Good morning god morning. Late again. No school again. Storm again. Storms really screwing with my publishing schedule. Apologies for no edition on Friday, as well. Let’s just say I skipped publishing in solidarity with the General Strike. I mean, I wrote a whole edition about general strikes and how America wasn’t great at them like, what? Three weeks ago? Well, that one wasn’t great exactly, but it was a solid first outing in eighty years so yay us. Let’s do it again. I hope I use up all my vacation days this year on General Strikes, and then start just skipping. Strike! Strike!

Before any further: Don’t forget to buy girl scout cookies!

And congratulations to The Cure for their first ever Grammy win. That is awesome and hilarious.

And it is Groundhog Day: Six more weeks of winter, that little turd says. But Annie loved Groundhog day, so I will forgive him. Annie used to have Groundhog day parties. That sounds like a great idea. I just finished Dry January. Let’s go a party.

Spent strike day doing an errand for a couple friends — one friend had been holding on to a giant vintage pinball machine for another friend for years, and now, suddenly, the pinball machine had to go, owing to a lease termination. Community support, let’s go, sounds like the perfect thing for a strike day.

Oh wait before that I went to the finger doctor and it was… not good? Did not seem particularly reassuring about my slow, painfully slow, recovery from my “foreign object removal” surgery that is not healing well. I am not happy. May involve another surgery. Gonna try some scar reduction bandages first, but I am not optimistic. Mainly because I also noticed some nerve damage, after the appointment, when I was shoveling snow. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Anyway, that was… sad.

Jane actually got to go to school on Friday for a few hours so Emma dropped her off for a late start while I went to my doctor appointment, then I picked Emma up at 9:30 and we headed to Raleigh for the pinball machine. Saw an old friend, got it loaded up, paid cash at a small local deli for breakfast, and slowly, slowly, creeped down the interstate to get the thing home. Had to make two stops because of flapping moving blankets but mostly it went well. Got home, called a neighbor, got the thing out of my truck and into the garage of Chore House, which is not a great final resting place but will do for now.

Spent the rest of Friday chipping ice. I was going to write to you guys, but I went outside to take a picture of the pinball machine in the truck for GMHHAY photo fodder, and Emma was chipping ice, and it felt wrong to not help her.

Then my pool partner came by to help me move the pinball machine, saw all the ice, and reminded me that I owned a swimming pool construction company and that we had a pallet of salt. So Emma and I went and got five hundred pounds of salt (sorry ecosystem) and my god it worked so well. Made all the ice chippable. Chip chip chip. Four hours of ice chipping. I blistered both my hands. So dumb. They are in such pain.

BUT now that that was done, we could prepare for the next snowstorm, and Saturday we got four ish inches of snow. BUT it was light and fluffy and pretty easy to remove, only took me six hours and Emma three. Shovel shovel shovel. I am so sore. So sore. Getting too old for this.

BUT the neurodivergent-affirming pediatric speech therapists and their kids can get to their office today, so I am happy about that.

Sore and happy.

So no studio work this weekend, I’m afraid. Loads of manual labor, but in service to snow and ice removal, not sonic bliss. It accomplished the same short-term emotional balancing, though, so no complaints.

This week-plus of no/late school means I have been sleeping till 8 AM every day and it is so awesome. Still going to sleep at 10:30/11, getting nine-plus hours every night. I love it so much. I love sleep. I don’t want it to end.

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 Grief Mop this morning, a shoegaze band, and their excellently named album I Want to Pull the Sleep From Your Eyes. Second listen. I like it a lot. Solid shoegaze action. Saw an article this weekend about Gen Z shoegaze and how it is like community and church and I liked it a lot. It took pains to say it was different from wave-1 Gen-X shoegaze, though, more metal-ish, which is true, but also it tried to say it was wimpier than MBV, ignoring their sonic experimentation, which I think is true but also a bit at odds with the first observation. And I think Gen-Z shoegaze is basically just far more diverse and assorted than wave one where we had really three types, manifested in Slowdive, MBV and Ride: Etherial, Pummeling, and Poppy respectively oh my god I should write a thesis about this.

What else what else. Trump is suing himself for ten billion dollars and is going to just have the US government hand him ten billion dollars and I find it unlikely anyone will stop him. The Dems have, so far, held the line on ICE funding but I am not optimistic that they are going to extract meaningful change, and I’m even less optimistic that ICE and Trump will actually do whatever changes the dems do extract. All very depressing.

I confess I spent just a stupid, insane amount of time combing through the latest dump of the Epstein files. Even if you seriously discount the tip line complaints (some of which should probably be discounted but explain to me why someone would call in a fake tip about Trump and Epstein prior to Trump running for office), there is a lot of pretty horrible stuff in there. There’s a lot of Banality of Evil, too. Shopping lists and the boring-ass mechanics of being rich. And then there’s just super weird shit like how often Epstein says “whoops” when someone dies and how much they talk about ice cream. But god, the explicit stuff, the “no room for doubt” stuff, it is abundant and horrifying. Journal entries from victims written in code. Many many many many famous and notable people saying explicit shit about “assistants” and “girls.” Just the worst. They should be getting a lot more coverage than they are getting.

It is weird and hard to talk about them without sounding like a conspiracy freak, and the un-edited dump blends unreliable tip line calls with signed depositions and it’s easy to conflate everything. To see this many rich and famous people happily cavorting with a known pedophile (most of these documents are from after Epstein’s first conviction) is just absolutely devestating. It’s hard not to say that the whole class is rotten to its core. Not just the billionaires but the academics, the gurus. There’s a guy in there who invented the darwin fish and seems to have maybe faked his own death and that’s just confirmed stuff from his own wikipedia page. Weird-ass world, creepy-ass people. There are things that get a single, un-verified tip that says Epstein made his money being Putin’s wealth manager and you find yourself saying “huh yeah okay that adds up” and you’re off to the races. Not healthy. But also… probably shouldn’t be completely ignored? Can anyone interface with this whole thing and stay sane? Probably not.

Jane just came down. She was mean to mama last night so no iPad on a snow day which will be hard for her. But she is making do. Maybe she’ll go sledding. Emma, in frustration with Jane’s non-compliance, turned over bedtime to me last night, and I got Jane to do all her shit because we did everything while singing, like the Buffy episode or something. It was a lot of work but she loved it and it worked and I feel like the greatest dad ever.

Until tonight when I try it again and she’s already bored of it.

I don’t have a playlist ready today it seems, so please enjoy this wacky Japanese Trans Kabuki Psych band I learned about on KEXP. A good time.

Until tomorrow, friend.

Stand With Minnesota Donation Directory

Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.