Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1491
Massive headache, very specific urban scenes evoked in PSB songs, mysterious towers, Buttondown's AI summaries, general political angst, bit more navel-gazing than usual
Good morning. It is rainy. I am work-stressed. And I have a splitting headache that won’t go away, perfectly resistant to my Advil-Tylenol-caffeine cocktail, no relief for you, Ricky. It crept up in my sleep, in my dreams, a thunderous night that woke both Emma and I up with the house-rattling kabooms. Maybe the thunder gave me the headache. Maybe this is biblical.
It is days like this I wish I was (were? never got that one) a cartoonist, and I could just give you a cartoon now and call it a day on today’s edition of this esteemed newsletter. It would be a black and white line drawing, with a head, and a bunch of scribbles all around the head, and the head held in hands, with a thought balloon that just says “ow my head.”
I could of course generate this with AI. You could do. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.
But if you want to hand draw such a thing I will be accepting submissions.
Semi-relatedly, here is a picture Jane drew this week that looks a whole lot like the cover of that Keane album I mentioned last week. Under the Iron Sea. Wikipedia tells us that the artist is Sanna Annukka. She has a website. Her art looks pretty awesome, and she looks pretty bad-ass. Could maybe take you in a fight. She’s Finnish.
Hey speaking of which fuck CNN for calling Hasan Piker a “Turkish-American” in their headline about ICE detaining him just to soften it when it should have said ICE detained an American-born US Citizen to, you know, clarify the stakes. Fuck em in the ear. Piker was detailed for his views, not his skin color. His skin color just told them they could get away with it.
It is a wonder to me journalists everywhere don’t rise up and rebel against headline writer/editors who are continually fucking them over and arousing the ire of the internet against a journalist for a shitty headline that the editor writes. But I suppose this is also the answer to why it keeps happening: because no one comprehends journalists don’t write their headlines, and the editors are continually getting off scott-free for their continued malfeasance. Cool world.
I’m not gonna lie, man, I am pretty overwhelmed with the outside world right now. Work is very stressful, second job, very stressful, but I can handle all that I just cannot handle the absolute relentless cruelty and criminality pervading everywhere it really is too much. It pervades everything. Every dumb, petty conversation I have with anyone I’m just like “don’t you know fascism is spreading why are we sitting here having this conversation.” And of course you don’t know what the other person is thinking: are they experiencing this just like you are? Do they think you don’t care? Or do they just not care? Or are they into it? Or are they just better at functioning as a human in this world. Lotta what I do in my life involves people who are not definitely against this: adtech and real estate development and living in the south and it is all very unpleasant. I miss living in a deep blue echo chamber working in a predominantly blue industry and just pretending everyone thought like me, or at least not having to deal. Smug people bemoan echo chambers but honestly most of them probably live in one. Not living in one sucks.
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!
Thank you to the GMHHAY slack group for contributing “Putting up that Hill” and the very simple yet very catchy “Goth Golf” as potential names for a goth mini golf. Goth Golf really does grow on you. Makes me wanna shout it out. Or sing it in a song or something.
Also please enjoy this photo of Mary Pickford’s Art Deco Surrealist Mini Golf course, courtesy of Jessica in the Slack group.
It’s from an Instagram. Username @beforethe101. You can click through on the image. We’re not the NYT here, we credit people.
Oh hey question for you all. This mysterious, high-tech looking pole has appeared on the side of the road, on the side of 15-501 next to Southern Village Park, southside by the dog park to be precise. It looks very creepy and Hughes Aviation or General Dynamics or just Generally Very Creepy Government Contractor like Shotspotter or some shit. It’s not Wifi, that is for sure.
Any ideas?
I’m not aspiring to be an anti-government paranoid freak or anything but, well, you know.
Next I present to you a week’s worth of Buttondown’s AI implementation (grr) doing summaries of GMHHAY. Every day when I post this thing, I fill out a little text field of a “summary” and that is what goes in bold at the top of the newsletter. There is also a little “generate” button there that takes your text and summarizes it. I do not use this button, obviously, because this button is of the devil and I don’t feel like burning down a tree. But I confess, father, I did use it for a week to make this list for you to show you how terrible it is:
I'm working on overcoming my writing block and discovering great music along the way!
Feeling a mix of sadness and humor while pondering music, politics, and shopping oddities.
Tired of mornings, I ponder caffeine, reminisce Twin Peaks, and reflect on recent losses and Apple’s woes.
Feeling energized, diving into music, gardening, attic projects, and enjoying family moments!
Reflecting on my birthday, mortality, new projects, and music that resonates with nature.
Birthday reflections, home projects, AI thoughts, and a new playlist to explore—what a week!
Frustrations with trade news, butter woes, and a birthday playlist reminisce—join the chat!
Really captures my style, don’t you think?
Man it must be awesome to use an AI and feel like it made you more productive. I bet that feels amazing.
While working on the attic this weekend and listening to my 7,000+ song playlist “All the Good,” on shuffle, like I do all the time when I’m not in front of my computer listening to new music, the song “Rent” by Pet Shop Boys came on. And there’s that lyric:
You phone me in the evening on hearsay And bought me caviar You took me to a restaurant off Broadway To tell me who you are
And it occurred to me that lyric has always stuck with me, back since the first time I heard this song. That idea that you would hear, through society, through the city, through the scene that there is another person that, well, you are just gonna have to meet, have to get dinner with, have to see about. It’s so evocative of a very specific (mostly) urban social situation, young people, still in the phases of dating and coupling, everyone feeling like they know each other, new kid in town, the whole idea from so many movies and books of someone appearing and causing a disruption in a scene and ooooh what’s gonna happen.
I feel like I know this world intimately, it was in my blood for so many decades. Yet now it seems… distant, alien. Still sorta exciting but exotic and almost fictional now. It is crazy how much my life has changed. Absolutely crazy. It is crazy I did this willingly. It is crazy I live in the middle of nowhere. It is crazy. All because I was vaguely claustrophobic in small apartments and my wife likes her Mazdas. Crazy! Crazy!
Jane’s teacher wrote a note to us saying the whole class was getting more rambunctious as they are excited about the end of the school year in three weeks. And could we have a talk with our kid to try and remind them to be good in school. So I dutifully had that talk this morning. Jane admitted they were “just so excited” that school was almost out. Except she loves school, so wtf. I should have asked that.
L’esprit de la dépôt à l'école.
Looks like we got a shoegaze playlist for you today. We listen to a lot of shoegaze around here, not sure if you know that. I was once in a shoegaze band. And I will be again. Oh shit that is a good song name gotta write that down. Anyway this is all new stuff, mostly deep into the American shoegaze obscurities scene, some of these are probably just made-up Spotify bands but I guess that’s okay if you are making shoegaze. I wonder if any of these songs on this playlist entirely consist of emulated pedals from within a DAW rather than actual guitar pedals. I tried this in Logic a few versions back and I swore I could tell the difference but a) I have very discerning shoegaze ears donthcha know, and b) that was like five years ago now.
Also I am glad so many of you wrote in about Fiona Apple and her court observer project. I am glad I could spread the word on that. It’s the little things that make GMHHAY with it. You know, reel ‘em in with domestic pedantry about butter dishes and then sneak a little woke marxist liberalism into their diet.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.