Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1494
One thing I love about the auto-generated AI summaries that Buttondown makes is that they always end in exclamation points for some reason.
Hi friend, good morning. Sorry I’m late. Jane has no school today. She is going to a cooking camp. Very excited. But it didn’t start till 9, so I got to sleep in till 8, which was amazing. Took her to camp, took myself to Walmart. Not much to report there this week. They were deep into no-stimulus hours, so I didn’t get to hear any Walmart radio. Though my car did shuffle into Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl” on the drive over, so I have had that tune in my head all morning. Great tune. Say what you want about 21st century, judge-of-the-kids Paula, but man, she was a giant of 80’s pop.
And still no Pepperoni-flavored Turkey Chomps. Although… Bloomberg had a solid piece of reporting, a profile on Chomps the company, specifically focusing on their demand challenges, with a nod toward the recent recall. Demand is through the roof. They can’t meet their orders even without the recall. Also they… don’t seem a completely evil company? I am somewhat surprised and shocked about that.
Or Rose’s Lime. Which is a weird one because it’s still available everywhere else.
Important update from Buttondown, my email provider, regarding the mythical issue 1488 from last Thursday, delivered a week late:
Well this behavior was defintiely unexpected! It was related to an error with our email provider and we are very sorry for the delay and confusion. This was not something you did.
We have comped your next 2 months of subscription payments as a thank you for calling this to our attention. This credit will be applied directly to next subscription invoices. Please let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns. Glad to discuss 🙂
Kindly,
X
Is that legit customer service or what? I mean, my email provider has an email provider, email provider inception, I hope they are also not Nazis, seems to be a rarity in the email world. But honestly it’s probably Sendgrid, and they seem mostly fine and in any case I’m in bed with them at work so whatever. No whiff of Nazi over at Sendgrid.
We are listening to the new Ravonettes this morning. It is called PE’AHI II, so I guess there must be a PE’AHI one, which I do think, now that you mention it, I listened to a couple years ago? Let’s check the ten-year-deep detailed media consumption archive. Hrm, no, I see three other Raveonettes albums listened to in the last five years or so, though. Those guys are prolific. Oh wait a minute, there it is. 2014. I actually own it on vinyl. Lol. Anyway, this album is great. Man the Raveonettes keep delivering.
Thank you for all your kind words about yesterday’s entry. Lol, if I am being honest, only one person really commented upon it, that feeling of conflict watching fictional horror on tv while reading about real horror on your phone. No one wants to talk about genocide, that certainly makes sense.
It’s funny. After writing that I felt like it was a really strong piece of writing, but as the day went on and no comments came in, I started to get graphological l’esprit d’escalier, thinking of all the ways I could have improved it: too much time on Star Wars not enough on the horror the dichotomy of both simultaneously. Longer pauses on the unique feelings I was trying to capture. And of course that whole postscript about Adam Curtis and 9/11 and New York should have been worked into the main piece and more clear.
There is a painful truth I don’t particularly want to think about that often, which is that GMHHAY will always suffer for always being a first draft. There are no revisions in GMHHAY. I write the words, spend five minutes trying to catch the most glaring typos, bolding, and maybe one or two quick edits, and then out it goes.
I believe GMHHAY is very strong for first edits, for spending maybe 30 minutes on each entry. But unfortunately I will never get credit for that. Our minds, our judgement is incapable of “giving credit” to its first-draft status and it will always be judged against things that got a revision.
And, of course, as a writer, I know how powerful a revision is. Nearly every piece of writing is better with a revision.
In my head, what makes GMHHAY special is three things: 1) its immediacy, 2) its consistency, 3) its panoply of topics, mostly centered on the relatable and pedestrian.
But in my head, there’s a fourth reason which, really, doesn’t count: I think it is a really great accomplishment because it’s without editing. And most of the time, the lay reader doesn’t even think about this, they judge GMHHAY’s as fully-edited pieces if they think about it at all. Because I’m that good at writing solid first drafts, thank you very much. Ask Elizabeth and Megan, my old editors at The Observer.
But of course the reality is that it is maybe one in one thousand times you write an essay that you get something truly great without a second revision.
Now, of course, I’m comin’ up on 4,500 issues here, so I guess maybe there are 4 or 5 truly great GMHHAYs in my past.
Anyway, I feel like yesterday’s coulda been one had it gotten a revision.
Alas.
Pretty excited about this FUTURE RUINS festival in LA that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are putting on of soundtrack music. Just an amazing lineup. Only thing it’s missing is Clint Mansell, but I have already had the privilege of seeing him perform his soundtrack work live. It was awesome. And a window into how awesome this festival could be. Seriously considering going. Emma is not interested. Haven’t been to LA in ages. Miss my LA friends. Will keep you apprised.
And, finally, we have our first steel going vertical on the storage facility site. VERY EXCITING. Been an incredibly stressful time, but we are getting through it.
Jane was so excited about Emma being the surprise reader to her class yesterday. She out-of-the-blue thanked Emma, genuinely thanked her, multiple times throughout yesterday. Her first real time of expressing consistent gratitude unprompted and long after the immediate fact. Incredibly exciting. I wish I could have seen the whole thing. Emma in her pink hair in all black reading to class of first graders. Just marvelous. I wonder if the teacher got a picture.
Looks like no playlists are ready. Pretty close on a drone one, but that one is specifically very hard to just add one extra song from the vault on because so many bands have one or two drone tunes and I tend to use the same ones. We’re also very close on a moody and quiet one, but need another six minutes or so.
So I leave you with Springsteen’s opening statement at the first show of his new European Tour oh my god why haven’t I gone and seen him again all these years it is so dumb I’ve only seen him once and it was like 20 years ago I need to fix this soon.
Anyway, this speech made me cry and if you have a heart I bet it will make you cry.
Have a lovely weekend, folks.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.