Good morning good morning. Sorry I am late. Took the say off. Jane has an early release. Emma and Janet have some errand thing to do, so I gotta pick Jane up. Gotta leave in 55 minutes. Can I finish this before then? Who knows, who knows. Some days I can bang it out in 40, some days it takes two hours. We shall see.

Had a dream last night in a casino. Labyrinthine and impossible to navigate, much like casinos in the real world. I was there with a group of friends, we were trying to meet up in the one bar in the casino that did not play oontz oontz techno. It was a nostalgia bar, supposedly. Played this old thing called alternative music. Never really saw the group of friends. Abby was one of them but I couldn’t find them. I was lost.

This casino was special. It was built on the California-Nevada border. Two complexes connected by a tunnel. On the California side was all the trappings of a casino without the gambling and smoking: Bars and clubs and Porsche Design boutiques and art collections. On the Nevada side was the actual casino, smokey and old school like the Golden Nugget or something. In between, in the underground tunnel, was art and a spa and weird pools. The underground is where I got lost. It reminded me strongly of the temple in George Miller’s criminally underrated Three Thousand Years of Longing. Weird temples and magic and mystique. It was great and scary.

Meghan asked me recently where my standard dream locales were. Hers are in real life - homes and schools and relatives houses. Mine are all made up. Big Allston college flop houses and, I am realizing, casinos. I have a lot of dreams in casinos. Weird. Maybe because of that time I was trapped in the Cosmopolitan alone when there was that giant wreck outside of the Mohawk during SXSW and I couldn’t get in touch with friends and coworkers and was super traumatized while a prostitute kept hitting on me.

Just back from Walmart. Pretty busy on a holiday Friday. Reduced stimulus hours. Smart guy was being smart but he foisted it off on someone else who did not use Walpay correctly. I was ready for him, though, if he was going to supercilliosly correct me. I had a very witty retort. Sad I don’t get to use it.

Last week Kacey Musgraves announced a partnership with Walmart and I rather like the Lee Jeans trucker hat that is part of the collection. So I spent some time looking for it — time I could have spent writing to you, forgive me. But the collection was nowhere to be found, they were still supporting the collection from the previous lady celebrity, Ashley Simpson, I think? Someone like that. And I am looking on their site and there is no Lee trucker hat. Shit maybe that particular item is a Kacey dot com exclusive.

Forgive me while I get a little lady country inside baseball here, but I am glad Miranda and Kacey made up. Now Kacey needs to pull a page from Miranda and make a Marfa Tapes-style album. My god the Marfa Tapes are so good. Do I have a predilliction for that little town that I have never visited? Yes, but even without that, that album rules. Oh my god, the chair creaks in “Anchor?” Contrived? Perhaps. Heartbreaking? Absolutely.

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Listening today to the brilliantly named new album by the Sheila Divine, The Middle Ages. I am on track three. It fucking rules. I am so into this record already. Man, Aaron rocks. Bought this album on Bandcamp. Can’t remember if it was just digital or vinyl. I hope a vinyl copy is on the way. Let’s check. Shit yeah. Splatter blue vinyl, purchased in March, shipped four days ago. Hopefully it comes today.

The world needs more Sheila Divine vinyl. Hrm actually, looks like all their albums have at least one edition on vinyl. I just only own three of them. Looks like Live at the Paradise 2003 has never been released on vinyl. If I am not mistaken I played in the band that opened that show. At least I think it was that one. They played the paradise a lot. Only night I ever truly felt like a rock star. My god they have a great fanbase.

Spent the bulk of my free time yesterday re-organizing my desktop photos folder. I have a folder of 500 or so images that rotate every day or so that are my wallpaper on my desktop. But I hadn’t added anything to it in, god, like a decade. So no pictures of, you know, my daughter. So I spent like three hours adding photos to the folder.

Then I realized that a ton of the photos in the folder I never got to see because they were TIFFs or PSDs and MacOS doesn’t support these file formats for wallpaper. So I tried to use the Batch command in Photoshop to convert them all to PNG. And you can do it, but you have to hit return three times for every photo. OR you could make a droplet. Which I did and it promptly crashed. I think maybe they still haven’t updated the droplet functionality for Apple silicon. I used to have one on my desktop but it died when I got an M-series mac. I could, of course, make a script but man I was trying to be quick. So instead of spending five minutes making a script, I spent fifteen minutes hitting the enter key constantly. Makes perfect sense. And, to be clear, you cold not hold down the enter key, that wouldn’t work. You had to keep tapping it. Idly wondered if someone made a device that just physically pressed the same key over and over. I bet the do. People probably use it to thwart the keyboard IT police at shitty jobs.

So many shitty jobs out there, you know.

Torn about the new Star Wars film. I have never missed a Star Wars film in the theater: not the originals, not the prequels, not the special editions, not the new trilogy, not the spin-offs. I liked The Mandalorian. I like that little Grogu fellow. The movie is getting reviews exactly commensurate with what I expected: a fun romp, feels like a couple TV episodes strung together. This is not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination. I am not even sure I would prefer if they worked in some Lore, since of late when they work in some lore, it tends to go nowhere (ahem Darth Plagueis). This is all probably fine. But it does not make me feel compelled to go see it in a theater.

Yesterday at dinner a little boy sat down at the table next to us and he had a LEGO AT-ST walker and I said “oh wow a Lego AT-ST” and he got very excited and said “You like Star Wars?” And we chatted a bit. He said the AT-ST stood for Armored T-something Scout something. I told him the last T stood for “Transport.” He got excited. I did not correct him on the first AT since, you know, that shit’s probably been retconned since I was a kid and he was probably right. He said they were also called Chicken Walkers and I started to launch into a lesson about how they weren’t called that when I was a kid and that only came into fruition in The Clone Wars but my wife gently made me realize I probably don’t need to hold forth about Star Wars to ten year old boys at burger joints.

Wisdom.

Jane had Girl Scouts yesterday and was apparently decently behaved, relative to the mad rabble of insanity that was the group. The girls are mostly second-graders, but half the group are Daisies in kindergarten and first, so this is not a group studiously studying from their handbook. They were learning about civics, apparently, and were trying to write letters to their representatives about wildlife preservation but one girl (apparently, I heard this secondhand) kept insisting they should write that everyone should be allowed to walk around Naked. Emma kept trying to tell her there places where people could already do that but the girl was not having it.

Gotta fight for what you believe in, right? Like that topless paperback club in NY.

No playlist today, just Sheila Divine. Go check it out. It is great. Plus it’s a good excuse to see if Bandcamp links unfurl in Buttondown. My god I wish I owned Bandcamp there is so much you could do with it. For starters the thing needs a Mac App.

The Sheila DivineThe Middle Ages

All right well enjoy your weekend. I am spending three full days in the studio working on the floor I am so fucking excited. And I will get a photo of the tomato trellis for you I know you’re still waiting for that loose end to tie up.

Today, if all goes well, I will get that exhaust vent installed in the room where we keep the 3D printer. Getting a little toxic in there.

À tout à l'heure!