Good morning good morning greetings this foggy morning from Durham, North Carolina, at the University Ford dealership. They are plugging in my back-up camera again. Hopefully. it is a long story. I’m in a aspirationally posh lounge either a bunch of other people waiting for their cars. There is a very antsy woman here who looks like Meredith Garretson from Resident Alien (RIP). Leave me alone, spell check, I Googled that spelling of “Garretson.” What a great show. There is a millimeter wave presence sensor in the bathroom which is mildly discomfiting but I suppose at some point someone tried to, like, hide in a stall to rob them? Who knows. Cars are expensive. Also there was a guy speaking on speakerphone from the bathroom stall. I flushed anyway. Not my problem.

Boy you guys are not reassuring me at all about the California Gubernatorial primary. just gonna go ahead and assume that’s gonna be a catastrophe.

EXCEPT, congratulations to Hannah Spencer, Green Party candidate in Gorton and Denton in greater Manchester UK (Hacienda whaaat?) who won the election last night in a lovely blow to all the xenophobes and transphobes in England. Look am I entirely clear on what “Reform” is and how Labor is now evil? No, I am not. But I can read the signs, man. More of this please.

Lovely fog this morning:

Emma and I had lunch at Shake Shack yesterday and the manager recognized a food blogger and was so excited and I have so many questions. Like, was the food blogger just trying to have a decent lunch or were they “on duty?” How is it that the manager of a Shake Shack keeps track of food bloggers aren’t they maybe working at the wrong restaurant? Do they own more? Are they so enamored with Danny Meyer that they are doing a reverse Danny Meyer and owning a Shake Shack franchise while also trying to start a fine dining establishment? Does Shake Shack operate on a franchise model? No, right? That shit IPO’d. Also she actually invoked Danny Meyer to the food blogger, saying Shake Shack had a “foodie pedigree” and I totally thought that whole façade had been abandoned in the rapid expansion but I guess not.

But what I really want to know is if Danny Meyer made a mint on Shake Shack why the fuck did he close the model coffee shop? Shake Shack is worth $4 billion now did you know that? Google Finance does not list Danny Meyer as one of the largest shareholders but I find they are often hiding behind SPVs. Man I miss Model Coffee Shop. When did it close again? I remember it happening but I must have blocked it out but I walked by it while mildly peckish the other day and thought “fuuuuck.”

Shit wait did Danny Meyer even own the Model Coffee Shop?

Man my NY brain is going.

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We aren’t listening to shit this morning. There is a TV playing some sort of luxury yacht content. There is a man droning on in the distance. Meredith Garretson has stoped pacing and has sat (sit? sit.) down. I have procured a delicious Diet Mt Dew from an incredibly high-tech, highly usable vending machine that makes me re-think everything we’ve been indoctrinated about Silicon Valley. I suspect America’s true tech innovation is back in the midwest at soda machine vending companies and whatnot. My god that thing was a pleasure to use.

Welp. The repair dude came up to me and told me that I am fucked. I mean, I am not completely fucked. I am, in fact, the victim of a recall issue. This is frustrating, in the sense that a very important component of driving a too-large truck is non-functional, that being the 360° backup camera. This is, however, a lot better of a situation than it was a week or two ago, where I thought I was going to have to spend another seven thousand dollars get my truck fixed, again, because the other seven thousand dollars I spent getting the truck fixed, last month, was botched. Turns out the two issues are separate, the first painful, giant spend was not, in fact, botched, I don’t have to go have an awkward conversation with the body shop. And if I am being honest here I already did spend the second seven thousand dollars, but I have learned from Ford corporate (thank you, Ryan) — and this guy now agrees — that this is definitely the recall issue, and that once the recall is
“officially released” (whatever the fuck that means) I will, in fact, be compensated for this.

So I guess in the end this whole thing is just a giant credit-card-points-accumulating ringomorale wherein I convert three-to-six hours of my time into a boatload of points and an interest-free loan to a car dealership owner, who is probably Trumper millionaire. Could be worse, I suppose.

They do have pretty sweet wifi thought.

BUT, alas, I cannot actually write to you anything else because my phone is in the truck because I am a space cadet and I forgot the key, again, so I had to leave the phone in the truck for them because the phone is the key and it has my GMHHAY topic list on it and you know what I kinda see now why that old friend of mine unsubscribed to this newsletter after week.

SO, I guess I will head out to vote now. I am gonna vote for Nida because I saw an instagram video that said that Anthropic is running PAC ads for Foushee, which is kind of crazy. Foushee isn’t bad at all, the local liberal rag gave her a ringing endorsement of “she’s been doing okay she’s old we should let her finish things out.” But she used to take AIPAC money. She is trying to pitch it as “Well I used to take it until they turned whacko” but no, she kept taking it until the public noticed they had been whacko for a long time. Which alone wasn’t maybe enough but I think we’re gonna need to send a message here that we are done with this appeasement-disguised-as-centrism schtick. Every extra vote a firebrand fighter gets is one more message to Schumer and Jeffries.

And then I am going to go to the new Chase branch in my bumpkin county and try and convince them to track down my old TriBeCa branch safety deposit box contents from the old Timehop safety deposit box. They closed the branch ages ago and tell me that they will happily ship the contents to any branch but I am pretty dubious. We will see. Also I don’t remember what was in the box. I think it is, like, some physical master key to our AWS account? But, like, do such things exist? No idea. We shall see.

Ugh yeah I gotta go the TV is now showing baby Ellison giving a tour of Paramount HQ I do not need this level of indoctrination on this sad day where they are now all-but-guaranteed to take over another storied American news brand Ted Turner rolling over in his grave fuck this shit.

Jane was great this morning, though. I told her we were going to stop telling her to brush her teeth because we have a theory she would do it by herself and she said that was correct. Then she brushed them. And then we had great talk in the car about me yelling at the slow car yesterday and how I knew she didn’t like me yelling at her and I try not to do that, but I didn’t know she didn't like it when I yelled at cars and I told her I would stop doing that.

So no one put a 19mph Honda Odyssey in front of me again mmmkay?

No photos of Jane handy so here are our cats. And no playlist today. I was supposed to be here for an hour but they are sitting me free. So no time. I did listen to some VERY SWEET Japanese metal on the way here, though. Hm let’s just post a YouTube link to that. Raaaaaawk:

You know what? I am feeling CRAZY. No bolding today, either. Screw it. Remind you how useful it is. And you know what else? Not even gonna half-assedly edit this one today. SORRY IVELISE.