Good morning good morning. I am home. It is so nice. It is so nice to sit in this comfy chair. It is so nice to have three monitors. It is so nice to be listening to records while I type to you, my friends. Man, this chair is comfy. God this computer is fast. this rules. Home home home. Look at that pond.

Oh look, no 1:1 with Kristen this morning. She is at a conference. Means I have a little extra time. Well shit. This is gonna be a long one. A long, lazy, indulgent GMHHAY. Been a while.

Drive home was swift, maybe the fastest yet, or would have been were it not for my 9PM McDonald’s cravings in rural NC just before home. Did you know they make Happy Meals for adults now? Fucked up. Eleven dollars. But it does include one of those shakey flavor powder bags for fries that Gary He taught me about at the Global McDonald’s in Chicago one night at like 2 AM when I was very drunk.

We saw three wrecks in 12 hours, including an 18-wheeler jacknifed and skid off the road no idea how that happened.

Listened to XM First Wave all the way home, special Easter programming, two-fers and three-fers all day, minimal babbling by Richard Blade. I am still undecided whether I should be pleased or irked they copped out on the second Love and Rockets block by playing Tones on Tail.

Emma and I had about an hour long conversation about AI in education and I ranted like Michelle Bachman or some shit talking about storming school board meetings, but we did get to a point where I think we understood each other: I am not opposed the topic of AI being taught in schools. I am opposed to them “needing to be proficient” for “the future.” I am opposed to them using it to see how bad the input is so they can “learn to tell the difference between AI and human output” because soon enough you won’t be able to tell. I want them to be taught about how LLMs are made and the content theft and the power and water consumption and what a data center even is. I absolutely refuse for her to be taught it’s “inevitable.” Everyone is comparing it to teaching kids to use computers to have a career. No, man. It’s like being taught about plastics: except they are not inevitable yet, they could still fail completely, we still have an opportuity to resist. We as a society have told our kids things like cars and plastics are inevitable and never teach them about the externalities.

I want them to teach AI like they teach drugs: look. this thing can fuck you up. Here’s what it can do to the brain. And when you’re older, you can decide if you want to roll those dice.

Finished a book on the drive: Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang. It had merit. It was also borderline unreadable. Lotta layers. I am constantly thinking in layers these days. Was it the writing itself? The translation? The cultural divide? The fear of offending the censors? The original editor? The Chinese editor?

My money is on the American editor, but I do not want to besmirch anyone trying to create any art. The story itself, the plot device is interesting, though as one reviewer pointed out, it need not have taken place on Mars at all, it could have taken place in Delaware or Tasmania. It is the story of two different cultures, and those who are trapped between them, and I relate to this story, it reminds me of my life in Boston after moving there from a childhood in the Arctic. Though of course the logical assessment of the source of this parable is the relationship between China and America. And it is not 100% perfect, but you get the gist. All of that was very interesting, I enjoyed that. There was a mildly interesting mystery in the book that paid off, more or less, or at least understood it was supposed to.

But my god, the writing, the basic, fundamental purpose of writing of communicating. It was perhaps 150 pages too long, you could cut that much and change nothing. There was a scene at the end, which would work great at the end of a movie as a montage, where a character sat somewhere and “remembered that time.” Except we read about that time! 100 pages back! We don’t need nine more pages telling us exactly what happened! We already read it!

Plot elements show up exactly when needed and not a moment too soon, like a child wrote this book in one go and couldn’t go back and insert a few set-up sentences. Someone’s trying to escape a base and they need everyone to be distracted? Surprise! Everyone’s preparing for “the big parade” which you never heard about before in 400 pages. Is this cultural?? Are there “big parades” in China every freakin day so there’s no need to talk about them? No idea! Very confusing! Mirrors turn into corridors cuz suddenly you need a corridor. There are fundamental grammar mistakes. It’s bonkers! Major characters come and go with zero introduction or explanation: they are on the stage when needed and never more.

And I read a bunch of reviews and no one talked about any of this! I feel crazy!

I’m tempted to chalk it up to cultural but this book is very much trying to be a Three Body Problem type situation and it did have some of these problems but nowhere to this extant.

(Jane has come down to join me and play some Cities:Skylines. She has today off for something called “Ester”? No idea.)

Came home to one reclusive cat, one very welcoming cat, and a giant stack of records. Just ridiculously tall. I just counted them. There are… 21 LPs, a 7” and a box set. In 18 days. It is disgusting. I have to stop. Though they will continue to trickle in in the mail for weeks, I am hereby proclaiming I am attempting a moratorium on record buying for a while. This is out of control. World is burning need to stop spending money on such frivolous things are soul-nourishment and supporting artists.

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 Bikini Kill this morning. The first of the 25 records or whatever in the pile. It is a reissue of Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah. And I just took a picture of it. Which means you get a rare edition of GMHHAY where the “we are listening to this morning” section and the “photo of a slab of colored vinyl” section match. Very exciting. I wish I could have seen, or will see, Bikini Kill on these reunion tours, but the one I was supposed to see got fucked up by Covid, and I’ve seen em before so I can’t travel for them.

Great record, though. As per uszhe, I am a sucker for the “ballad:” “Why.”

Went and saw the Dirty Three at the Sinclair in Cambridge Friday night with my friend Craig. Layers layers layers. I find myself unable to, you know, stop thinking while going to a concert these days. It is a problem. It might be the anti-depressant. It might be the age. It might be the gummy. Each of these layers adds a dimension to the experience and I cannot stop constantly trying to unpack and discern each layer. Which do I communicate to you? Which is valid? Which is real? I don’t know, man. I mean, I love all the thoughts that come into my head while I am watching a show. And I love writing them down and compiling them into a short essay for my dedicated GMHHAY readers. But also I miss being able to lose myself in the bliss of the music.

Sometimes I just want something pure, one layer, no thinking.

Warren Ellis, in one of his notoriously long banter sessions, reminded me that it had been 31 years since I’d first seem the Dirty Three. Saw ‘em a fair amount after that. And I remember by the end I always wanted them to play “Indian Love Song” and “Sky Above Sea Below” and they did not always play these two songs, much like Mogwai has to go and be difficult and not play “Mogwai Fear Satan” every time or Radiohead refuses to play “Creep.” But this time, they did play them, both of them, back-to-back. Thank you, Dirty Three.

“Indian Love Song” included a very long interlude where Warren had the whole audience sing the refrain while we held a seance trying to conjure the spirits of lost rocker artists, starting with local hero Mark Sandman, whom I knew a little bit, very much looked up to, he was very kind, had kind eyes. And am often brought to tears when thinking about his early demise. So that got me good. He threw in Sinead O’Connor, Mark Lanegan, Shane Macgowan.

I howled like a banshee for Sinead. Craig may have given me a funny look.

Then it evolved into a seance for lost pets and he made the audience show photos of their pets and he talked about them with the audience, which was glorious. He said “that is the first time anything good came out of mobile phones” about the show us your pets thing and… he might have a point there.

The pet seance and the rocker seance were, as a reminder, all in the middle breakdown of “Indian Love Song”, which is already quite long without this 10+ minute seance interlude. I used to love it when you thought “Indian Love Song” was about done but no: boom! bang! giant loud explosion for a cathartic finish! And I did love the cathartic finish this time. Buuuuuut I think maybe this time it was a smidge too delayed? Can there be such a thing? I don’t know! Layers, layers layers.

I had a few other epiphanies during the show:

I had an epiphany about venue architecture. Remember how I was talking about how Bowery Presents has gotten good at a standard layout of clubs? I realize now that part of their whole thing with the layout, with the bar in back or downstairs, large segments of the club dedicated to not seeing the band: I suspect these are in response to building codes and the trend of reducing capacity density in clubs and venues. By having large areas no one is going to stand in, they can increase the venue’s overall capacity, thus having a good crowd in the “show area.”

And remember how after Covid, when things re-opened, bands would talk about how even sold out shows aren’t that full anymore? I suspect this is, at least partially, also a circumstance of reduced capacity limits on venues.

Never thought about the Bowery Presents school of Architecture as a response to building codes. The more you know.

Also had an epiphany about atonal and arrhythmic. I like atonal music. I like arrhythmic music. I do not, generally speaking, like music that is atonal and arrhythmic. Like, for example, “Love Changes Everything I,” the opening piece of the Dirty Three set. It did not help with the atonality that they played a substantial part of the song while the intro music — a Billy Joel tune — was still playing.

It is hard for me to engage with music that is atonal and arrhythmic. Dirty Three are often atonal, often arrhythmic, but rarely both. But that song is.

Revelations!

Harmony. I love harmony. When the tones and notes and rhythm all combine into some sort of perfect harmonic bliss and everything gels. The Dirty Three achieve that, and when they do, it is bliss.

Also this makes the fifth band I saw in a week where I couldn’t understand a single lyric or where weren’t any. That is weird. I am ready for a sensitive, lyrical folk singer.

I refuse to speak ill of any creator creating art. And I deeply respect the Dirty Three, especially Jim White. The set was great but it didn’t move me and that is probably more my fault, not theirs. It was very good. It was weird how completely similar to the old shows it was after 30 years. It was weird how it hit me differently. Like I said before: was it my age? antidepresants? the gummy? Their age? I don’t think it was their age, Warren has really maintained his energy, if not his hair. I loved it when he said “everyone in their 70s should start a band” because that is my plan, and that spoke to me.

Layers! Layers!

The GMHHAY Slack has a lot of people who have seen Dirty Three at almost every show on this tour, which was a pleasant surprise. So I knew that the average set time was about three hours. I also knew I needed to get up in the morning and drive thirteen hours, and I knew that I walked there on a 40-minute walk and I had already been standing two and a half hours. Oh right. They said the show started at 8, no opener, but didn’t start till 8:30, which is a helluva bait-n-switch on a three hour set. I left at 10:30, which I had hoped would be 2 and a half hours of Dirty Three, but ended up being only two hours of Dirty Three.

But man how crazy is it to see the Dirty Three in 2026. What a world.

One final thing I realized: my android phone is absolute shit with its brightness settings. Every time you wake it up it starts super-bright and then you gotta unlock it before it goes dark again so every fucking time I wanted to take a picture, it blinded me and annoyed everyone around me and I swear to god this alone is probably a reason to leave Android, except there is probably a micro-setting for this like sixteen menus deep somewhere.

Jane did the 13 hour car ride once again, like a champ. Never tired of her iPad. Every four or five hours she’d ask to get out and do some wiggles and stand for a bit. She is such a good traveling companion. It really is a gift. Not a single tantrum the whole day. Every hour or so she would stretch her legs and wiggle her toes against your arm to say hi and oh golly that was so nice. Driving days are good parenting days. Hashtag blessed n shit.

No playlist today but I swear they are coming back very soon. I PROMISE.

As I went to bed last night I picked up volume seven of Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diary. Came out in 2021, I am behind. I used to read these as they came out with Annie, for 20+ years. I don’t know if she read this one or the final volume, A Joyous Transformation in 2023. I have no one else to talk to about Anaïs, so as I finish these two volumes, which will probably take… mmm.. 2-3 months, I will be thinking of her a lot. And generally insane. Anaïs makes me a little insane. I will be talking about her too much.

I apologize in advance