Good morning good morning good morning. Late again. No school today. They have dispensed with the remote learning, thank god. Had to bribe Jane with Lemonades (on sale now, get your girl scout cookies today! We ship nationwide!), one every lesson. NOT HEALTHY.

And I will be very late tomorrow, probably like noon, maybe later. Gotta go to the Hand Doctor and complain about my slow recovery from the Birthday Foreign Object From hell removal. Then I gotta go pick up a divorce-afflicted pinball machine for a friend. I just wrote that into my time off application for work, which I alone read and I alone approve.

Oh god I might have writer’s block this morning that is not good. There are like 100 topics listed in my little topic notepad, but I am not feeling any of them, and I cannot conceive, this morning, how to make them all flow into a single issue. That is always the worst form of writers block for me, really. The weaving together. Well, with GMHHAY. With a book I can just write a section and worry about weaving later. But I don’t really write books anymore, I guess. Too short.

So I guess I will just let my base-level, 24/7 politics paranoia id run wild for a smidge here.

I was thinking about Minnesota, like you do, and how there is this new video of Alex Pretti kicking an ICE car a few days before they shot him and, I guess somehow this means it’s okay to shoot him? But of course that raises all sorts of questions, like: did the ICE agents know that he had done that? Were they using their spiffing Palantir software to keep track of him, track him down later and shoot him for kicking the car? Not unlikely! And not a great line of thought.

And I was thinking that for, oh, 10 hours or so no one was sure if the video was AI or not and how utterly fucked we are as a species at this rate but hey people can code more quickly so I guess everything is fine.

And I was thinking about how Chuck is asking for the most milquetoast reforms, and how ICE and the Republicans are going to 100% ignore the law if and when Chucky Schumer gets these “reforms” passed, and in doing so gives up, as far as I know, the last moment he has any leverage.

And I was thinking about this judge who wrote into an opinion yesterday that since the beginning of the year, ICE has ignored nearly 100 court orders, making it by far the most illegal department ever and having violated more orders this year than other, centuries-old departments have violated in their entire liftime.

And just how stupid it is that people are like “you can’t defund ICE! They have all this money already!” And, like, number one, even a lowly unfrozen cavemen tech monkey like me fucking told you last year to shut down the government rather than give ICE a hundred billion dollars, so that is on you, Chucky. And number two what you are doing is writing laws. You are congress! You control the purse! You can literally write a law that says “hey we are taking that money back.” Hold out for that!

Buuuuuuuuut all that being said, I was thinking this morning that if they make a law banning masks, and if ICE follows it — which is not completely impossible, if the left gets its messaging shit together and gets it onto Fox news and everywhere else that these masks are now illegal — well, then. Having ICE remove their masks is no abolish ICE, but it is not nothing — I suspect a good chunk of these goonghouls will just quit? Maybe? That could be good.

Oh and also this whole thing where Trump is literally stealing Venezuela’s money and putting it in an account, an offshore account, in the Middle East, that no one can touch but him? 100% impeachable and no one is doing a god damn thing about it. Fucking insane.

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 this morning to the first two Alan Vega solo records, recently re-released on Sacred Bones records, one of my favorite labels. They are far more rockabilly than I thought — which I guess actually makes sense, there always was a bit of a rockabilly sensibility going through Suicide. And now, actually, I am on Side B of his second record, Collision Drive, and thing are getting a bit more sludgy and droney. Looks like these records are three years after Suicide and five years before Ghost Riders.

I saw Suicide once and I deeply regret to this day I did not yet understand or appreciate them. I am sorry, Rock Gods, please still let me into Rock and Roll Heaven.

So Cindytalk, a band I have loved for 30 years and put on tour in the US in 1996 with my good and recently departed friend Annie, has a new album out. It is on this label called The Helen Scarsdale Agency. Bill, Annie’s Husband, told me about this impending release and label, so I went over to Bandcamp to The Helen Scarsdale Agency’s web store, to see if the album was available for pre-order yet. It wasn’t at the time. I have since ordered it. But look at that page! I mean, January is not yet over and I have listened to nearly 80 new records. I listen to so much new music, of exactly this ilk! I know this band personally! I put them on tour! And the Helen Scarsdale Agency has like 40 bands on their label and I had never heard of a single one of them. There is so much new music in the world, so many great bands. It is absolutely insane.

So that was early this month when Bill gave me the news, and I felt so inadequate not knowing any of the bands on this label I had never heard of before. Like what if I am hanging out in a record store and someone says something like “oh yeah, you think you’re into experimental noise ambient but I bet you’ve never even heard of She Spread Sorrow or Ekin Fil.” And I am a 53 year old grown-ass father and business titan, sure, but that would be so utterly humiliating. We absolutely cannot have that.

So I have been working my way through the releases on this lovelily named The Helen Scarsdale Agency (is the “the” part of the label name? Unclear. But I have ascertained that it is not run by a woman named Helen Scarsdale but rather by a man named Jim Haynes, who founded it to put out his own (very good) music). And it is all very very good! I’m about six bands deep now and I would heartily recommend every album to anyone into noisy ambient and experimental music. Just lovely. Great label. Been a lovely addition to my dry January.

Last night I had this rare transcendent moment of clear vision on just how much this political environment is permanently oppressing me, especially when combined with social media. And I just got so pissed about it. And as I was going to bed Emma came and asked me what that thumping sound was and it was me dropping Hayden the Cabbage Patch Doll and I could have answered her brusquely or tersely or sadly but I was like “you know what? Fuck this political world I can still be funny and silly” and I just, I dunno. I am not explaining it right.

I answered the question with humor and levity, talked about how I had apologized to Hayden and set him up right and how I understood that my wife and child think this Hayden fellow is a real hyoo-mon child. And the jokes just kept coming I was a regular stand-up comedian, I was. So I says to her, I says…..

…and we just had a really good bedtime as I joked around and you know, GMHHAY readers, I have a mordant humor here in GMHHAY but I am actually pretty bad about remembering to be funny when it is evening and I am tired and cranky because of fascism.

But you know what? Choosing levity and humor even in dark times? A-OK in my book. Will try and do more.

This fleeting moment of happiness was brought on by the profound relief that the movie I was watching ended the way it did. Ugh I suppose even that is a spoiler in a way. But my god, that movie was so good.

Okay fine the movie was Sentimental Value and it was amazing and I loved it and it was beautiful and the way it could tap into and convey pure emotion on multiple levels — joy, despair, anxiety, fear, connection, isolation. Just phenomenal. Also it is a moviemaker movie and Hollywood loves that shit. I had believed that One Battle After Another should win best picture but now I am not so sure. Man. I have now seen five of the best picture nominees, and every one of them deserves to win. And I still haven’t seen Hamnet. I don’t think Sentimental Value will win but damn I would be happy if it did.

Jane has been pretty horrible these last few days it has been hard on us. She needs to go back to school. Hit mommy with a cat toy last night so I had to take over bedtime. She knew she went to far with that, so mostly bedtime was fine. But it is impossible to talk to her about her unkind actions. Except I figured out a way to do it. She would talk seriously about things but only if we used a funny voice. So I made a Yoda voice and she made some weird-ass voice I had never heard and in those idiotic voices we had what was perhaps one of our most honest conversations about feelings and actions in a while. She will also do this if we put all of the unkind actions onto someone else like “other Jane.” Responsibility is a bitch, man. No one wants to admit they did wrong.

But, then. She’s eight and she is probably already more emotionally mature than almost everyone running our country, though, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

Noise and metal playlist today. Two bands from the Helen Scarsdale Agency. Other than that mostly new stuff. What can I say, man, dark times call for dark noise and dark metal. Every kid who joins a metal band is, broadly speaking, one more kid who joined a community and is not living in online isolation, prone to radicalization. In a lot of ways then, Metal is like the YMCA you could say.

Huh well that edition turned out all right considering I had no idea what I was going to say.

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