Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1550
Trump's Fed BS, Capital's capitulation, Jane's first day of school, revisiting 2021 GMHHAY for the book.
Good morning good morning. First day of school. I am up so early. Got up at 6:30. Jane is now safely at school, I have stopped at the grocery store, and am home in front of the computer at 8. This is the part I love about the school year: all this extra time in the morning before the workday starts. Luxurious timing to lovingly fuss over every word in GMHHAY. I History will determine that GMHHAY’s are better in the school year, I’ll warrant.
Jane was very excited, just thrilled. All decked out in her K Pop Demon Hunters Derpy Cat shirt. I hope she has a good day. I hope she likes her classmates. I hope she finds someone to go to the cafeteria in the morning with her, since Hattie isn’t in her class with her this year. And she skipped breakfast. And our county doesn’t have free food in the cafeteria anymore (thanks Trump), and the system for parents paying is monstrously complex. So I gave her cash, like the old man that I am. She said she could handle it. “It’ll be just like the book fair day” she said.
She was asked to bring in something special for a first-day show-and-tell and she made this LEGO portrait of our family and it is pretty great:
Trump fired a governor of the Fed board for a made up reason. This is illegal, of course. And it’s a thing that the Supreme Court recently said was definitely still illegal. When they were doing their crony court thing and conveniently finding that Trump can fire the entire government but Biden can’t forgive a loan, they explicitly said that none of this applies to the Federal Reserve. Because they were worried how markets would react. But now, just a few months anyway, when even his crony court told him it was illegal, he is doing it anyway.
And, of course, the crony court will find it completely legal when it gets to them. Because they were, of course, lying the whole time.
Also they are firing her because she “lied on a mortgage application” by saying she intended for two different houses in two weeks were going to be her primary resident. This was ages ago, of course.
And of course the only way they would know this is if they directed Fannie Mae, the federal mortgage provider, to dig up the records of a political enemy.
Which they did to Adam Schiff too, by the way.
So, you know. Branches of government just digging through records of Trump’s enemies to find mildly embarrassing stuff to blow it up out of proportion and turn it into crimes.
So, you know. Not cool!
Let’s see how the markets react. Lol. The markets are so chicken shit. I mean, I have read my Adam Tooze. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. It is not surprising to me how gloriously, eagerly complicit Capital is to fascism. Capital loves fascism. They were never gonna be a bulwark against it.
But you’d think they’d at least grumble a little. Nazi businessmen grumbled a little. Ours don’t even bother. Also, Hitler sorta stumbled through his co-option of the business world: wasn’t sure he could pull it off, at least gave nominal deference in certain matters.
But Trump’s just like “nah, they’ll come round.” And he is totally right.
Lovely.
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We are listening to some electronic metal noise thing this morning, on vinyl, from a record club. Stay Calm by a band/artist called Wreck and Reference. It is pretty good. I like the yelling metal vocals and weird DJ Shadow-esque electronica. It is an interesting mix.
Lisa gave me the draft of GMHHAY vol 2 yesterday, and I started reading it. I don’t check what she cut, I just read it as a finished piece. It.. I dunno, it’s not hitting me as much as volume 1. Lisa said it was better, though, so maybe I am remembering volume 1 incorrectly. Maybe my standards are higher. Maybe I am getting better at writing these entries, ha, yeah, right. Maybe it’s a weird mix of my writing style and Lisa’s editing, she likes things punchy, I like to meander, she cuts my meandering down, maybe it loses the nuance that I personally need when reading it but no one else will even notice or care. I cannot tell. I cannot tell! It just kinda feels like maybe I am a bad writer. I will plow ahead and not let my insecurities get to me, fear is the mindkiller and all that. But I am not feeling it at the moment. But I am also not done with it. We shall see, we shall see.
I also gotta make a decision about the bolding I do in the daily editions for you skimmers. I think probably no bolding in the book form. Books aren’t skimmed in the same way. And it looks weird. And when I am writing I’m not thinking about bolding. And when Lisa cuts, she often cuts the bolded line, so a lot more paragraphs don’t have them and it’s stylistically scattershot. Which is interesting, now that I think about it, since the bolded lines are usually the subject of the paragraph? Weird so many of them got cut. Mysterious!
2021, though, what a trip. Still stressing about covid, still in a mostly quarantine state. Finally went to my first rock show again in late 2021. Jealous of friends who were going out again. VERY obsessed with the arrival of the covid vax for kids. That’s all gone isn’t it? I suspect by next year none of us will be able to get the covid vaccine. Fucking insane. What a world.
There are these funny current events I wrote about that I completely forgot about. And I wonder how they turned out. There was this whole drama with California and bacon. California made these strict new bacon laws and the bacon industry was playing chicken and not adopting the laws, and bacon prices were set to go through the roof in price in California. Of course, this was at the very dawn of inflation, and in hindsight, the price of bacon was set to go through the roof all over the country. “They could be as high as six dollars a pound!” I said, breathlessly. I am looking at the website for our local grocery store right now and joke’s on you California, cuz all bacon is $6 a pound.
But I wonder what happened with that California bacon law. I wonder how much bacon costs in California now.
Or the brain zapper. There was this woman living in the Bay Area and she had this special machine in her head that zapped a certain part of her brain when she was having depressive thoughts and they just… stopped. Went away. And she didn’t even notice or feel it. It was an experimental device, was gonna take a few years to get to market. Well. Here it is a few years later. Where is my magic, special brain zapper, because I am so ready for that shit. Give to me. Stick it in my brain.
Early TikTok China drama. Hahaha gawd I wonder how many times Trump will kick that can down the road, just waiting for the moment he can take it for himself. I suppose this whole Intel socialism thing is just a dress rehearsal for the TikTok deal, huh? That’s fine. I think it’s hilarious that Trump is embracing socialism. No one stop him. Everyone egg him on and encourage him to nationalize Amazon.
But mainly, reading about 2021 means reading about us all grappling with the fact that Trump isn’t going away. Watching Elon go from cringe to horrific in increments. Watching me hate on NFTs and crypto thinking it was the worst thing ever not knowing just how much worse things were going to get with GPTs. Just absolutely billsful ignorance about GPTs. Optimism about Biden’s chips bill and his green bill. Those things were awesome. I assume they’re both completely dead now? Maybe some of it has lingered. But it was nice to feel, for like a month or two there, like maybe we were gonna deal with climate change. WHOOP LOL NOPE.
Anyway you can read all this too, once I turn this into a book and put it up for sale. If you’re a glutton for punishment.
2025 is markedly a worse year than 2021. We had a little optimism in 2021 still, though we had a dread for the possible future we could all see coming — the one we live in now. Somehow, even though 2025 is so much worse, I think I would rather live in it than in 2021. Sokath, his eyes uncovered, as they say.
The Jane bits were interesting. An eagerness to learn that has maybe been diminished a bit as she ages. An excitement to learn new words that she still has, but pride now keeps her from getting excited to learn words from us. Pride, really, that’s the thing: she has so much more pride now. Secrecy, pride, wilfullness. I mean, these things can be useful. She is not abnormally bad about these things. She is a normal kid. But reading from four years ago, you really do notice the differences. There is a passage in there where she tells her first lie, and how sad that made me and how I knew this would grow and grow. And boy, here we are four years later and that girl loves to lie as much as any seven-year-old kid. And it is just sad.
I wish she didn’t have to go through these phases. I wish she just magically knew that it is better to not lie all the time, better to not let your pride get to you, that secrecy can often be destructive, that screaming is not healthy. But of course, how else do you learn these things? And she is going to learn them all more quickly than I did. She is a faster learner than I was. And many adults still haven’t learned these lessons.
The other day she asked me who was more kind, her or mommy. And I was honest. Mommy is, hands down. It’s not even close. Mommy has never told anyone she loves that wishes they were dead. She has never asked someone what words she can say to hurt them the most. Jane, you are often kind, but you are often deeply unkind, you often seek out to hurt those you love, and it makes me sad.
“You’re gonna make me cry,” she said.
And, ugh, I wish I hadn’t but also I had to, before I toned it down and offered love again I said “Well, no, Jane. It’s you who’s doing that.”
And I think all of this was probably necessary parenting and I think, to some extent, it had the desired impact, or at least made a dent.
But jesus it felt horrible to do.
Hello, here. Have a shoegaze playlist today. So much good new shoegaze out there. It is crazy. All these bands just making beautiful, majestic music. Maybe it’s the pinnacle of music and people have figured out the formula and this is just the end. Wouldn’t that be something.
Talk to you soon, fine friends. Here have a bonus photo of Tori Amos and Andrew Eldrich.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.