Good morning good morning. Hello. How are you? Feeling okay? Can you tell the difference between garden-variety aging and hypochondria? Not I! My blood pressure was down a bit this morning, second day in a row, that was nice. Doubly nice since somehow last night I just forgot to take all my pills. Was too busy thinking about the Roman Empire or something. That was a joke. Doctor got back to me and is putting me on a new blood pressure medication all very exciting. I am walking in the footsteps of my father, all these medications are familiar to me from those caretaking years. Which, gulp. On the other hand, dude lived to a pretty ripe old age and did not die from his heart, so… fingers crossed.

On the flipside, my back still weirdly feels like it’s on fire and I had a completely unexplained bout of intense nausea this morning. Woo!

The goal here of GMHHAY is to write down and capture all the fleeting thoughts, fears, and paranoias that pass through our heads, in order that we feel less alone. Well, it’s one goal. The other is to valorize domesticity and the murder of your ambition in order to save the world, but that’s not the point today.

The problem with this (first) goal, however, is that it makes you seem crazy and neurotic. Woo!

Had a dream last night that Jenna and I caught an Alaska Airlines 747 to Bermuda from Chinatown, NYC. You caught the plane like you catch a Fung Wah bus. I actually have a ton of dreams where I am sitting in first class of a 747. I have never sat in first class on a 747. Jenna was very excited about this trip. I recently bailed on a trip to visit Jenna in Barcelona due, mainly, to spiraling flight costs — it was gonna be $5,000+. My subconscious seems pretty ripshit about this.

Just back from the grocery store, went to the smaller local grocery store (this is a local shop for local people) so I could avoid talking to the kind old man. Tried to buy walnuts because one of the last remaining trustworthy sites on the internet told me they are good for my heart.

Reader, there were no walnuts. At all. Except in POWER MIX 5000 OMG PROTEIN I’M FIERCE mixes which also include, erm, chocolate and pretzels. Okay.

As I checked out, I was asked to type in my phone number, and was reminded of the giant security hole that exists in the Lowe's Foods rewards system, wherein you can type literally any phone number in and it will give you the person’s first and last name. Super cool, super cool.

I have friends much smarter than me. I have friends much more patient than me. That I can quickly think of, I only have, like, four friends that are both much smarter than me and much more patient than me. I do not get to talk to these people often. I wish I could talk to them all the time! Heal me daddy!

But it occurs to me, often, when I am having a patience-trying conversation that, alas, this is probably how they feel when I talk to them. God, it must try their patience.

Talked to one yesterday. Vented unnecessarily. Felt like a raving lunatic.

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 a band called Rhododendron today and yes, look, I am always going to want to start the “we are listening to” section in the second person I can’t help it, okay. The album is called Ascent Effort. It is super math rocky. It feels very 90’s. Like maybe A Minor Forest or something. I love it. Nick would love it. I mean, it does have some metal, scream-o vocals at times, as befitting its home on the Flenser label, but it is great. The album isn’t on Discogs yet, comes out Friday. The band is, I think, but there is no information. So I know nothing about this band. I like that. Reminds me of childhood.

Tricky and the Tear Garden are both coming to Boston in the fall. Neither are coming here. They are, maddeningly, ten days apart in Boston. Neither is close to the Cabaret Voltaire show that I had previously decided was going to be my “travel-for-a-band-I’ve-never-seen” fall trip to Boston. I cannot go to Boston three times. I am verklempt. This is very sad. I do not know what to do.

I so utterly, desperately need to go see all these bands and stand there, get too wrapped up in my thoughts, get really sad when they don’t play my favorite song — an obscure song off of their first or second album — and be mildly bummed about their instrumentation choices.

I mean, is the Tear Garden really going to play “Romulus and Venus” with a full band including acoustic guitar and drums? No, probably not.

But, then, his other band has a full band with drums and guitar.

And, shit, what if they do?

(fun fact: Not a single Tear Garden setlist on setlist.fm. How rare is that?)

Is Tricky going to bring Ed Kowalczyk from Live out on stage and do that Evolution Revolution song?

Is Cabaret Voltaire gonna play “Don’t Argue?”

Oh shit I just looked on the internet and both Tricky and Cabaret Voltaire played in London last night and, while they did not play “Evolution Revolution Love” or “Don’t Argue,” both of their setlists absolutely fucking killed. My god, imagine living in London.

I am so fucked.

Also I am not 100% sure I have never seen Tricky. I think maybe I have. The gig list says I saw him in 2009 at SXSW. I have no recollection of this. I do not have any photos of that show, and I was a photo whore at that point. Shit wait was it at La Zona Rosa? I have an image of Tricky standing on the stage at La Zona Rosa oh shit if I have seen him before I am not allowed to travel for it. The internet says it was at the Austin Music Hall. I do not remember what the Austin Music Hall is. Oh shit is it La Zona Rosa?

Imagine if, once a week, a factory or office building in the United States was taken over by a gang of terrorists, sorta like in Die Hard. Imagine if, once a week, the FBI said “well, you should probably just pay the terrorists.” Imagine if, after you pay the terrorists and they leave, you ask the FBI if they could investigate and the FBI just shrugged its shoulders and said “do you know how many office buildings and factories get taken over by terrorists every day in the US? What do you expect us to do? Catch the criminals?”

That, my friends, is the internet these days.

Our entire economy is based on the a foundation of acceptable terrorism. And this was true before a bunch of kleptocrats took power.

I mean, part of me thinks it’s hilarious that every single major corporation on the planet, at any given time, can get completely fucked over by a couple of North Macedonian teenagers. Except it’s not always North Macedonians or Croations, more and more it is Chinese, Russian and North Korean.

And the FBI does jack shit.

I’m sure you heard about the Canvas hack this week. Our school district uses Canvas. They did not tell us about it at all until after Canvas had given up and paid the ransom, and when they did, they a) didn’t mention that, b) pretended there was “no reason to believe that they had taken any private information” of students. Haha lol yeah because Canvas is an A+ scurity surface and studiously keeps your kid’s birthday in a separate, more impenetrable database than the one where they keep the grades. They do this because… uh… because they are fine with some of their information getting hacked and not other information I guess.

I mean, look. I’ve had a company hacked and the FBI investigate. I used that exact phrase – “no reason to believe.” In our case, there actually was no reason to believe, because we did not have the data in question — we never collected it. Canvas does. This phrase is a lie.

It’s worth mentioning that the world is this way because VCs are this way. They don’t want to pay for companies to do certain things, like have security, or trust and safety. They just don’t like it, so we all suffer.

The FBI told me exactly who hacked us by the way. Their names, where they were living in that exact moment. They were in a country with which we had an extradition treaty, which would have been trivially easy to apprehend them: Canada. The FBI also explained they weren’t going to bother doing anything about it because…. well they never said why.

My god the internet sucks so hard.

Speaking of the internet sucking my god it is dead. I mean, okay. Yes. You can still navigate the internet and get good information. You can pay attention to URLs and the little lock on your screen and not believe any photographs and memorize bylines and publications’ political leanings and stay the fuck off of Twitter. But the rest of the internet? The internet you find when you get a little bored and wanna doomscroll just a little further? It is all so fucking fake now. It’s crazy.

Peeked on Twitter again last night because I was in a self-loathing K-hole of apathy and… aside from my usual depression at seeing friends, good friends, losing their god-damned minds in realtime, pedantically talking about AI models as if they don’t kill our children, it is just stunning how many people are spending their time arguing with robots. So much arguing with robots. So much believing Polish dudes invented Speeder Bikes from Empire or put swimming pools on their skyscraper balconies. It is fucking.

More and more I think this is a circumstance of the failures of the therapy profession in the United States. No one can get a good therapist, all of the good ones are full up, too many of them focus on diagnoses and drugs and people just need someone to fucking talk about their problems with and the lying, dying, synthetic internet is all too happy to comply.

I need a decent therapist so bad, and boy does venting to the internet seem tempting. Oh wait, shit. I am venting to the internet right now. Except I lucked out and had enough real-world friends before things went to shit. THANK YOU REAL-WORLD FRIENDS FOR KEEPING ME SANE.

One last bit of this rant: I am so tired of people thinking they are able to tell if something is AI-generated.

AI has already seeped so profoundly into our lives that people are writing, making art, making real photographs to match the AI’s aesthetic. I have no evidence for this but I would bet good money that the human, non-robotic use of the em-dash has vastly increased in the last two years, as people finally learn what an em-dash is. I bet the “it’s not this, it’s this” phrasing has become way more used by humans in the last two years. Same with low depth of field photos with overdone bokeh has, with too much filtering.

Humans are mimicking the robots now and you cannot fucking tell, no one can tell, which is which and we should all stop pretending otherwise.

I figured this was coming but figured we had another… eh, three four years. Nope.

GREAT.

The band Breathless came on this morning in the car on my drive to school with Jane. I tried to explain to Jane how I was sort of friends with this band, how we toured together, and how that was really special to me because the singer in the band was in another band called This Mortal Coil and I loved that band so much when I was a kid.

Then she asked me how many of the bands on my big-ass playlist were dead. I asked her to clarify if she meant broken up or someone in the band was dead. She said either. So I estimated 20% broken up, 25% someone is dead. We then played a game all morning where I told her if the bands were dead or broken up or not.

We (okay, I) spent an incredibly long time on a Mark Reader remix of Yello, and I explained to her how Reader succumbed to the temptation of including all these extra vocals that had been recorded but not used in the original mix and how that made sense because they’re just sitting there on the tapes and they sound good, why not use them. But that it was a mistake because the song works better without the extra passages.

Jane was shockingly far more interested in this conversation than anyone, including me, would expect.

Got a drone playlist for you today. I mean, look, am I comitting a slight breach of ettiquette by putting both Spacemen 3 and Jason Pierce on here? Sure, maybe, but lets give John Coxon a little credit here, mmmkay. Shit is John Coxon related to Graham Coxon? Both from London, similar age… Who knows. Thank you whomever told me about this BlackMoon1348 with the monks thing it was as great as you promised. OH RIGHT that was Bill. He is reading this amazing book on Drone. I am gonna have to check that book out. Who knew you could write a whole book about drone. Pretty obsessed with this Mirror Revelations band and SO INTO the new Gnod. They rule. I wonder if either of those bands ever tour.

All right talk tomorrow. I have so much more to rant about. But I will stop for today. You are a good therapist, GMHHAY.