Good morning good morning. Hello! Hi! Howdy! Hola! Hey hey hey. You been gettin down about the liars and cheats of this world and you coulda been getting down to this. sick. beat.

Was 87 degrees here yesterday. Will be 30 tomorrow. Weird times, weird times.

Lots of political anxiety over here today. I guess I put it on hold to get through my work crunch but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel on my giant todo list for the week so the political angst is coming roaring back. California’s governor open primary is still fucked you guys gotta get that shit together. Though two new polls from Emerson and Berkely have Swalwell in second in both, so that is promising. Fwels like the Becerra stans gotta let it go at this point. Steyer doing shockingly well. I am a big fan of Steyer as billionaires go. Loved his book Drawdown, it was a great no-nonsense guide to solving the climate crisis and introduced me to the legendary Colin Seis, father of pasture cropping, and the drunken inspiration for the greatest song I ever wrote, Pasture Cropping Drinking Song.

Let it be untrue
That drink is the devil's brew
Cuz after more than twenty beers
May come the best idea

Not the best production, though, I’ll give you that. Hard to record a drunk man’s choir at home, alone. Unless you spend four years building a pro-level studio in your attic. Working on it.

So anyway Tom’s cool… Buuut billionaires gonna billionaire? I think? Generally speaking they should be giving their money away. And isn’t Katy Porter, like, an abusive boss or something? Or is that just what the fascist mind virus wants you to believe. Can’t tell anything in the news anymore. It’s like my Lou Reed said “Don't believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.”

Last great American Whale.

Emma and I were talking about Lou Reed the other day, well, first we were talking about Leonard Cohen, because we were listening to the Lumineers’ shockingly good cover of Democracy, and I was talking about the 1992ish The Future tour that I saw and how I didn’t get to see him again for like 30 years but then got to see him four times before he died, and I am happy I got all those shows and but I still wish there were more. And it was the same with Lou Reed. Got to see that Lollapalooza show where he played a Metal Machine Music bit and Dirty Boulevard and some Velvets songs, and we got to see his last moments on stage ever with Metric, but I still wish I could have seen him more.

Anyway speaking of fake news I can’t tell what the hell is going on in the Middle East. The time zones are part of it, it is overnight here when Iran does their nightly volleys. And honestly they seem pretty bad! Hitting tankers and closing the straits and hitting oil depots and American bases.

Then I wake up and the American news machine takes over and we are winning winning winning. The number of launches from Iran is declining and that means they’re running out of missiles not biding their time. Who the hell can say.

There is this Youtube channel called The Military Show that Youtube is serving up to me because the clickbait you with titles that seem to be talking about specific activity, and I was raised as an American boy in the 70’s which means lots of military toys and books and I could still probably name every plane and ship by sight. And even though the shit is evil, I’m still a sucker for military hardware porn. Like regular porn. Or car porn. So… I see a thumbnail with a B-2 in it? click!

But then you watch a video and it is absolutely 100% jingoistic, utterly oblivious American propaganda that seems completely incapable of comprehending we might be heading into a debacle here and wow after Vietnam, Afghanistan and Ukraine there are people who still think overwhelming military might is guaranteed to win wars it really is something.

Hey semi-speaking of which, what’s up with Samantha Power? Remember she wrote some book about how we could and should prevent genocides and laid out steps to stop that in the future? Then she was all the rage in the Obama administration and… I think she was in the Biden administration? Feels like we maybe didn’t stop a genocide in the Biden administration? Hrm yes Wikipedia says I am not imagining things. Last administrator of AID before they got DOGE’D. Well golly gosh. That sure is weird that she didn’t say anything in the Biden administration about Gaza I wonder what was up with that did she just…. change? Or did she get ignored.

The idle thoughts you have while in the drive through line with your daughter buying McFlurries. McFlurrys? McFlurries. Like Furries.

AND ALSO: what is up is with this fucked up shoe situation with Rubio and the rest of the Klan. Is this shit real? Are they all wearing gifted clown shoes as some sort of cucking? What the fuck, man, I cannot stand the internet or that I am even thinking about this sort of thing when I could be thinking about the staying power of bagged broccoli.

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!

So we are listening to another vinyl copy of Labradford’s A Stable Reference this morning, because I was too curious about the other blank copy that I thought was a secretly cool rare test pressing or something. But nope. Turns out it was just a slab of vinyl without a cover, because this second copy, which has a cover, is also a labelless blank slab of vinyl. So I guess good thing I bought the second one. It is cool to own a test pressing, that will suffice in lieu of a complete official release, but it is so not cool to own a record without the cover. Unless it is a beat-up copy from a cool indie college radio station like my new Bongwater The Big Sell-Out.

Sorry. Finished Labradford side A and now I am listening to Pasture Cropping Drinking Song right now and this really has to be the most absurd thing I ever did.

Except maybe that time I burned my last dollar in the toilet at the Model.

Oh shit now is not the time for nostalgia Rick.

As you can see, my GMHHAY scratch topic list has has been depleted.

Man I cannot imagine what that dude who mastered this record thought about this absurd song.

Last night I was laying in bed, having finished reading about the man who ruined the world, Tim Cook, and I was so excited to go to sleep after having gotten no sleep the night before. But as I laid my head down, I started thinking of the night before and my manic planning sesh, and I inevitably had another good idea about it. And I got up to write it down, which was annoying. But then I had to pee, so I went and peed before I wrote it down. And I got back, picked up my phone, and… I almost completely forgot the idea. Within a minute.

Do you know how hard it is to remember to write down the fleeting shit that goes through my head to turn it into GMHHAY content? It is so hard. It is so hard! I had a GREAT one today at the grocery store. It is gone. Lost to the ether.

I try to tell myself if I can’t remember it, it probably wasn’t that good. BUT SOMETIMES, a week later I’ll remember one and you know what? It was that good.

OH BUT. I remembered one. We have a peanut butter mystery! For Christmas, I bought Emma one of those awesome hand-crank peanut butter stirrer things. It is awesome. BUT, around the same time, suddenly our peanut butter started getting way more… liquidy? But also I am a depression granny covid boy and I keep six jars of peanut butter in the house at any time, and we open them in a FIFO stack, so I am opening peanut butter jars from… mmm… maybe november now? And the last two have been extra creamy! SO. Many possible explanations!

1. Grandpa Whitmer’s peanut butter stirrer makes peanut butter super liquidy, which seems impossible. And yet.

2. I am currently in a run of peanut butter from the factory that shipped extra creamy last November ish.

3. They changed the formula

This is all very stressful! I miss my highly viscous peanut butter.

I could open a more recent jar, I suppose, but the first rule of prepping is you respect the fifo stack.

Jane Jane Jane my daughter is great. We are going through a great period. Oh wait no she screamed at Emma the other night. Not about teeth, though. Teeth are still going great. Screens are still a problem. And the saddest thing happened this morning: I think she is growing out of the amazing pink patent leather boots that Emma found at the thrift store. They are so great. They’re her favorite. I don’t know what we’re gonna do without them.

She has multiplying backpacks. Her school backpack, a backpack specifically for when she and Emma play “college,” and a third one that seems to be functioning as a purse, though she also has a purse. She is figuring out accessorizing. She has a pretty keen fashion sense. Good use of color, which is a weird thing to have when both your parents just wear black cotton all the time.

Last night she called me out for using big words when I used “antithetical” so I taught it to her and I suspect she will be using it any day now. Words, man. She will never yell at you for teaching her a word. And you never have to teach her a word twice. It is crazy. That girl loves words.

Maybe she needs to start a daily newsletter.

Do I have a mix ready for you today? Oh, look. I do. A shoegaze mix. Awesome. My favorite mixes. So I learned that the buttondown (my newsletter provider) embed for Apple Music now exists, which is great, but it doesn’t show all of the songs, so now I gotta put the image and the embed, which is weird. And you can’t click on the image, because if I add the link to the image it turns it into the embed. So you get both today. It is unclear if this is a long-term solution. I just wanna write a newsletter, maaaaan.

Anyway the new Nothing is great and I am super bummed I forgot to go to the show. The new American Football is great, pre-ordered the record yesterday and even got a t-shirt I am so millennial. Oh shit I see there are two she’s green songs on here oh well too late now you’ll just have to enjoy this amazing awesome shoegaze band. And Spiritualized’s Anyway that you Want Me came on in the car a few weeks ago and Jane loved it, even though she’s always telling me to play her Jane music.

WHEW. That was a hard one. I am deeply thankful for the like six of you that got to the end. I will send you a nice gift.