Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1501
Finishing History of Middle-Earth, an un-openable glass bottle, the dance of the band T-Shirt, little capitalist dopamine hits through the mail, norm-core parenting anxiety
Good morning good morning. Frazzled! Overslept! Jane woke me up! Though we still managed to be right on time, fourth in line. I just skipped teeth, getting dressed, washing my face, socks, eggs, basically everything but making a lunch. Man. Not brushing your teeth in the morning is gross. Even after you’ve had something to drink or eat. Gross, I say! Brush your teeth! Also got stuck behind a really smelly truck on the way home. Just the most foul-smelling exhaust. Turned the recycle-air switch on on the car HVAC, but it was too late, the smell had already come in. Now I was stuck in the car. Need an Omega-13 Device for car air recyling: go back in time ten seconds, so you can turn it on before it stinks.
Omega-13 device. Deep cut.
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!
Listening to the new Planning for Burial this morning. It’s Closeness, It’s Easy. Weird name, but I kinda get it. Solid. I love this band. I love their t-shirts. I really like the one with a Fender Amp and a cat. Also the Joy Division knock-off one that says “Love did tear us apart.” I have a lot of Planning for Burial shirts. Seriously. I have like four of them. I was wearing one in Davis Square in Somerville, Ma, the last time I got a proper t-shirt comment from a stranger fellow band-shirt guy.
“Nice shirt,” he said.
I mean, you know. Medium enthusiasm. But solid.
The delicate dance of band shirt compliments. So many people are not good at this game, yet choose to wear obscure band t-shirts. It is one of life’s little mysteries.
An eagle-eyed reader, Craig, several days ago inquired how and why I was using lime juice in non-alcoholic negronis, and he was quite right to ask. That was a typo, for I make two non-alcoholic nighttime cocktails, sorta switching back and forth each evening. a negroni and a G&T. The G&T, obviously, takes lime juice. The negroni does not. When I worked at a radio station they told me that for every caller you got when you asked for a caller, you had 500 other listeners. Or something like that. I don’t remember the exact number. But I am assuming the same principle holds true with GMHHAY comments, so I assume you were all wondering about that. I apologize for the confusion.
Oh also! Speaking of the negronis! I purchased a bottle of Dr Zero Zero’s NA Amaro and… it cannot be opened? Since I last purchased a bottle of this (very good!) fake Amaro, they have changed how you open it. It used to be corked, now it is a… glass cap screwed into a glass bottle? Very weird. But it cannot be opened! I spend days trying to figure this out, asked my wife, she couldn’t figure it either. The shit is not cheap. But eventually I decided the only solution was to buy another bottle and see if it was just as stuck. Because I had to know. So I ordered another bottle, a few days went by, it arrived and… Well, that’s when I learned how to open the bottles, now, post-change. So that helped. But this one opened right up.
So I am now still stuck with this bottle. I mean, it’s all glass - lid and bottle. So I can’t, like, put it in a vice and use a wrench. It’ll shatter.
So I am stumped.
Do I write to the company? Is that excessive? Will anyone even answer aren’t all companies just run by Chinese robots now?
Big milestone yesterday, I completed volume 12 of the History of Middle-Earth. Man. That was a journey. October to May. Seven and a half-ish months. I am happy to be done. Well, I suppose it was like November ish because I read Lost Tales and the Silmarillion first.
After I finished, Saturday night, I sat there for a moment and thought of all the other books in my to-read pile: the last two Anaïs Nin unexpurgated diaries. The new book about Apple in China. The four books in Jeff VanDerMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. The bible. Simon Raymonde’s autobiography.
But then I thought, well, this quest of mine would be forever marred if I did not carry it through to the end and re-read the Lord of Rings trilogy. Since, you know, this whole stupid journey started back last year when I had it in mind to re-read the Lord of the Rings and then thought “hrm, well, you should probably do this right.”
So, after seven months of Tolkien, I have started Fellowship of the Ring. It’s actually quite pleasant since it has the actual polish that Tolkien gave his writing at the very end of his writing process; Something I have gotten none of through the last fourteen books. You can forget he’s actually a pretty decent emotional writer if you just focus on all this behind-the-scenes stuff. So that is nice. They just left Tom Bombadil’s house. Justice for Tom Bombadil. I’m glad he had his little appearance in Rings of Power but I am still kinda bitter he’s not in the movies. Also Merry and Pippen are far less stupid in the books, I had forgotten that. And Crickhollow. And the Hedge. Man there is a lot of shit not in the movies.
Anyway, I haven’t forgotten about you, Anaïs and Jeff. We will get there this year, honest.
I forgot to tell you yesterday that somehow, over at Chore House a hose spring a leak. It has been spraying out a small amount of water for god knows how long. It’s not in the garden, it’s around the side of the house where I store shit and I am not sure the last time I was over there. Seriously coulda been like two, three weeks? And the ground, man. Just absolutely saturated with water. Felt like the whole hillside was gonna slide right off. The mulch on the top is dry, but step in it and it was positively like quicksand.
Also this particular hose faucet is not tied into the well, it’s tied into county water, so this stupid leak is probably gonna cost me a fortune. I am sad.
But also how does a hose spring a leak while just sitting there?
And also I feel like hoses always fail these days! I mean, I admittedly went, oh, thirty years or so, living in cities and not owning hoses, but prior to that in my juvee years I had a lot of hoses and I do not recall any of them ever springing a leak. But, then, I was not financially responsible for those hoses. Which cost a fortune! Hoses! Cost a fortune! Spring leaks! The rot economy! Kleptocracy! Wait what does my friend Mark call it? The scam economy!
I wonder if communist hoses last longer.
I have gotten some swell things in the mail recently. These swell things have given me small joy. I am realizing that for, oh, like a decade of my life, small things in the mail brought me constant little dopamine hits of joy. But over the last year or two, I have really cut capitalism off. Or, well, maybe that’s not it. I instead started getting primarily home improvement items in the mail, and then did a new year’s resolution to not buy as many records (note how I have softened that resolution as the year goes on). But last week? Three great things in the mail! And it was so nice! Little hits of happiness each day. Sure, stuff doesn’t bring happiness, but I posit to you that the arrival of new stuff can.
I got a new posh signed copy of the Simon Raymonde book courtesy of a friend who mailed it from England. It is gorgeous. It is designed by Chris Bigg, heir to the 4AD/V23 design crown post-Vaughan (RIP). It comes in a box. So nice.
I got a vintage, new-old-stock Swell shirt from the For All the Beautiful People album that a member of the band found in a box in storage and it has just been sitting in that box for twenty-seven years. I am very, very excited about this shirt. I have loved Swell since I first saw them in 1992 at TT The Bears opening for His Name is Alive and then again the next year playing with Medicine. Also at TT The Bears. Wait I also saw them at Brownies somehow in NYC. Only those three times. All in 92-93. And then they just kept on making awesome albums for fifteen more years and I kept buying and loving them but I never got to see them again and they never got big, Swell deserved to be bigger. But then the singer David Freel died in 2022, that was really sad. RIP.
And I got this new Planning for Burial record from the Flenser Records because I cleverly purchased a year-long membership prior to making my new year’s resolution. Genius, really.
Anyway, I maybe, kinda sorta, perhaps discounted the power of nice things in the mail in my pursuit of austerity. Maybe all those records arriving in the mail were helping my mental state after all. Maybe.
Last night Jane was being pretty intolerable before dinner, during dinner. Just acting crazy, it was very exhausting. Though at one point, she said “hrm maybe I have taken this crazy thing too far and overdone it. Maybe I should tone it down a bit” and that was really great. And she did tone it down, for, like, five minutes but then went right back into it. Exhausting! Exhausting! Kids! Just chattering endlessly about nonsense stuff! I can play along for a while but eventually, I’m like… can you say a single normal thing? Are you capable of holding a conversation? No, right? The answer is no? For all seven year-olds? I mean, they may be able to once in a while completely randomly appear to be having an actual conversation. But… are they? Who knows. I wish I was a better parent. I felt like I was going to be a better parent. This age is pretty great, and most of the time I think I am in the parenting zone but also. I could be better. But anyway, I just got exhausted by it. Emma had to cover my portion of bedtime. That was very nice of her.
Lol there is nothing new there. Normal parenting shit. Feeling it. Feeling it.
Jane and I did get our Wordle in two, today, though.
Oh wow look at that I was gonna tell you there was no playlist ready today and go find some other media to share with you. But it seems this Modern Classical one was just about ready and I was just listening, post-Planning-for-Burial, to a Mary Lattimore piece that will complete it quite nicely. Lovely. So here we are. Do I have anything to add here? Nah.
OK have a lovely Wednesday. Peace.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.