Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1583
A dream of Copenhagen, Band-Aid organization brilliance, studio construction work, they let us into the Gym.
Good morning good morning. Jane overslept. Her alarm didn’t go off. We blame Mommy, who is in charge of setting the alarm. Of course, Mommy is normally blameless, but in this case, she was a convenient scapegoat so Jane didn’t keep yelling at me about being late. Mommy’s fault. Sorry mommy. In any case, we were only about 10 cars behind in the car drop-off line. Still on the sidewalk, which is all-important, because that means she can exit the car at exactly 7:30 and not wait for the car line to advance. Whew.
Hold please. Have to “Delete and Report” this text-message Spam, the second of what will probably be a hundred today. Why do we live like this.
Programming note: I Forgot to do bolding in last Friday’s edition. GMHHAY regrets the error.
Had a dream last night I was back in Copenhagen, and they had this amazing library, it was like a coffee shop, library, bar, I mean, it actually had a bar in it, and it had a giant library too of course, didn’t skimp on the actual books. It was the new National Library of Denmark and it was so awesome and so nice hrm let’s Google the National Library of Denmark.
Well damn. That is really nice. It was nicer in my dreams, though. And they sold shirts at this little concession stand outside of the Graphic Novel department. I really wanted the shirt that was an hommage to the Ramones logo, but they did not have it in my size. I bought one for Jane instead.
Love Denmark. Not a big travel fan anymore, but would not be sad if I woke up one day in Copenhagen again.
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We are listening this morning to The Mercury Program, the album is From the Vapor of Gasoline. It is a recent re-release of the Numero Group, read about it in a Spam email. Don’t know anything about them. It is kinda post-rock, reminds me of the jazzier components of Bark Psychosis or something. Less electronic. Hrm they are from Gainesville. One guy went on to be in the Album Leaf it looks like. You can hear that. This is a bit jazzier and more upbeat. Me likey.
Heard 1,000 Homo DJ’s “Supernaut” on the drive home from Jane’s school this morning. Hadn’t heard it in a while. Man what a riff. Always been a little unclear about whether it was Alan or Trent singing vocals on this. Apparantly Trent did them first, TVT wouldn’t let him appear, so Al re-recorded them and that is the version on the sing. Trent version finally came out on the Wax Trax box set. Good to know.
There are three parts of making a room “soundproof”: vibration, mass, and air. The entire room must not vibrate any other part of the building. Hence the entire studio is floating on foam. And there needs to be sufficient mass between the room making the sound and other parts of the building. Hence the Rockwool, the three layers of OSB, the two layers of extra-heavy Type-X sheetrock on the floor. Attics are, by their very nature, almost impossible to soundproof. If you want to make a soundproof studio, for the love of god, put it in your basement, but it on a concrete floor. But that was not an option for us. So: vibration, mass, and air.
Air is the one that makes you crazy. You can go crazy making a recording studio. Every single air-gap needs to be filled. When you are layering the layers of sheetrock and OSB on the floor, you want to make sure the seams don’t overlap. If you are obsessive, you should also caulk those seems. It can seem like overkill. But the thing is: You need to be obsessive. Every small air gap matters.
So I find myself, some weekends, obsessing over the exact cut of a piece of sheetrock on the floor as it goes around a gas line penetration or meets up with the bumpy, spray-foamed roof of the house. You will find yourself spending twenty minutes getting a perfect fit, the whole time thinking “I am being too anal, I am wasting time.” But also thinking “No, fool, you must be anal, that is the key. NO AIR GAPS.”
But the thing that makes you truly go crazy is that you will not know if any of it works or not for YEARS. In one, maybe two years, I will finally lug my Fender Super-Six Reverb combo amp upstairs, plug my Jazzmaster into it and strum a chord. And then I’ll get someone else to strum a chord while close the airlock doors, go downstairs, and see how loud it is.
And the thing is: no matter what I do, no matter all this work, I’m going to be able to hear the sound downstairs. No soundproofing is perfect.
And it’s not like I’ll be able to tell! It’s not like I’ll be, like, “well, shit, that is too loud because on layer 2 of the sheetrock on the floor you half-assed the fitment on the HVAC duct leading into the second bedroom.” You just won’t know.
But it will still make a difference.
And every time, cumulatively, you half-ass it, the sound will be louder.
It’s not like anyone lives in this house, either. You could make an argument that none of this matters!
But I would love to get it quiet enough that a) the Neurodivergent-Affirming Pediatric Speech Therapists don’t hear me rock out in the daytime. That should be easy enough, they are two floors down. But my true dream is b): That two people could rock out up there late at night while other people sleep in the house.
Will anything I do make this possible? Is it possible at all? Am I wasting all my time? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But no, no I am not wasting my time because it is four-to-six hours a day, two days a week, I am getting weird-ass exercise, carrying six hundred pounds of sheetrock while going up and down the stairs, as I did this weekend, contorting myself into weird shapes as I crawl between ducts as I also did this weekend.
And, most importantly, it is four-to-six hours a day that I am not doomscrolling.
The other thing: I need to not stress out about thinking time. A lot of the time, I find myself just sitting there in the attic, on the floor, having just finished up putting a piece of the floor in staring at where the next piece is going to go, or staring at some other logistical problem. And I keep thinking “go go go. get up, next piece.” But I have to remember that the thinking is part of it. I spent about twenty minutes saturday just staring at this section of floor, not sure what I should do, how I should do it. And when I came in Sunday, my brain had figured it all out, and it was no problem. Got it dome in 30 minutes. But if I had tried before all that thinking? Hours, no doubt.
Do not feel guilty about the thinking time.
Anyway, got a lot done on the studio this weekend. Took a delivery of a bunch more sheetrock, had to bribe the driver to put it in the garage, apparently they don’t do that anymore, so that is a whole thing now. Every delivery is going to stress me out. Great.
Also I need to tell you about another chore I got done this weekend. I mean, I did some gardening and weeding, that was fun. But not that. I need to tell about about the expansion of my world-famous Band-Aid organization system. I have four new types/brands of Band-Aids now, thanks to all the weird ones I bought trying to find something that would stay stuck to the palm of my hand (in the end, Band-Aid Flex Water Seal won out). So I needed to incorporate them into the existing paradigm. Behold:
My Band-Aid filing technique is unstoppable.
I got to a good stopping point on the studio work Sunday in time to go to this birthday party that Jane was going to. The exciting thing about this birthday party was that it was at the Kid’s Gym, where she takes gymnastics lessons, and they were going to let the adults into the gym. This is not usually the case. I go every Wednesday and we sit in the parents room and watch Jane do her gymnastics through these windows. I have never once set foot in the actual gym until yesterday. It was very exciting. Springy floors. I want springy floors through my whole house. I tried to walk the balance beam, failed the first time, but managed the second, third and fourth. Got to jump on a trampoline. But, you know, being two hundred and something pounds, I was convinced I was going to break everything in this… Kid’s Gym. Still. Very fun.
K-Pop Demon Hunters everywhere. Imagine being a seven year-old right now and not liking K-Pop Demon Hunters. You’d be so fucked.
That’s not Jane, though. She loves it. Listens to it every day. Is going to dress as something from the movie for Halloween. So is every other kid her age, I suspect. Trick or Treating is going to be a sea of Derpy Cats and Rumy’s. Is that how you spell Rumy? I don’t know, man, I only saw the movie once.
Oh we also learned that on Halloween, a friend of ours, who is a prof at UNC, is bringing two of her post-docs, one Belgian and one Indian, trick-or-treating with us and the kids. That is going to be hilarious.
Jane has now missed the last two teeth-brushings, we are such terrible parents. Last night she just absolutely refused, and Emma didn’t have the heart to bring in the Daddy reinforcements and do it for her against her will, which is fine because literally everyone in the family hates that. Then this morning we had the missed alarm. Her breath smelled bad. I hope someone at school says something.
We could use a little shaming in this situation.
Volume ninety-six my god I’ve been doing this a long time of the W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe playlist series. All new stuff I think? Well, except I did just throw on a track from this Mercury Program album and it is a re-issue, new re-issue, old music. I think the Blonde Redhead is a little old now too. But it is all CHILL AND SMOOTH. Order yourself a Negroni and sit in those plus chairs in the lobby of the closest W Hotel and feel those 2000’s vibes. Man. W Hotel was a brand. I kinda miss it. Not gonna lie.
Righty-O let us now turn our thoughts to work. Until tomorrow.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.