Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1523
The fear, really. Insomnia, Taiwan, AI, the resistance campaigns of my daughter, RIP Bill Moyers. Springsteen box.
Good morning. Couldn’t fall asleep again last night. Got about six hours in the end. Could be worse. But boy am I tired of this. Some days I think I should write in the evening, like I did when I was young. You wouldn’t believe the things that go through my head while I’m laying there, trying to go to sleep. Mind racing in a million directions. Really is something. So many great little jokes, turns of phrase, entire paragraphs or outlines. Lost to the sandman.
Sometimes I try and fight it. I sit up, and write little notes to myself, because I don’t want to forget some brilliant insight. Real mixed bag, this habit. Cold light of morning usually makes the note seem tepid or uninteresting.
The only one I have from last night: “Robert Caro never successfully interviewed Bill Moyers.”
Bill Moyers was a hell of a man, by the way. RIP. Just… amazing. His death did not get enough attention. The true father of the peace corps. The man who made Joseph Conrad famous. The man who focused LBJ, linked him to the east coast liberal establishment and bore as much responsibility for LBJ’s landmark civil rights bills as LBJ did.
But he never spoke to Robert Caro.
Mostly I just lay there in a doom cycle about AI or Iran. Last night, thanks to an utterly terrifying video from ReaLifeLore, China’s imminent invasion of Taiwan made it into the mix. Has to be in the next three years, right? Trump is the absolute perfect incompetent patsy, exactly what you want as an adversery.
Wanna freak out about some shit? Watch this. You think the giant boats that make huge invasion bridges are bad? Wait till you get to the part where they built an entire target practice range with giant replicas of American aircraft carriers on rails so they can practice shooting them down.
Maybe AI will be fine. Maybe we’ll move on-device, maybe we’ll institute some sort of regulatory framework to pay creators. Maybe somehow renewables will survive the Big Beautiful Bill (the fate of the world is in Lisa Murkowski’s hands this morning so, you know, this is fine burning dog gif) and will become widespread enough before the data centers burn us all to a crisp. Maybe it won’t take up 10% of the energy in the US in the next few years.
These things could happen. But I am not feeling especially optimistic about it.
Maybe it’ll be like the green revolution where we thought everyone was going to starve on the planet but then we magically made enough food anyway.
Except the green revolution was solving a real problem. And it used oil to solve it so we’re all gonna die anyway.
Had a pretty crazy conversation with my wife last night. She has, essentially, lost her job to AI. Or perhaps more accurately she lost her job to capitalism but AI is very clearly making it harder to get another job. As a human need to in capitalism, she is thinking about AI, her relationship to it, the possibilities of AI within her profession. It is very easy to make the analogy of AI being like “the internet” was in the early 90’s. Emma is questioning whether she will become one of those designers who wanted the internet to go away, or whether she will be, like she was the last time, a designer who embraces the new technology. All very understandable.
Except this time she also has to content with a husband who hates the stupid thing. That is a new wrinkle for her, for us.
Made me feel kinda weird! Like maybe I need to get with the program! Stop being such a curmudgeon.
I offered her a job moving boats and RVs around a storage facility. She did not say no.
Most of the time these days I feel like Rorschach at the end of Watchmen, where he sticks to his principles, insists it is not okay to murder a million people to “save the world,” and he is killed by the “heroes” as he walks out into the antarctic void. Killed because he couldn’t get with the program.
I think a lot about him these days.
It is not fun being such a curmudgeon!
I suppose two of my fears could cancel each other out. China could invade Taiwan, TSMC could decide it was necessary to destroy their fab plants. China could then, somehow, lose. We could live in a world where both those threats are gone. Nifty.
I am starting to think that I need to write this dumb book just so I can get some sleep.
Also I’m tired of people thinking I’m a luddite because of this.
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We are listening to Bruce Springsteen today. My seven-LP box set of Tracks II came in yesterday. Though I confess I am listening to the album, right now, on streaming. The Springsteen box came in a custom shipping box. Like the box is printed inside of it with Springsteen stuff. Like the brown cardboard box that went through the mail is, technically, part of the packaging. And the thing is just so big. I got really stressed about how to store it, how to preserve it. And eventually I just put the whole giant shipping box on a shelf and listened to the thing on streaming. This seems sub-optimal, aside from the fact that I made sure an artist got fairly paid for their work. I might sell it. I am increasingly pleased that, though it has not held completely, I have broadly kept my resolution to buy less vinyl. I love it but it is an albatross.
But the box is pretty great. Seven LPs of music Bruce recorded and then just didn’t release. I am on disc 2 at the moment. It’s great. I thought I would like disc 1 more, the one of songs recorded in the Nebraska era, but I am realizing that as the years go by, Bruce’s old-man big-sound era of the last couple albums like Western Stars and High Hopes — basically post-Wrecking Ball — has become my favorite Bruce era, supplanting Nebraska. This is weird and slightly uncomfortable feeling. I think it might be the pandemic’s fault.
Jane was a nightmare yesterday. Well, I dunno. She was… quixotic. This summer thing, this formless summer thing. It is not her bag. She needs some structured activities. She is not great at entertaining herself because all she wants to do is be on screens. Of course, all I wanted to do when I was her age was be on screens. I wanted to play Combat and Keystone Capers on my Atari 2600. When I was seven, my next door neighbor got an Intellivision and it was the greatest thing I had ever seen. B-17 Bomber! With the speech module! That amazing Utopia game. Snafu. Oh my god I loved it so much.
The difference is my parents just let me do it. And, you know, I loved it. I am still kinda thankful my parents just let me sit around all day looking at screens. I mean, I didn’t sit there all day. I did ride my bike around the neighborhood and terrorize salamanders and try and set fire to the clubhouse in our back yard and all of that Spielbergian 80’s shit.
But mostly I just sat there playing the Atari 2600 or watching the same movies over and over on Showtime.
And I turned out fine, right? Right? lalalalala
But we are smart, modern, better parents, so we do not let Jane watch screens all day, but boy does she resent it. Yesterday she reached fifth-column levels of resistance. She literally tore her entire room apart. Took every stuffy off of the shelves, every book off the shelves, took her chothes off the hangars, threw them around all over the room.
She did this because her mother asked her to stop throwing things on the floor.
She did not do it in some sort of screaming fit. She did it manically but deliberately.
She was doing it to press buttons.
She is very good at it!
We did not take the bait, we insisted she is going to have to clean it up.
It is not yet cleaned up.
Or maybe it is this morning, I don’t know, I can’t bear to go up there.
But as soon as other adults are around she is so well behaved! We took her to a lawyer’s office yesterday — to a closing signing — and to a restaurant. Totally fine at both!
She has it in for us!
She demands screens or attention. She needs screens or parental attention at all times when she is home.
We are trying to be good parents, but there are limits to both screens and attention that we can give her.
When she is at a camp or class with other kids, she does not need screens or attention.
But here? Screens or attention?
What about drawing, Rick? She loves drawing.
She does! But she doesn’t ever want to do it. Once she gets going she’s in a good place for a while. But these days, after ten or fifteen minutes, she realizes she would rather be watching a screen.
Camp starts in six days. We can make it.
We can make it.
The BBC has posted its selections from Olivia Rodrigo’s Glastobury set, and they have chosen to post “Bad Idea Right” and “All American Bitch,” two very good songs, but not Olivia’s performance of “Just Like Heaven” with Robert Fucking Smith, so you are going to have to make do with this crowd-shot version, brought to my attention by Cassel in the GMHHAY Slack:
I would very much like to see Olivia Rodrigo and Robert Smith play a song together that seems like the sort of thing that would make me feel a bit better about the world for a while.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.