Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1560
A short list of petty complaints, GoT season 6, questioning long-term planning as I get older. Google, TikTok and that graveyard soda that pools in your recycling bins
Good morning, hello. Hi. How are you? All well? I hope so. I wish you could write this column today. Then I could read it and know how a nice friend is doing. That would be nice. Back in the beginning, 1,500 issues ago, when this was on Facebook and new people were being exposed to GMHHAY before we went all secretive and insular and closed-web, I would occasionally inspire some friends to endeavor to write their own GMHHAY. I loved every effort, loved reading about friends’ lives so much. Sadly none of them ever kept it up, and rightfully so, it is a herculean feat and can drive you insane. But still. I loved reading them. Like a Christmas letter from a friend every day. I mean, I suppose it does not scale: you have 100 friends, you gotta read 100,000 pages every morning, doesn’t really seem practical. Maybe everyone does it once a week. I would do one a week if it meant I could receive a hundred or so in return.
Petty complaints time (Petty Complaints is one of the channels in the GMHHAY Slack and it is very satisfying):
I have to drop my truck off to get the stupidly self-inflicted body damage done. It is a ridiculous amount of money, absolutely not worth it from a financial point of view. And they are going to keep my truck for three weeks. It fucking sucks, makes me hate that I was so stupid to get the thing damaged to begin with and generally contributes to my self-loathing. So I desperately need this whole incident behind me, which means I have to suck it up and pay $7k to not have my truck for three weeks. I could pay even more for a rental, lol. But Emma and I made it years with only one car when we moved here. But we did not have Jane then. But we manage for weeks on end with one car when we go to Boston. But Jane is not in school then and we’re in a city. So. This is gonna suck.
Relatedly, I accidentally ran a stop sign this morning. Not just any stop sign, but one that a bus popped out. There were no kids around, the road was very wide, there was never any danger. But I completely spaced it. And the bus honked at me like I was a scofflaw. Probably woke up the neighborhood. And now I feel bad and have no one to confess my sins to, so here we are. Someone please email in to GMHHAY that I am forgiven, k thanks.
Going to the scab finger doctor to get my finger looked at so maybe, just maybe, I will be at an end of this journey of massive miserable sharp pain every time I move my finger slightly wrong. Or maybe not! Probably not! They will probably send me to surgery scheduling and it’ll be weeks and Emma will have to drive me because I won’t have a car. But I suppose there is a shred of hope it gets resolved today so maybe this shouldn’t go into the petty complaints file until tomorrow. Another reason this is a petty complaint is because of the scab doctor, I don’t get to see my real finger doctor, which means I don’t get to schedule surgery to fix my three trigger fingers.
Jane hasn’t brushed her teeth, morning or evening, for like two-and-a-half days now and I’m gonna have to do it against her will soon and I fucking hate doing that.
My computer-mixer-Yamaha-monitors pipeline has a squeal in it, sounds like electronic interference and I haven’t been able to get rid of it for a couple weeks now and it is driving me crazy and i’ll probably tear the whole system up and it will still suck and I am sad.
Speaking of the doctor, I went to the pain clinic a week ago — bullshit required visit before I get my neck shots, which I am gonna get Friday, so that will be mildly nice. They have a cop now. But, like, this is a pain clinic, but they don’t have any medicine? The nurse told me the strongest stuff they carry is Tylenol. She said “corporate” (unfortunate term in the medical world) sent the cop and that it would “make us feel more safe.”
“He does not make me feel more safe,” she said.
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I am listening to Patrick Watson. Laura, an old friend of mine who is in the GMHHAY Slack, told me he is one of her favorites. She listed two albums she loves, and I am listening to one of them, Wave. It is very pretty. I like this. I searched the archives and I listened to his album “Better in the Shade,” probably on Laura’s recommendation. I did not star any tracks from it, though, which is surprising because I have already starred two on Wave here. On the drive to school this morning I listened to Bonnie Prince Billy and Bill Callahan’s cover of Cohen’s “Nights of Santiago” and this has a similar feel: moody, mellow, vaguely flamenco. I like it.
Last night I was putting a can into the recycling, and thought “oh yeah I need to drain it” and walked over to the sink and shook the can and tried to get all the liquid out because I think it’s gross when I’m dumping the recycling and a bunch of graveyard soda comes out. But then I realized it didn’t matter, I drain all the cans, and somehow there is always still graveyard soda. How is it, I wondered, that the soda won’t come out when I vigorously shake the can over the sink but it somehow manages to come out when I dump it.
I wished to myself I could Google this, there is probably some life hack out there to avoid this. But of course, Google sucks and there’s no way I could actually find this information there anymore. AI might have it, but they might just make some shit up and anyway, fun fact, AI is completely immoral even when correct.
I came to the unfortunate conclusion that if there were a life hack, the place to find it would be TikTok. Which is unfortunate cuz I hate TikTok but also because you couldn’t really search for it. You’d just have to stumble upon it in your constant zombie scrolling.
So then we have this weird situation where a bunch of TikTok-addled Millennials know the life hack I’m looking for, but do not particularly need it, whereas I need it, but cannot find it. And I hate to admit it but god damn I love those short-form videos of people doing ten different domestic life hacks. And I thought about these TikTok addicts are learning some shit and that is kinda cool. It’s almost like… school? You learn shit divorced from space and time and when you need to know the thing, just for the sake of learning. Because it might come in handy later. Shit I bet TikTok addicts know so many life hacks and bits of trivia.
(Are people still addicted to TikTok? They don’t send me unsolicited TikTok links at near the same rate as yesteryear.)
Anyway, it gave me a slight respect for TikTok. And, you know, my burning hatred of AI has put my minor annoyance with TikTok into perspective. Not the same thing at all.
Semi-relatedly, I have come to the conclusion that I am getting too old for long-term planning and probably need to start focusing on the here and now more. In my good existential cry the other day I thought of, like, the five biggest things in my life and almost all of them were for the future and not enough were for the here and now. The studio build counts as both, because it’s super-rewarding to work on and I’m building it so I can rock out in my retirement. But Jane? My Job? My other job? All about the future. I mean, Jane has some great moments, we had a few yesterday before a bomb went off in her head and she was a terrorist to her mother. But mostly I have a kid for the purpose of creating a good adult down the road.
I’m not saying all this like some hippie and stop and smell the flowers and whatnot, my long-term plans have generally been amazing and powerful. But two things:
So much of the time you are working on the long-term plans, it is a fucking nightmare, so that is unfortunate. I am tired of the constant five-to-ten years of agony endured while enacting a long-term plan, regardless of the end reward. Just tired of it.
I am getting old and I need to stop making plans that will take “five-ish” years which usually means ten years. I do not have another cycle of that left in me. I need to keep perspective on the whole arc here so I’m not one of those sad fuckers on their death bed working on utterly irrelevant shit.
This was a a bit of an epiphany for me yesterday. Probably need to think on it a bit before I come to any major conclusions. Or… plans, if you will.
My Game of Thrones re-watch has just finished up Season 6, very satisfying ending, good riddance High Sparrow and Walder Frey. She show is still very good. It is missing the witty dialogue of early seasons, and you feel that absence, but so far it has not shit the bed by any means. The production values add 5% improvement to early seasons, and a 20% ding for lack of witty banter, to net out that I would call season 6 about 85% as good as Season 1. With way less boobs.
I should give you a Jane anecdote but man this phase is a bit of a bummer. She’s not refused school again, so that is nice, but she’s just so mean all the time. She doesn’t even know she’s doing it. But, then, I have several adults in my life that are just as bad, just say the most condescending shit all the time. You call em on it it’s a giant episode, and not worth it, so you just sit there listening to their condescending shit and, man, I swear, it rots the brain. It’s worse from adults, but it’s worse from blood, so, you know, a wash. I wish she was nicer. I wish she was more kind.
Super useful traits in the world these days, I hear.
Oh hey that worked out, look: adding an aforementioned Patrick Watson song to this Moody and Quiet playlist rounded it out to an hour, that is nice. Oh wait no. This has three Cranes songs on it. There. That is better. Swapped out two of them with Piano Magic and The Hope Blister. I like that Hope Blister album a lot more these days than I did when it came out. Anyway, new Blueboy, Martin Carr from Boo Radleys, Emma Swift (Hi Keith) and a lovely new Hilary Woods. Scrawl from my recent investigation discussed yesterday, Cranes from a recent dive into their late-period albums, still cranking through the Springsteen box set and jesus he just announced another one this is out of control. The NIN track was the opener of the show I saw and it is a good’un I did not know it before.
On a positive note, owing to my decisive action on my medical problems, a light at the end of the tunnel on my truck, and the fact that the hard days of the week are almost done, I think I can feel this depression lifting. Provided I don’t think about, you know, the world at large. Fingers crossed. Talk tomorrow.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.