Good morning dear friends, greetings from headache land. Man my head hurts. Did I have a single Gin and Tonic last night, sure, sure, I did. But I also got ten hours of sleep come the F on.

Jane is here with me. It is a teacher workday. She is playing Infinite Craft, one of the games/inventions of the internet genius Neal.fun. Keeping the dream of a fun internet alive, that guy. Don’t know anything about him but he is a hero to me. I should never meet him. He is probably a Trumper. Go about as well as when I met David Lynch.

Was pretty paralyzed with depression about being in another war yesterday, so I guess we’re just gonna try and ignore that today. Besides, I think I got the gist. We are destroying the weapons we already destroyed last year. All Americans should leave the region right now except we got all the flights cancelled. We have extended our brand of violence in schools to other countries. Got it.

I do have a whole robust GMHHAY scratch notepad at the moment, though, so we will ignore the world and just go through the notebook items one by one and write some pleasant stuff and think pleasant thoughts.

Are you guys familiar with the suika-type, fruit-merge games? They are the best. Relaxing, pointless, time-consuming, and brain settling. There is a free online one at the CBC. Our entire family plays it. I used to doomscroll at night while watching Star Trek Academy or Shrinking or whatever TV show takes half your brain. Now I merge fruit. It is manifestly a better option.

I have, for a while now, been resistant to accept that this endless news consumption is corrosive and unhealthy. It was so drilled into me by my parents to “keep up with current events.” But more and more, those who tell me it’s not worth it might have a point. They might have a point.

We are being barraged with doorbell rings of home service personnel this morning. Gotta get our three septic fields inspected today. And there is this whole drama with pest control. We had two different services at the two properties, and Emma spent an insane amount of time being a procurement officer and playing them off each other, along with a third option, and consolidating the contract on all three houses into one contract. Which all went well but apparently those termite stations around your house are the property of the pest control company, and they are regulated, and you can’t just have one pest control company take over the ones around house. The old pest company has to come remove them and the new pest company has to put new ones in, so there is a startup cost to switching companies. And of course they slow-roll it, and use it as an opportunity to retain you as a customer.

AND THEN. Chore House has one of those in-house, in-wall vacuum cleaning systems. I was obsessed with those when I was a kid, just the coolest things. But nowadays I am old and jaded and didn’t want it and the vacuum itself was taking up too much room in the garage and so I removed it and have been slowly removing the ducts as part of my studio build. But this means there are a few holes in the system now and now somehow it smells like sewage so we assume a mouse got up in there and died. So we are also awaiting the NEW pest control company to come take a look at that.

So I can only assume at some point today there will be a rumble between pest control companies on the street. I hope it’s a dance number.

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!

I am listening to the new Eric Bachmann aka Crooked Fingers album, Dwet Deth, which is very weird for him and kinda silly and even, dare I say, a bit fun. Even if it is on black vinyl. I would like to see him again. Saw him a couple summers ago but it was an outdoor set, hard to hear, too short. Hopefully he’ll come play the town where his record label is and we can see him properly. Also I deeply regret not seeing him when my friend Miranda was in the band why did that never happen I am dumb.

I would like to shout out to my friend Doug who built the website for our boat and RV storage facility and it went exactly as smoothly and as effortlessly as it always does when doing a project with Doug, the world’s most easy-to-work-with, no problems engineer out there. My god I had forgotten how nice it was to work with an engineer who just says yeah okay let’s build that. Just the best. Doug rules. A+ for Doug. March 3 is henceforth Doug appreciation day. Even if he did Irish Goodbye from the Magician last month when we were hammered.

Did you know I am still looking at the NC Covid Tracker every Thursday, when they update it? Been doing this for six years now, that really is something. Wow almost exactly six years. National trauma piled upon national Trauma what fun. Anyway things are pretty good nowadays with the covid, though there is a slight trend upwards. And we did have a pretty big spike last fall. It’s still around, just ridiculous.

Question for you: How many boycotts do you think you are participating in, personally, at this moment? There’s a lot of talk about how America is terrible at a national boycott or strike, and I think that’s true, though congratulations America on having your first national strike in 90 years or whatever. But on the other hand, it occurred to me recently that pretty much every person I know, pretty much every person in America with an ounce of ethics, is participating in several boycotts at once. Companies like Amazon, Chick-fil-a, Home Depot. Being a liberal means keeping a running list of a giant number of companies in your head that you cannot do business with. It is a lot! I bet I have… twenty? thirty? That is… that is kind of crazy when you think about it, but also kind of right and proper. And also wouldn’t it be cool if we could boycott more of them.

I would like the government to make it’s own LLM, it’s own data centers and cloud, and it’s own ID service. All optional, all reasonably priced: think post office or interstates, not the NSA. The ID would be in the Estonian mold: you could use it for your interfacing with the government, but all sites would have compatibility with it so you could use it everywhere if you wanted, and it would be constitutionally banned from collecting data, doing any sort of privacy analysis, saving the data at all. Everything would be open source so you could confirm the data would not be being kept. The LLM would compensate creators and run off of green energy. Any engineer could build on their cloud for reasonable prices. The whole infrastructre publicly owned and antithetical to surveillance capitalism. Why can’t we have this like we have interstates or the post office? The entire country has lost their imagination to do anything ambitious for the public good.

Oh yeah I was going to tell you more about Sebulba, our house raccoon in 1999 in Allston. That raccoon, man. You could hear it in the rafters, it lived in the roof above my head. And he had several methods of getting into the house and he would get into the house and search through the kitchen and dressers and the kitchen and steal our food. This would go on for months without us seeing him.

There was this landing in the middle of a stairwell that was this 3 foot by 3 foot spot that I had decorated with knick knacks and candlesticks and whatnot. And one morning I left my bedroom, and was going down the stairs, and looked onto the decorated landing and right there in the middle was a pile of raccoon poop. But the weird thing was everything around it was completely untouched. Candlesticks still standing and whatnot. I could not figure out how the raccoon managed to shit there without knocking things over, unless he had, like, four long, thin legs and walked like a crab. AND, since Star Wars Episode 4 The Phantom Menace had just come out, we realized that, in fact, this delicately pooping creature would have to walk like Sebulba, Anakin’s podracing nemesis.

(It turned out that in fact my roommate had woken up earlier than me, not hard in those days, seen a giant mess on the stairwell as he was going downstairs, sighed, and cleaned it up. He claimed he did not see the poop, but to this day I’m convinced he did and just didn’t want to deal.)

SO, then, like I said before, Sebulba used to actually come into my room when I was asleep, break into my dresser, and steal little Spiritualized chocolate candies from it. Just insane.

AND THEN, one day, I was coming home from the bar, needed to pee, walked to the bathroom off of the living room (kinda a weird location now that I think about it. Had a shower and everything, even though there were no bedrooms on the first floor wtf). I turn on the light, and there in the corner of the bathroom, pressed up into the corner, his arms spread out, gripping the walls, was Sebulba.

I was drunk. I looked at him. I turned and peed. I looked at him again. He hadn’t moved. I turned off the light, I left. I went to bed. I went to sleep.

Two hours later I hear a huge commotion and it turns out my roommate has also found Sebulba in the bathroom and is trying to pry him out with a broom or something. I don’t know. Not my problem. I went back to sleep.

I think we called pest control not long after that.

But man. Sebulba. That guy was intrepid. Brave.

Spelunking Sebulba the Beantown Raccoon.

Jane had another meltdown last night. An hour of her yelling at Emma to make her tortellini for dinner, because the already-made Ziti would not cut it. An hour. Of yelling and screaming and name calling and guilt tripping and lawyering. We both took shifts. Eventually I picked her up, brought her downstairs, turned on a livestream from the space station and she immediately calmed down and turned back into Jane. Full-on Jeckyl and Hyde kinda crazy. And of course she would never do this in front of anyone but us. Really is something.

Complete angel this morning, though. And even for the rest of the night after the Tortellini Incident, sequel to the 1991 Rosanna Arquette/David Bowie film The Linguini Incident man I watched that mediocre film way too much solely based on the presence of Bowie.

Shit maybe I need to watch it again now.

She has a doctor’s appointment today and isn’t even mad about it. It’s so weird how she can continually mature but also have hourlong breakdowns about tortellini. Though I suppose not.

We all have hourlong breakdowns after all.

Moody and quiet mix for you today, half pre-made, half made right now from old favorites. Oh I haven’t told you the whole story about the Kingsbury Manx bar have I? Maybe I did. WHo knows, maaaaan. Anyway I have been in a sort of “super mellow women” kick lately and have discovered Karen Ann, Ichiko Aoba, Tremosphere and Natural Wonder Beauty Concept of late and I am enjoying them all. More moody ladies. And of course Julee Cruise oh god I am still so sad she has passed. And her choosing to end her pain while listening to “Roam” by the B-52s has permanently changed my perception of that song and now I freakin cry whenever it comes on instead of thinking of it as late-period lesser B-52s and it is still messing me up like three years later I AM FINE.

All right until tomorrow.

OH and I have finger surgery tomorrow. They won’t tell me what time. Honestly I have no idea what’s going on with that. Weird. But I guess I should prepare you that there may be no GMHHAY tomorrow.