Good morning good morning good morning sorry I am late. Jane had an early-morning, 10-minute dental check-up to make sure her eight cavity repairs were doing okay. They were doing fine. Dropped her off to school 20 minutes late. had to interact with the single most terse person in any customer-facing role in Chatham County. Never pleasant.

Went to McDonald’s afterwards because I hate myself and I carry millennial baggage in my DNA and on my frame. The nice guy who works there bought my food. He is convinced I’m a Tar Heels fan. We talk Tar Heels football a lot. I try to keep up with the Tar Heels just to please him. Curiously, he believes the guy at the next table is a World Cup fan. Now I feel like I might need to barrage him with curling facts. Did you know you can get any pair of shoes turned into curling shoes? Did you know the Swedish women’s team has been the same team members and positions for over a decade? What makes a curling coach a coach? Why don’t they just keep curling? Can they no longer bend over?

I am not clear, after a decade, whether Tar Heel is one word or two. Is anyone? No one even knows what a Tar Heel is, why would they know how to spell it?

Some updates:

It turns out that a ton of GMHHAY readers have a Christmas Ornament like my grandma’s (why did I capitalize that? Feels right), and they are all ancient and family heirlooms. Different colors but same design. I am intensely curious about this. Was it a kit? Something like a sewing pattern? Something from the Sears catalog? Insanity. Must know more. Here’s the photo again for reference. Please pass along any anecdotal information you may have.

Reader Ben pointed out I messed up the GMHHAY edition numbering again, about 30 issues back. Makes sense. I was on Christmas vacation. Anyway, it has been rectified. All incorrectly numbered issues are updated and marked in the archives as having their edition number changed. We are sorry for the difficulty this may cause you.

Lines that Would Have Been Tweets in the Oughts

• Chomplings is a great word, perhaps the best brand extension name ever.

• Ever think about your spouse pouring over your autopsy results and being appalled at everything coursing through your veins?

• I am starting to think writing a email newsletter (formerly known as blogging) is somewhat akin to being a Civil War re-enactor. Lost cause, history has moved on, etc.

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!

What are we listening to. Ah yes. Doing a re-listen of the to-investigate queue. Listening to Blushing, lovely girl pop dream pop shoegaze thing. Don’t know much about them. Googling. They’re from Austin. Jesus they have three records already. Full-time job, keeping up with modern shoegaze bands.

Cabaret Voltaire is coming to America for the last time. They have been on my travel list for years, never seen them, very excited. Thank you to Jon Whitney, Brainwashed guru and old friend, for giving me a personal alert about this. Presale is in 40 minutes.

Guess I’ll go to Boston for it, since they are not coming here, so many bands don’t come here it really sucks. Also Springsteen isn’t coming, neither is Chapterhouse, who are two days apart in Boston. I want to go, but I am going to Boston the week before for two other bands that aren’t coming here (Wu Lyf and the Dirty Three) and I don’t think I can stay in Boston for 10 days just to see rock shows, although, I mean, that does sound pretty awesome I don’t HAVE to parent, do I? I have seen Chapterhouse before, and Springsteen, but a) I’ve seen the Dirty Three before, and I’ve been VERY obsessed with seeing Springsteen “one last time.” Oh god what do I do I need to take Jane out of school she needs to see Chapterhouse and Springsteen this is far more important than learning about trees.

(PSA: After three times, I can tell you that the secret to seeing Chapterhouse is stand right next to a speaker oh my god they are so good loud).

…although… serious noble pedestrian domesticity here but I was standing in the driveway looking at the mother-in-law’s ADU and the trees we planted, nine years ago, along the western edge of the house to block the house from the road. And the trees are fuckin’ huge. And in this manic fascist AI dream world, I was standing there like Lennie Small staring at the trees, and Emma came out:

“Look how big those trees are,” I said. “Compare them to the ones by the road that were there when we bought the house. Those trees are, what? Six years older? And the new ones are the same size. That is so weird.”

“It is kinda weird,” Emma said. “Although I suppose it’s just like humans and animals, right? They do a lot of growing, then they are grown up and it just stops.”

Holy shit my brain exploded I have questions: do trees MATURE AND STOP GROWING? I thought they grew forever.

Here is a picture of one of the oldest trees in the world, hidden in a swamp near Wilmington. It is two thousand six-hundred and twenty-three years old. Fuuuuck.

Wait a minute do you hyphenate between a number and “hundred?” I spend so much time thinking about proper hyphenation. I think about proper hyphenation more than the rest of the internet combined. I think about proper hyphenation more than Chat GPT thinks about em-dashes. Not to say I don’t think about em-dashes a lot. Bringhurst 4 life, yo.

Oh my god I suddenly need a coffee-table-sized, massive, beautifully designed copy of The Elements of Typographic Style more than I need anything else ever.

This makes me miss Annie.

Are we fucked in the California gubernatorial primary? You guys gonna get it together out there? I do not relish the idea of two Republicans advancing from the primary to the general but that is the way things seem to be going. I am told to be chill about this, that it’ll self-sort, but… will it? Tell me it will be okay. Hold me, cozy alternative to Nate Silver.

That’s the whole politics section today. Oh wait yeah Prince Andrew got arrested. That is awesome. I hope he sings. It is weird to me no one in the Epstein world has sung. Half of America would forgive you for sleeping with a 17-year old, and a few more would forgive you for coming clean. What’s to lose? Oh right aside from getting killed by the president of the United States.

They tell me my truck will be done tomorrow. I will officially find out whether the water ingress was a result of the body work done by the body shop. I can’t imagine it isn’t, lord knows I didn’t do anything to get water into the tailgate, but I’m also dreading it because I do not know how to navigate a conflict without flipping the fuck out, and I do not enjoy flipping the fuck out much. Once the fiery thrill of profound righteousness burns off I just feel like a heel and I am not fond of that feeling. If I’m gonna half self-loathing feelings I prefer them to be of the catatonic or gluttonous varieties. I think I have a rough game plan of trying to broker a deal with them to get the repair on the other car done for free, which is not a repair that can fuck the car up? Oh god it’s all too much. I am dreading it. I’m a 50-plus year-old titan of industry, maaaan. I can handle this. I can handle this.

I cannot handle this.

I DID get Jane to the dentist on time this morning, and, while she was not terrible she was certainly not cooperative. Around the time we had to leave she decided that she needed to change the clothes on one of her cabbage patch dolls, and then she needed to poop, and you know that when she poops she needs to cozy game for a while. But one thing I am is a neurotic planning over-thinker, so joke’s on you, girl, we were having this whole conversation fifteen minutes early. Success.

We had a nice long conversation about temper. She had some sort of frustration during gymnastics the night before, laid on the mats and cried a bit. Emma and I studiously didn’t look because we knew that would exacerbate things. So we’re not sure exactly what happened. But when she got out she was very aggro. She wanted to scream and hit and came close on both. BUT SHE DIDN’T. She was being annoying AF and pouty and snippy, but she controlled her worst impulses. It was very tempting to focus on the negative — how unpleasant she was being (look at that sweet em-dash) — but instead I congratulated her on NOT giving in to the worst impusles. And it worked! And she was still very proud of it this morning. And she asked a question she loves to ask, which is “am I better at this age at controlling my temper than you were?”

And I tell her “you sure are” and she feels great. And we had a nice talk about whether or not all people want to do bad things, did the first person want to do bad things, and I told her it was apcrophyl but we talked about the fall of Adam (laying all the blame on him, not Eve) and how it was probably made up but even made-up stories have a message in them.

AND we talked about how this is the goal of parenting — make kids better than you. My dad had a temper, he taught me to control it, and I learned, and now I am teaching her to control it, and she is learning even more quickly. Make every generation better.

She liked that.

Justa mix today. Couldn’t do the morning mix thing because of the dentist appointment and whatnot, plus this morning’s mix was very heavy on the metal and post rock. Jane was unimpressed. Added a few oldies to this one to round it out. Also the Raffaella is not the NYC-based Raffaella I am currently obsessed with. It is very confusing. But a topic for another day. I have to admit I am obsessed with the new Charlie XCX album, love it so much. And yes there is Blackpink on here tell me when are you ever gonna get to listen to a mix that has both Can and Blackpink on it, come on.

OK love you have a lovely day. TTFN.