Good morning good morning. Apologies to my west coast readers who like to read GMHHAY first thing. I have today off from work. Emma volunteered to take Jane to school this morning. I can’t do any chores at chore house, which means I have all the time in the world to get stuff done today.

Which means that for the first time in as long as I can remember, I could stay up as long as I wanted and sleep as long as I wanted. It was glorious. Stayed up until about 12:15 reading Molly Crabapple’s book about the Bund, took probably 20 minutes to fall asleep, slept till 10:10 AM. Awesome. Love it. What a way to live. Retirement ho ho ho that will be the life for me.

Bund book is great. Very revelatory. A bit too enamored with revolutionary action but I suppose we need revolutionaries in the world, even if they will ultimately often be frustrated, disappointed, murdered, incorrect, and cause incalculable harm. Lotta Jews, so many Jews, revelatory stuff. Lenin was a Jew. I had no idea. I am learning a lot of the connective glue behind the scenes of major events of the 20th century it is fascinating. Congrats to Molly for a NY Times bestseller. I don’t really know Molly but we’re Facebook friends. Met a couple times at some fancy ish NY events but I… well, I am not fancy. Or glamorous. Or revolutionary, I guess, at least not in that way.

End all unwanted suffering.

I lost a stranger subscriber yesterday which is somewhat concerning since I thought it was one of my better editions, but I guess, you know. If that one’s not for you, may as well skedaddle. Alas. The battle to bring tik-tok-for-writing to the masses in America without any promotion whatsoever does not go well. You guys are the elite. The pioneers.

Get guess what! Volume 2 of the book version of Good Morning. Hello. How Are You? is done and now available for purchase. You can purchase it here. It is once again edited by Lisa Crystal Carver, of Rollerderby fame, with a cover by my wife. This one features a foreword by my friend Mark Slavonia. I am very excited about it. It covers a much shorter period – June to December 2011. It is pretty tight. Lisa cuts everything that bores her, I cut a bit more, restore a few of her cuts. She is a great editor.

Anyway, you can buy it, or you can buy a vol 1-2 combo. Why would you want a book form of this thing that you read every day? I don’t know. Maybe you started late. Maybe you need a physical totem of the pandemic’s horrors sitting on your shelf. Maybe you appreciate my efforts at making a new written art form here. You don’t have to buy it, though. I just need to make it, because… reasons.

Thank you for bearing with me for this incredibly uncomfortable moment of self-promotion I fucking hate that stuff.

We will now never speak of this again.

We now turn to volume 3, which comprises most of 2022. I am doing a rough first-pass edit. It was 480,000 words when I started. I have gotten it down to 450,000, and I am still in January so I think we will be okay. I am not sure calendar year is the correct paradigm. I have historically let Lisa decide when to end the book. I have zero recollection of 2022 so I don’t know if there will be a logical stopping point. We will see.

Liisa lead the charge and in the GMHHAY slack told me that people needed to know exactly how big these grapes were. So here is a photo of my large grapes with a perfectly normal-sized not-small-at-all grape. The more you know.

Important question: will Thai chili seeds kill a cat? I dropped some on the floor yesterday and couldn’t find them. Our cat Roy is dumb enough to eat a thing that’ll kill him. I do not want to kill our cat. I like that cat.

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’re listening to the new Olivia Rodrigo right now, natch. Advance single, called “Drop Dead.” Except it is not capitalized because capitals are nut cool. It is great. It is airy and happy, despite its name, a nice anthemic cute pop song, slightly stylistically different than her rockers. It name-checks “Just Like Heaven. I am optimistic about her new album. T

There are also new songs from Kacey Musgraves, Broken Social Scene, Muna, This is Lorelei/Waxahatchee and Kevin Morby today and Nine Inch Nails put out the Nine Inch Noize album, though weirdly there is no vinyl pre-order, which I guess is good for me trying to not spend any money these days.

Also this Massive Attack and Tom Waits song is way better than it has any right to be. Have I already said this? It is so crazy that it sounds like Tom Waits and it sounds like Massive Attack and it somehow works. Also the video is amazing.

Politics stuff:

Sen Wyden and other Dem senators are darkly and obliquely warning that the FISA renewal that is happening – the domestic wiretap law – is illegal and that there is bad shit going on with the government spying on Americans, but they can’t say what because of secret reasons. They should tell us, of course, on the floor of the senate. Even if it means losing their clearance. But I don’t think it’s too hard to guess. I suspect there is some showy AI abstraction layer inserted into the process and so the government is spying on all Americans while maintaining plausible deniability that they are.

Whatever it is, the bill is expiring and Johnson has been trying to extend it “clean,” which means without any additional restrictions. There do seem to be just enough actual libertarian Republicans left, combined with right-thinking Dems (whichon this issue is thankfully most of them) that his 2AM ploy last night to get it extended failed. And the Senate is leaving town.

Thus the extension remains on life support. And for now, Americans still have no idea exactly how or if the government is spying on us all, and no one on either side will grow the balls to actually tell us. Swell.

Been a couple post-Swalwell comeuppance polls in California and it looks like Tom Steyer is the chief beneficiary of the implosion. The last two polls both have a Dem in the top two so I think maybe this will not be a lost cause after all. Fingers crossed.

I got a new high score in my Fruit Merge game yesterday, which was cool. BUT THEN, I had a game where all the fruit freaked out and spun out and away and that included a watermelon, so with 3,200 points I had a completely blank board. YOU WOULD THINK I could get an even higher high score after that but no. I fucked it up. I mean, I got my new second-highest score but wtf man, I should have been able to break 5,000.

My new high score stands at 4,880.

The mysterious and important work of merging fruit continues.

After work yesterday Emma and I went to the Family Night of Jane’s school’s book fair, which was not a thing when I was a kid. But I guess they realized that if they could get the parents in the room they can convince them to spend more money and it totally worked. Jane had $6 left from the day-version of the book fair, and we ended up spending $26 because I really wanted her to own this chapter book about the Fermi Paradox. Who’s gonna say no to buying their kid more books, assuming they have the money. Jane walked in and said “I just love books” and I have never been more of a proud papa. She saw her friend there, the one who lives in The Most Alaskan House on the East Coast and they book shopped like they were at McNally Jackson it ruled.

Justa mix today, all new stuff. Love the new Twilight Sad might be their best album yet. It is huge. Makes me miss Annie she loved them. There is new Nina Hagen. There is a new Avalon Emerson album she is great. She is the only person except maybe the Chemical Brothers that can do perfect pop and deep electronica, New Broken Social Scene songs are very promising. Alexis from Hot Chip has a new album and it is great as well. Lotta good stuff coming out right now in the pop and indie world.

All right enjoy your weekend. No idea what I’m going to do with mine but I have been informed I might be able to go to Chore House on Sunday, and do some outdoor chores so that is promising.