Good morning my friends hello hi how are you? I want you to know I set my alarm and woke up an hour earlier than I needed to just so I could write to you. What a crazy thing to do this whole habit of mine is a sickness. But also the greatest artistic creation of my life. A paradox, that, though I suppose not an unusual one. Couldn’t fall asleep last night, either, so I think I got, eh, a bit less than seven hours of sleep. Which sucks for me, but I have been getting so much sleep lately that I think I will manage.

Here let’s put these at the top of the email today instead of the bottom:

Stand with Minnesota.

Buy Girl Scout cookies.

Man the shit that runs through my head when I am falling asleep. I latch onto things and think the same thought over and over, refining, listing, adjusting. Last night I dismantled the DHS as I was trying to fall asleep. It was very satisfying. I got so worked up I sat up and took notes. Here is what I would do with the assorted departments of the DHS when I dismantled it:

• USCIS - Goes to the State Department

• Coast Guard - Defense Department

• Customs and Border Protection - Goes to the State Department, and is statutorily physiclaly confined to the actual borders — say 5-10 miles from the Canadian and Mexican border, on the physical premesis only for ports of entry and airports. Confined to specific terminals at airports, cannot go into terminals that don’t have international flights.

• Cybersecurity Infrastructure security agency - Goes to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence

• FEMA goes to Health and Human Services which might seem a little weird but also is perfect.

• The Law Enforcement Training Centers go to the Department of Justice

• ICE is disbanded, natch. Its customs work goes to USCIS under State

• Secret Service goes to the DOJ which might seem weird, not going back to Treasury, but it was always weird it was in Treasury

• The TSA goes to the Dept of Transportation.

• Science goes to Commerce

• Its WMD capacity goes to - State or Intelligence

• Heath Security goes to HHS

See? Easy peasy. Bob’s your uncle.

Morning is the absolute best time for me to write GMHHAY, but I swear. GMHHAY after dark, written while in bed, falling asleep? It would be so lit. Maybe someday after I retire, I will do, like a special GMHHAY After Dark month or something. Each edition written after one pint-size G&T, half a gummy, and twenty minutes of laying in bed.

The other big thought I had while falling alseep is that the Wachowskis are underrated and I am tired of pretending otherwise. Cloud Atlas? A masterpiece. Speed Racer? Awesome. Jupiter Ascending? Ten times better than people give it credit for and should have at least one sequel. Bound is great. Why have I not watched Sense8 what am I thinking? I know this opinion is controversial but it is the correct one.

Thank you to all the people who told me that BDS is an automotive parts brand. You guys are very helpful. Gatti wins, he said it first, but three more of you also “got the answer correct” like it is trivia. But it isn’t trivia. It’s FRIENDGOOGLE. Just the best. Friend Google. It’s how we all got by back in the 90s doncha know.

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 Neu! this morning, the 2022 box set. Fiftieth anniversary box set. Just got through Neu! ‘75. Moving on to Neu! ‘86. Man I love Neu! so much. Drone drone drone. Just the best. I love their tinny drums and their absurd BPMs. This box set comes with a tribute album of remixes. Has that Gorilla Toss Zum Hertz remix I loved so much a few years back. I recently learned Gorilla Toss is from Boston. Feel like I was doing something wrong that I did not come across them in my rockin days. Maybe the timing was off.

Gotta drop Jane off to school soon-ish and then Emma and I have to take my truck in to the dealer for servicing. It has turned against me. It is like a Boomer who’s finally gone senile and turned against those who love it. It beeps relentlessly at me about every god damn thing. Every ten seconds it beeps at me that the electric liftgate is malfunctioning and to check the manual. There is nothing in the manual about malfunctioning electric lift gates. So I turned off the electric lift gate functionality, and rather than stop the beeping, it yielded an additional beep cycle where it helpfully asks me every 30 seconds if I want to turn the electric lift gate back on. Occasionally, while parked, it will helpfully open the lift gate for no reason, and you come out of, say, your kid’s gymnatics class and your trunk lift gate is open. One of the turn signals flickers randomly, at a brightness far in excess of any other light on the car. It has given me a BSOD two or three times. It tells me, seconds after starting the car, that I have no key. Its USB ports frequently reset. I strongly suspect that the 12 volt battery or the 12 volt battery system is borked. It is so dumb that electric cars still have to use teeny extra batteries for shit because the whole world is too cheap to make shit at different voltages. Love that.

In a perfect world, in a year or two, I replace the thing and buy a Rivian R3 and a Slate, both combined for about what I paid for this thing. But that will be a while. Or maybe Ford gets its shit together again and makes an EV Maverick instead of this BEV ICE nonsense.

But in the meantime, my friend is sick and they need help.

This is complicated by the fact that I almost certainly won’t get this thing back from the shop before I have to go to the airport on Friday, so god knows how I will pull that off. I used to take taxis but all my Chapel Hill taxi knowledge is stale, like my knowledge about VCs or MDMA.

Been thinking a lot about that lust and ambition comparison I made a couple days ago, definitely something there I haven’t thought about a lot. Maybe I am re-inventing the seven deadly sins in my head or something: I do have a terrible habit of ignoring the great philosophers, owing to a couple of, shall we say, overly pontificating college friends. Anyway, two emotions/habits that are mayhaps healthy in small doses but easily over-consumed. But society is very different about each, responds very differently to each, especially these days as we get more prudish. But no one really gets more prudish about ambition. Even the schoolmarm scolding leftists (not all leftists) have ambition, and because our (okay my) main interaction with them is on the socials, it seems like they, too, have unbridled ambition. Because relentless social posters really fall into two camps: neurotic and blindly ambitious. I don’t want to say the Marxist revolutionary who seriously means it and Peter Theil have a lot in common, and I won’t morally equate them, but I do kind of think they both have ambition in common, and this supreme confidence in their correctedness. That they can picture the world perfectly arranged in their mind, and that they are right. That the risk of being wrong is minimal, and the massive disruption “will be worth it.” That is ambition, that is hubris, that is bad in both cases, I suspect. Which is sad. Because the world needs fixing. And incrementalism is a drag.

But really, who are we fooling. Incrementalism is all their is.

Last night after Gymnastics we went to the pizza place and we were talking about the difference between kindness and niceness and Jane got so obsessed with it. She really delved into the topic. Jane, Emma and I all put forth theories about what makes them different. I posited that kindness costs something, whereas niceness doesn’t. I knew it wasn’t quite right, but it was a good start. Emma said that maybe kindness wasn’t always something the other person wanted, which is true, but then we had a hard time distinguishing between kindness and busy-bodiness by that rubric.

But Jane, man. She was so into it. She was using words like “whilst” and “posit” and she sounded like a freakin philosopher, it was so amazing and creepy and glorious. She said all this in a calm voice and sounded so wise and buddha-like and actually she super reminded me of Sonmi-451 and her Orison, from Cloud Atlas (hence the soporific tangent last night). And then she came up with this:

“You can be kind to a lot of people but nice to only a few.”

And… I mean… it’s not wrong! It’s not 100% but… damn. That is an insight.

Damn.

Got a drone playlist for you today. Helpfully included Neu! for your listening pleasure. And this awesome Breathless song that came on yesterday in the car. And I have re-arranged the playlist after taking this screenshot but you’ll have to actually look at it to see what I did MWAHAHAHA.