Good morning good morning. This “sleeping in” thing is pretty sweet, but also… kinda useless? I slept 8 ½ hours last night. I am still tired. I still have to make Jane breakfast. And I lose the time in the morning I do things: I haven’t done my Wordle or my DuoLingo, I haven’t read my newsletters.

But most importantly I haven’t gotten out of the house, driven around a bit, maybe stopped at a grocery store, and thought of things to write for you. I just woke up! It’s hard to get my brain working and write!

Also… I can’t find a moment to go to the grocery store anymore. I keep running out of things.

Life is hard.

Well-wishing to Bonnie Tyler, singer of the banger hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” who is out of her coma. She’s been in a coma for a month. It was medically induced for a surgery, but when they tried to take her out of it, she suffered cardiac arrest and they had to put her back in it. Now she’s out but she is still “very unwell.”

And condolences to the other Dan Sullivan, who was forbidden from being on the ballot for US Senator from Alaska, running against incumbent Dan Sullivan. On a technicality. Apparently people don’t like fun. I was really looking forward to this. Now I gotta find something else to be excited about.

And I guess no one has any opinions about Brown Rice and arsenic huh? I had brown rice at lunch yesterday and I gotta tell you: it is not super fun eating it when you think you might be poisoning yourself. ALSO: they say brown rice goes bad quicker than white rice? I am eating some old-ass brown rice and it seems… fine? I am deeply concerned and confused I might just have to freak out and throw out all this brown rice.

Shit maybe brown rice causes brown rice neurosis.

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 Sinead O’Connor’s Reggae album today, Throw Down Your Arms. I did it. I cracked. I finally bought a copy. It was not cheap. It was a barely defensible purchase. OK it was a not-at-all defensible purchase, other than its continuing skyrocketing appreciation. But it is fucking awesome, it is in pristine condition, the vinyl quiet and crackle-free and the sleeve nearly perfect. Now I just gotta pick up a cheap re-issue copy of Universal Mother and I have all the Sinead albums on vinyl that you can buy on vinyl. It is crazy how many Sinead albums are not available on vinyl at all, were never pressed on vinyl. Sinead’s career precisely overlaps the domination of the compact disc. Before my 2005-or-so recommitment to vinyl, as the albums came out, all my Sinead album purchases were on CD. I have a bunch of 12” singles — even through the darkest days of CDs, the 12” still thrived. But to this day, Faith and Courage, Sean-Nós Nuance, She Who Dwells…, Theology, and the accompanying live album… none of them have been released on LP. Who owns Sinead’s rights why are they not on this I cannot possibly be the only person on this quest.

God. Sinead. A hero. A lion. She was amazing.

And every time someone lionizes Prince I just think about how creepy he was to her.

Taking a peek at the news here as I am somewhat at a loss for a couple interregnum topics between the music segment and the Jane segment in today’s newsletter. The Times thinks Epstein killed himself. Cool cool.

AH here we go: this fun special investigation into kraktom, the latest method of semi-legally getting your rocks off from the check-out counter of our nation’s truck stops. God DAMN our nation’s truck stops are a hotbed of scientific inquiry into psychonautic topics. I deeply respect the role they play in American society. I wonder if Warren Buffet thought about how he was becoming one of the world’s largest legal narcotic dealers when he invested in Pilot Truck Stops. My entire life, there has been some mysterious, quasi-legal bottle of… something for sale in a little lucite stand next to the cashier at truck stops. Always clearly marketed in banal terms but really saying if you know you know.

Really one of the best things about America if we are being honest.

Been reading a bunch over the last 24 hours of the usual internet pundit suspects freaking out about the UK social media ban on children. People younger than me saying things like “I found out about abortion and LGBTQ on the internet and no one can ever learn anything without it” and… 1) man I found out about all that stuff as a kid in the arctic without the internet, the kids are resourceful, will do just fine, and 2) they are not banning the internet, they are banning social media. They’ll still have plenty of advocacy and information and support sites.

ALSO I hear Jane magazine is coming back? Maybe they should launch in England. Maybe this will lead to a renaissance in teenage magazines in England, that will be rad.

I am not entirely unsympathetic to concerns, however. I do also worry that not helping kids to develop some defenses against misinformation while children will make them go gaga when the band-aid is ripped off. But I’m willing to bet this won’t happen. Kids who grew up under smoking bans did not start smoking in greater numbers when they became 16, quite the opposite. And it seems to me the best way to innoculate people against fake news is to… put a good head on their shoulders first?

ALSO I am so fucking tired of people pretending they know what is going to happen in the future. It is so exhausting. It is everywhere in life, but it is particularly rampant amongst internet pundits of a certain age who take certain things from “early” (actually mid) internet as gospel. So much shit we took as gospel has turned out wrong, yet people are still convinced they know what’s going to happen in the future.

The internet is absolutely nothing like Wired promised us, it’s a fucking cesspool and there is not nearly enough cool black latex or overthrowing of fascist regimes. We were all wrong.

ALSO you know what? All the way back before Wired, the internet was riddled with kiddie porn from day one, and we all just pretended it wasn’t? First because it was the 80’s and the 80’s just loved kiddie porn and then in the 90’s because the 90’s kinda loved kiddie porn and then in the oughts we just pretended it wasn’t happening?

I kinda wonder sometimes if the entire “consumer’ internet wasn’t an elaborate plot foisted upon us by 20 or so overweight bearded 70’s pedophiles. Tell me that isn’t at least a little bit plausible.

ALSO it won’t kill us to fucking try, man. Get some real data. Consider it an experiment.

BUT I will say: I was sort of pondering this yesterday and trying to reconcile it against my general support of kids and my thinking that kids should be recognized as adults sooner than they are. Or later than they are. I mean the 18 year-old male brain isn’t any better developed than the 14 year-old male brain or the 23 year-old male brain. They’re basically fucking idiots from birth to, like, 30. So why do we pick 18? Well, we pick it because we sort-of thought it was okay to send 18 year-olds to war and not 17 year-olds. Even though people all over the world send 17, 16, 15, 14 year-olds to war. But we don’t, because we are evolved or something. I would prefer not to base the assignment of legal rights to billions of people on when we can send them off to be killed. We could pick puberty, but we have decided as a society that is gross, and puberty is moving and getting younger or so they say don’t make me go research that I’ll get tagged by the feds or something. Well, not these days. God I am digressing. BUT anyway 12 does seem a bit early?

I’m thinking if we were honest with ourselves we have three options:

1) bestow adulthood around 13/14

2) bestow adulthood for women around 17 and men around 30 which would be fucking hilarious and introduce all sorts of hilarious complications but is, if we’re being honest, the closest to reality. I am not saying this because of sex, I am saying this because we all know men are basically incapable of being adults for a long, long-ass time.

3) pass a test to become an adult.

SO, yes, I support this ban on social media for kids, but mainly I’m thinking of a) boys, and b) ages up through 14ish. To me, 16 feels a bit long and completely arbitrary.

Went upstairs to bring Jane her breakfast today and she was laying down by her giant bookshelf, reading Harold and the Purple Crayon, which was literally the first thing I bought for her when I was born. It was my favorite book as a child.

I handed her her breakfast and said “that’s my favorite book.”

And she said “I know. I love this one.”

The other day when she was zonked on her GA and we were up in that room, I looked at that giant bookshelf of books, and I was proud of it because every kid should grow up in a house with a giant shelf of books. But also I thought maybe it was anachronistic, and I wondered to myself if she ever even touched it, read any of those books. She reads at bedtime, but mostly the same 5 space books she has most recently checked out from the library. I thought maybe the whole thing was just artifice and aspiration.

But no! Look at that shit. School’s out, summer morning, girl wakes up early and goes to the freakin bookshelf.

PARENTING WIN.

Psych rock playlist for you today. I have begun to take a slighty more expansive take on psych rock for these playlists, adding things like Lou Reed and this new Joan as Policewoman/Iggy Pop song. I sorta knew Joan back in the day, as much as you could know someone whom you were completely intimidated by because they were so bad-ass and awesome. Okay maybe not knew. Traveled in the same circles. She was amazing. And we got a live Verve track that was always one of my favorites. And more from the new Slift and new Gnod albums, and this wonderful Mekons dub album. And the new Les Big Byrd is is so good they rule.

OK well that worked out okay maybe this sleeping in thing isn’t that bad after all.