Good morning good morning! Hello! Hi! How’s it going? Let me just go turn on the lights on my fancy new model of the ST:TMP refit of the USS Enterprise here. Now item in the morning routine. Very rewarding watching all the lights light up like they did in the dry-dock sequence.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO EMMA OMG. It is my wife’s birthday today. She is great. She is asleep, as she should be on her birthday. I managed to come through in the end, but sometimes she reads this in bed, so not gonna talk about it just now. She’s gonna have lunch with a friend today. She gets to choose dinner. All very exciting.

The turtles are also very excited about her birthday. They came out in force:

The turtle dock and cam was not a birthday gift, but it was still a very good gift. I am proud of it. Does look like I might need to adjust one of the pontoons, though.

Sorry I’m late. Running around doing errands this morning. Some for Emma’s birthday, but also some gardening errands and…

I got new glasses. It is very exciting. I had a revelation last year that my prescription was nearly perfect, but it assumed that my glasses would stay propped up right against my eyes, and they don’t, they slide down my nose about 5MM. So this year the doc and eye measured that distance and matched it to the distance of the vision testing machine and oh my god it is so good. Real big difference. Now I find myself constantly pushing my glasses up when I don’t need to. Gonna need to break myself of that habit, it is crazy how often I do it subconsciously. Also I got a whole new pair, same frames as the old ones. And I got new lenses for the old pair, so now I have two pairs that match, because they are always cancelling frames, fast fashion and whatnot. And I like these frames because they have a little fabric square on the arms that I can feel with my hand in bed and differentiate from my reading glasses.

Will these be the last glasses I ever buy? Will I get that elective lens replacement or whatever they call it? Cataract surgery for people w/o cataracts? I am leaning yes. But it is a lot of money. Might be a while.

At the grocery store there was a woman with a handicap placard in her car who did not park in a handicap space, presumably because she did not have her old mom or dad with her. You don’t see that every day. Lord knows I was a bit sketchy when I had one for my dad. Hats off to that woman.

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 the Montana post-rock band Ranges today, big favorite of me and my friend Bill. Bought a ton of their records from them last Bandcamp Friday. Just finished up with 33, moving on to their 2014 debut, Solar Mansions. Strong debut. This band seems to have emerged fully formed. Makes me wonder about the Montana post-rock scene. And hoo boy look you get a matching colored vinyl picture today.

Another exciting thing today is that according to The Farmer’s Almanac, today is the average last frost date for my region, so I can start putting things in the ground. I am a little sad because I only have a couple days off this wekeend to do gardening and I really really really need to get back to studio work and I can’t do it next weekend because we have a ton of guests staying at the house for a neighbor’s brother’s wedding, and I can’t do the weekend after because I am going back to Boston for Rock Week. And I miss my studio so much. Might take tomorrow off to get another day in. You know what? I think I will. Live a little, Rick. Plant some tomato starts.

You have probably heard by now about how some asshole in Trump’s State Dept dragged the Pope’s ambassador to the US in and told him the Pope better shape up, and mentioned an “Avignon Papacy.” This is a period where, well, not particularly great for the papacy, let’s just say that. BUT I get to brag for a moment because in 1988 I went to Avignon and visited the Palais Des Papes, where the popes lived in this time. And I took pictures. And, being a digital packrat, I have them right here, handy, scanned and sorted and filed away on this very computer. Enjoy.

Also very exciting is this 14th century electrical outlet that 16-year-old Rick thought was very funny.

End of the film roll. Shitty Kodak consumer film, 400 ISO. Absolute garbage processing. Pentax K-1000 with the stock “new photographer kid” lens.

Read some more Anaïs last night. She went to a Ginsburg/Ferlinghetti reading in October 1955, the month before Howl was released. Ginsburg did a reading of it. She loved it. One of the first pieces of writing in America that really moved her, aside from her friend James Leo Hurlihy.

An audience member told Ginsburg the poem was bad, and Ginsburg took all his clothes off and said:

You come and speak a poem as beautiful as ours. You come and stand here, stand naked before people, I dare you. Take your clothes off. Stand naked before the world, as I have. Will you dare?

Anaïs sure loved that. It reminded her of Antonin Artaud and “the old surrealist fights.” She new Artaud well, had a big ‘ole crush on him, wrote about him incessantly in, mmm, gonna say volume 3 or so. He was friendly but never seems to have reciprocated. Thank god, those two woulda messed each other up.

The audience member was boo’d away and people told him he looked like Nixon. SICK BURN.

Anaïs might be crazy. It is very impressive she carries her youthful passion and her youthful boredom for the pedestrian and domestic well into her 50’s. I could not do that. As we age, ware parting ways, Anaïs and I, but I still admire her commitment to the bit.

Relatedly she is suffering perimenopause and it is absolutely horrific how utterly clueless her doctors are about the cause of her symptoms. Though I suppose she is partially to blame since she has staged an elaborate ruse with her west coast doctor in order to convince him she has a heart problem to give her a note to give to her east coast husband so she can stay with her west coast husband more often. God knows what kind of drugs they were putting her on.

Speaking of youthful passions I have been listening to “Sometime Around Midnight” by the Airborne Toxic Event on repeat all morning. It reminds me of a very specific time and place and my god every time I hear it I am transported right back. From the first time I heard the song, I have always pictured the scene in the exact same way, a scene right out of my life at the time.

I should really listen to the rest of that band’s work sometime. But could they possibly have a song as good as that one? Could any band.

New poll finds Platner at +33 in Maine. I am reasonably sure that 60% of the Democrats in Maine are not Nazis. I have a hunch they are willing to roll the dice and give him the benefit of the doubt since he polls substantially better against Collins than Mills. I hope they prove correct.

Seems obvious to me Platner knew it was a bad boy probably Nazi tattoo at the time, though I will confess that when I was 18 or so I managed to excuse a verrrry similar symbol from a certain goth band that had us fooled. But that was before the internet. But kids love to be edgelords. The bigger question is has he grown up, and it… god, it is iffy.

I think, tactically, the dude played the whole thing wrong and should have painted himself as a victim of rightwing grooming who has seen the light, like one of my favorite reporters these days, Caolan Robertson. That would have been politically far more savvy than this whole pie-eyed guilelessness and I think it would have peeled off a lot of the current naysayers.

I am not saying this is good or bad. I am saying dude is probably gonna be a US Senator and we should probably all do what we can to make sure he doesn’t Fetterman us. I have written this exact paragraph before I don’t know why I am writing it again, except, my god. That poll. +33. That is nuts.

Android update: Mostly I am committed to foldables. Heard a rumor Apple might have a delay in rolling out their foldable. That will be sad. I have iOS gripes, but I think all-in-all, iOS is more for me. My order of importance in phones is 1) Keyboard, 2) Foldable, 3) OS, though, so not going back to Apple until they bring out a Foldable. Also I am sad about the rumored aspect ratio of Apple’s foldable, which will be more widescreen than square, and that is a bummer. I am not much a video-on-phone kind of guy, and I like the big square for Insta and the feed-based socials. But then again I suppose I should kick that shit it is killing me and all.

Also the fingerprint scanner on this phone sucks.

Since I got my Android phone, I have not set up visual voice mail. Something is broken, I have to go to the AT&T store to get it set up, and I’ve just not bothered. It’s actually pretty nice using old-school voice mail, listening to messages and pressing 7 to delete and all that. I check them less, they nag me less. Checked it yesterday for the first time in three weeks, had 15 messages, not a single one was actually important.

Jane made her triumphant return to gymnastics yesterday, had no problems with beam, didn’t seem to remember her meltdown at all, had a great time, so luckily we are back on track there. She made Emma a very cute card and a very cute piece of art. I forgot to take a photo of them. Will do today. Her “cold” seems much improved today. She gave me a Jane Credit this morning for giving her cough medicine, so now I have five Jane Credits.

I am drunk with riches.

No playlist today. I was making good progress on a “Morning Drive” playlist today, and it was a good one, spooky, mellow, really liked it. But then “Sometime Around Midnight” came on and, well, you know the rest.

Also: I forgot to include the URL in yesterday’s email. I remembered, and then I added it mid-delivery, though, so maybe you got it? Maybe you didn’t. But if that was bumming you out, here it is.

Until tomorrow.