Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1550
A weekend of chores, seeing friends, and a giant tortoise. Well, no, just a big regular tortoise.
Good morning. Hello. Hi. How are you? Did you have a nice weekend? I hope you had a lovely weekend. I had a lovely weekend. I hope everyone had a lovely weekend.
Back at the Monday grind. Reader, do you know how much hassle doing this frickin’ email every weekday adds to my life? It is so hard. Mondays, especially, are so hard. First, my meetings start earlier on Mondays than any other day of the week. Something like three years ago I decided the best approach to not being lethargic at work was to frontload my meetings on Mondays, just get going, up and at ‘em. It would give me energy that I could feed off of the rest of the week. Three years later, I am not entirely convinced that theory was unfounded. But, three years later? It still frickin sucks.
Also, you know all thast Artists Way shit, and about how you should practice your craft every day and you will get better and it will be easier? It is all definitely 100% true, but my god, even after, I don’t know, six, seven years of doing this, every weekend is a little minideath of the artist’s way. It is hell starting back up every single weekend. I don’t recall that book, or War of Art, another excellent book on the topic, talking about weekends or holidays. Which is weird. On the one hand, it could be implicit in these books that of course you shouldn’t feel compelled to write on weekends, or Christmas, or whatever. But it feels non-obvious? Because it’s really hard to start back up! So maybe it is implicit you’re supposed to write on the weekends and holidays and I have been going about this all wrong for the better part of a decade.
Dammit.
Anyway, talked to my editor Lisa yesterday, she is close to being done with Volume 2 of the GMHHAY book series. It’s gonna be a thick boy. Might split it up into two. She says she’s cutting a lot less this time than last time as I got into the groove of GMHAAY. Be funny when we get to Volume 5 or whatever, here in 2025, and she is cutting like 80% of my words because I don’t have anything to say anymore.
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!
We are listening to a band today called The Low Field. Self-titled album. Post punk, slowcore ish, I like them I don’t know anything about them. I added them to the playlist a week ago yet I have absolutely zero recollection as to why. That happens a lot, as I am sure the regular readers have noticed. We’re only through one track so far but it sounds pretty solid. Very 90’s. Makes me want to wear brown courduroy again and get involved in rock venue interpersonal politics and play inscrutable music to six people my god that might have been the happiest phase of my life.
Lovely weekend, just great. On Friday after I wrote to you, I drove solo to Salem to see my friend Annie and her husband Bill, who is also my friend. But Bill was working so I didn’t know if I was going to see him. But he got away from work so I did. I should re-write this paragraph to make it more concise but I’m not gonna bother. It was a great day walking around Salem, looking at tourists who were looking at Hocus Pocus houses and learning about how they kept backing up into the road while taking pictures and getting hit by cars so they had to change the sidewalks, and seeing tourist goths all over my god I love tourist goths. Salem has to be easy one of the top-five best towns in America to live in it is so great. I would live in Salem. Luckily I also live in a top-five town in America, but mine does not have goths wandering around. Well, not many.
We went to the record store, Annie and I, without Bill, and it was a great Bechtold-like test for the record store owner who always talks to Bill not Annie. If we go, would he talk to the man, whom he knows less well, or the woman, whom he knows better. I am happy to report he passed with flying colors and talked to Annie more than I. I bought a Gnod record, a 40 Watt Sun record, an old Tortoise 12”, and two Love and Rockets 12”s for the teenage son of a friend of mine who is really into them. I myself procured both of these 12”s for myself at around the age he is now, and I remember being really excited so, you know, nice to pay that forward.
Speaking of Tortoises, on Saturday Sean, Jussi and I and their dog Nova walked to Porter to do some shopping and on the way home we stopped on a stoop that was selling gourmet dog treats, but the woman who lived there was holding a giant tortoise in her arms. Well, no. A tortoise, a regular kind, that seemed really big. Not the species Giant Tortoise. I should re-write this for clarity but I am not going to. The Tortoise was very cute. I told her about my turtle cams she was very impressed. I am a special boy.
Friday night we went to see our friends Ashley and Charlie and their kid George and Charlie made pizzas and taught Jane how to make pizzas and the kids watched The Lego Movie the Second Part and the adults talked and it was a lovely evening and I had a great time.
Saturday I got to do CHORES ALL DAY. It ruled. Just a great chore day. I did about four hours of sanding, made a couple kitchen shelves for Emma, sanded this posh thick piece of oak I use as a work bar in the fromt three-season room. I am sitting at it right now. It is so smooth. I sanded this baby up to 300 grit, did not skip a step in between, went all the way up from sixty. Then I gave it a coat of Odie’s Everlasting Dark oil, let it cure. I did this to both sides. I finally srewed it into its base so it is no longer wobbly while I sit here and type.
So much sanding. Four, five hours of sanding.
I also sanded the kitchen shelves to like 180 or something and added Odie’s and then a Polycrylic waterproof finish since they’re going to be kitchen cabinet shelves. Odies’s is suposed to be water resistant and honestly it seems to be doing pretty well. My personal jury is out on whether this work bar will get a shellac coat I am leaning no.
I did a lot of cable cleanup in the front room, mounted the HomePod Mini in a non-ugly place, cleaned up the HVAC cords.
I also stained three coat hook boards and two shelves and hung them so we have a ton more hanging options here in this entry-way room.
It all looks so nice I am really coming to love this room.
Even if Jane told me it looked like poop and she liked her pink room better.
OH. And I installed a foot rail beneath me, since I am up at bar stool height and my feet were dangly, and now there is a foot rail, though I may have installed it about three inches too high for my liking, but it’s a good height for people of all heights, so it works and it looks great.
Then I watched Game of Thrones while Emma went out to the goth club and I had a bit of FOMO but also I was so tired I was happy to be left alone.
On Sunday I went to New Hampshire, got a ride with my friends Abby and Emily and their doggie Guillermo and Sean came too and we went to the lake house of our friends Jen and Tony and ate grilled meats and listened to the Pet Shop Boys and went out on their boat and watched people swim and had chats and fish and it was a lovely day, though it was unstructured and man that wigged me out.
I do not have a lot of time in my life that is both unstructured and open-ended. I have lots of unstructured time, but it is scheduled. I do not have any open-ended time in my life. It gave me a bit of anxiety, I’m not gonna lie. But it was probably just what I needed and it was lovely to see old friends and hear a remix of “Being Boring” that I had never heard before.
In that second Hunter Biden interview he said he has a friend who owns 20 McDonald’s and he spent $2 Million per location to replace workers with automation. Biden called it AI but who are we kidding it was probably just automation. But he went from like 20 employees on shift to 2 employees on shift. Hunter went on to multiply that out on how many jobs lost that would be across all McDonald’s in the nation, then Burger Kings, then Wendy’s and so on. And it was bad. But actually it’s worse because clearly his owner friend was talking per shift and he is probably not laying off 20 people, he is probably laying off 40 or 50.
Jane and I went to McDonald’s yesterday and they had this situation where you had to use the kiosk for ordering — like you do at pretty much every McDonald’s now because they have the counter there where you can order but they just studiously never have anyone at it. Except this McDonald’s told you you had to order at the kiosk and pay to a human, so, you know, worst of both worlds.
The next day while we were driving to New Hampshire, we stopped at a McDonald’s on the road trip and same thing! Order at the kiosk, pay at the counter.
To be very clear, this fucking sucks, takes forever, and is the worst possible combination.
Also when I was with Jane I ordered a Diet Coke and they handed it to me with Diet Coke in the glass and I thought it was weird but figured it was maybe like a movie theater and you asked for refills. But later, when I asked for a refill, the woman said:
“No.”
No apology, no explanation.
Also the Whole Foods sucked, had mean signs on the carts saying you couldn’t put kids on or near them, the aisles were too narrow, no humans at checkout, no cart returns in the parking lots.
Cities, man.
I don’t have a playlist for you today so I give you Sean Drinkwater’s Windows into the 90’s, Sean’s playlist of, well, his window into the 90’s. It slightly violates GMHHAY playlist protocol by being a bit longer than the standard, digestible, one-hour-long playlist. It is… well, it’s nine hours. But it’s awesome.
I hope you have a splendid Monday and don’t look at the news for a good chunk of the day and manage to forget things if even for a second. That would be awesome.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.