Good morning! Hello. Hi. How are you? All well? No, of course not, but… you know. I hope things are going okay. Happy Friday? Just woke up. Slept in. Emma did drop-off this morning because I have the day off — our monthly “recharge day.” Pleasant surprise for me. Whole company votes on which Friday of the month is the recharge day. Almost every time, they chose the Friday to make a four-day holiday out of a three-day one. So I assumed we had next Friday off. But nope! For some reason this month, they chose today. You’d think I would notice this as the human that organizes the voting and enters the holidays into Justworks, but I did not. Pleasant surprise!

Gonna get some outdoor chores done today since it’s the last day under 90ish degrees for the weekend. Hopefully finish up my new tomato trellis and do the porch repair Emma’s been asking about for a month or so. If I get both of those done, I will be a happy camper.

Update: Yes, I realize I was ripping off that “Still punk AF” meme as I made my goth jokes yesterday. It’s like biodigital Jazz, man. I’m like Bono it is homage you’re supposed to understand the underlaying references I don’t need to give credit maaaaaan.

Two dreams last night — in the first one, I lived in downtown Fairbanks, in the Northward Building. Louis CK had decided I should be a comedian, and I was going to open up for him on his upcoming tour. Louis had not been, er, exposed in this dream world, so there was not the same baggage around him. Yet at the same time, he was not that popular: playing rooms of about 750 capacity. Still, though, I was not a comedian, I was an adtech executive like I am in real life, so.. uh.. it was gonna be kind of a mess. There was a very jealous professional comedian who was pissed I got the gig. They were out to get me. There were stops in my old church, Fairbanks First United Methodist, and at my old music store, Music Mart on Noble Steet. I dream frequently about these two places. I do not know why.

Second dream, Emma, Jane and I were on a vacation to Boston but rather than staying at our apartment in Somerville we were staying in my old college dorm, the behemoth, brutalist Warren Towers, the second-largest non-military dorm in the country. Wikipedia tells me that the the Taco Bell in the dorm closed in 2008, that is sad. Having a Taco Bell in your dorm rules. Wikipedia also tells me Neal Stepehnson lived there. Cool. In my dream it had been heavily remodeled in a sort-of 1920’s wooden rococo style: labyrinthine and dark, the giant escalator lobby and sunny, brutalist dining rooms both carved up, paneled up with carved wood, and darkened. It was both very pretty and very sad.

There was a portion of the dream where I had to run several blocks town Comm ave to catch up with a cab that drove off with our luggage. Then I had to take the B-Line back from Packard’s Corner to Warren, with our luggage and Jane, who was still a baby. Some yeah bro grabbed my balls on the train. The T-driver defended me and the dude ran off.

Man I love Boston.

I dunno I find dreams kind of off-putting to discuss with others, but readers keep telling me they’re interesting so here you go.

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 Xymox today, the brilliant synthy goth album Twist of Shadows, one of my all-time favorite albums. Bought a first-edition vinyl copy a year or so back and it has stayed in my heavy-rotation rack ever since. I love this record so much. Sure, sure, the 4AD gothier stuff is great, but nothing is as good as Twist of Shadows. Xymox has had a lot of lineup changes through the years. They are still around, but the current lineup eschews this pop masterpiece and plays nothing from it, which is why I don’t (usually) go bother seeing them. I love Pieter Nooten’s solo stuff, and I know he is out of the band, but I don’t think it’s Pieter who is responsible for this album? There is some missing piece of this puzzle I have never fully unraveled. As far as I can tell the album was a one-off moment of magic between three people who did not get along, which makes it all the more special.

Forgive me, GMHHAY, I have sinned. Be my confessor.

So, yesterday I was out of sorts all day. Not my usual depression or angst about the state of politics or a garden-variety bad mood. Something slightly more detached and uneasy, slightly more aggro, and slightly more endurable. It was odd.

Eventually it found an outlet in arguing with an old high school friend about Gaza and Israel on Facebook. I dunno, man. I mean. Look. I know it’s not his fault that every single fucking time I go to Facebook, the first thing I see is one of his Zionist freaky-ass posts saying unhinged shit. He is posting his personal thoughts on what he sees as his personal space. If you don’t like em, don’t go to his space. Just like that guy who I don’t know who unsubscribed to GMHHAY yesterday, presumably because he is an AI lover I don’t know I don’t know. Fair enough.

But the fact is that it’s not just his personal space. It’s not like this here newsletter, that you have to go find. Facebook shoves this shit into our faces. And of course, he. knows this, he just doesn’t really care. He likes the ambiguity — that he can pretend he’s just saying stuff in his personal space but he knows it is also being sent out to other people. The product design is toxic, has been since the news feed. It’s part of why I have this newsletter off of Facebook and almost never post there.

So anyway there were a bunch of people protesting Israelis selling land they don’t own in Gaza and the West Bank out of a Synagogue in Brooklyn the other day. A had several friends join in these protests. My high school friend characterized this whole thing as “masked thugs.” He decried the lack of coverage of this riot and then posted a NY Post article. I commented that the post article 1) explained that it was a protest, and 2) explained what they were protesting, and 3) pointed out that more arrests happened on the pro-israeli side than the non-Israeli side. From an article he posted.

Well he could not have that and rambled back some incoherent answer to me calling me flip and then talking about Trump in China.

I don’t know man, it just set something off in me and I asked him if my Jewish friend in his 60s who was at the protest was a “masked thug” too, or if, in fact, maybe it was like every protest in the history of humanity, where most people did their protesting while a minority on both sides tried to get violent.

I may have posted, like, five messages.

I mean as Facebook flame wars go, it was pretty mid, but I have been trying to not engage with this guy as Facebook has been baiting me for months.

Social media is a toxin, man.

As an aside, a few days before this exchange, I read Hamilton Nolan’s piece about the self-same protest. High-school friend accused me and everyone else of “being oblivious to what’s happening,” but no matter. Hamilton is a fantastic writer, just fantastic. Of course his political viewpoint is diametrically opposed to my high school friend’s, but Hamilton is a reporter by trade, and makes a point to distinguish between his opinions in the piece and the facts. He does not dehumanize anyone, on either side of the equation, with terms like “thugs.”

In better news, the local protest against Pittsboro’s Flock Cameras has been successful, and the town has agreed to take them down. Man I love it when good old fashioned protest democracy works. I mean, am I personally planning on putting a camera up that takes pictures of our neighborhood street after there was a broken window recently? Well, yes. Am I a hypocrite for this? Ish? Maybe? But my camera, a) is owned by someone on whose property it resides, b) does not share its imagery with anyone, c) keeps all the images in the neighbohood, on a NAS in the neighborhood. I do view these differences as meaningful.

We did a full daddy bedtime last night. It went pretty well. Hard to get her to stop watching videos about space to do a Daddy School about space, but we managed. Managed to get the teeth brushed without too much fuss.

She is in this phase where everything is boring. Everything. Always. Boring boring boring. She also keeps criticizing me for singing all the time and, if you know me, well, it’s like breathing to me. I sing constantly. I keep trying to be parental and explain that she is a smart little girl and her brain is running all the time and needs stimulation and I was the same way and music is so interesting and it is part of the reason I love it, because you can put it on and then any situation is less boring because you can think about ten million things related to the song while you also brush your teeth. But it is not working.

So instead last night: I proposed a grand bargain that I would stop singing if she stopped calling things boring. It was such a brilliant idea. And I was instantly terrified she would take it.

But she did not.

Alas and thank god both at once.

Wow I wrote for exactly as long as the duration of Xymox’s Twist of Shadows. I could spend another 30 making a playlist – it’s Friday, probably tons of new music today. But it’s nice out and I want to get outside and get chorin’, so, nah. Instead you should listen to Twist of Shadows. It is great! Or maybe it’s not and it is just perfectly recaptures the feeling of being sixteen years old at Jay Jacobs in the Bentley Mall with Larone and Renée when I first heard “Imagination.”

Until Monday, when I will regale you with Tales of Chores.