Good morning good morning good morning! Hello! How was your holiday weekend? Did you have a lovely time? Did you go swimming or do some grilling or watch some fireworks? I hope so.

Though I did none of those things. I dunno, I am just not much for birthdays, countries or humans or animals or whatevs. And of course my feelings about America are quite complicated, though I saw someone say you cant really “hate” something if you don’t love it. That seemed both untrue and wise. I do love America. I love those purple mountains and vast fields of wheat depleting the Ogalalla aquifer, those sandy coasts and those rocky coasts and those vast forests. Especially the forests.

I like the weird colleges sitting in corn fields in the Midwest and that ridiculous couple in Vegas living in the pirate house in Zillow Gone Wild. I like Circle K and 24-hour convenience stores and bodegas a whole lot I don’t think I could live without them. I like our socialist Post Office and socialist fire departments and socialist Libraries and socialist mortgage funding and socialist schools and colleges and socialist elderly health care and socialist retirement benefits. I like my fast food I am not gonna lie. I still think Democracy is a worthwhile concept even if our founding fathers and our actual fathers were not so great at implementing it. I like free speech and I even like the rights we supposedly have that we don’t anymore, like the right to a speedy trial and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. I bet those were great when they were around. I like Dolly and Willy and Bruce and Loretta and Johnny and June and Jello and Exene and Olivia and I even kinda like that Benson fellow’s absurd jumps.

I think I will forgo a list of the things I do not like about America, though, for today. That could take a while.

Read through North Carolinas new law NC SB 227, the bill the Republicans overrode our Democratic governor’s veto to pass. It is a law designed to restrict the teaching of DEI in the schools, lol. It is kinda terribly written, though. A news article I read said that it banned the teaching of “any divisive concepts” and it occurred to me this could be used, then, to insist our school does not teach AI. But I assumed this was an incorrect reading of the law and they were not that dumb but nope. Sho nuff.

You are now prohibited in North Carolina from teaching about any divisive concepts. There is an exception if it’s part of the official curriculum, BUT, of course, it has to GET into the curriculum and that will be very hard now. And even then they have to teach very clearly that the state does not approve of such things.

Also, schools are now banned now from spending any money on these things. I think they were trying to, like, keep schools from spending money on, like, books with two mommies or some shit. But now it seems pretty clear to me that no school in North Carolina can spend any money on AI. Which, I mean, that seems like a fun thing to hold their feet to the fire about.

So far my school district has not endeavored to do much of this, but i have not poked around yet on my daughter’s Chrome Book this year to see if Gemini is lousy up in that thing. It’s on my list.

Because I am, in case you have not heard, rabidly anti LLM/GBT-based AI in 99% of its forms.

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 this morning to the new 4AD vinyl reissue of Michael Brook’s 1992 album Cobalt Blue. Another gorgeous 4AD release that I’ve owned since it came out that did not get a vinyl release “back in the day.” Oh wow actually I just looked. That is a lie. It got one in the UK. But not the US. Wow now I want the original pressing. I feel inadequate now.

Over the five days it’s been since I’ve written to you, this is the only record that arrived for me in the mail. I am somewhat shocked. Somewhat proud. Somewhat confused. I guess two of those days were no mail days. Maybe a giant pile will arrive today. We shall see.

Spent virtually the entire four-day holiday working on the studio. It was awesome. I am so sore. I was so wet and sweaty for four days straight. I completely finished the area above the front patio of the house, installing two Cat6 boxes and two speaker boxes, clearing out the old insulation, adding the Safe N Sound, and putting down the first layer of OSB. And with that, I am done done done for quite a while now from having to contort myself into crawlspaces and underneath HVAC ducts and my god I am so happy. My body is starting to rebel. I took a picture. See that little hidey-hole on the right side? Back there. That’s what I got done. Back there. Contort contort contort.

Also I am very proud of the way I am handing the cables coming out of the floor look at them:

You will recall that the final floor will be about 2-3 inches taller than this, so those little outlets will be flush with the floor. And there will be a wall along that floor seam where each one of them will climb the wall a bit then join the main low-voltage cable run around the edges of the attic till they get to the IT room. I still gotta build that wall. But I have been testing my slap-bracelet-as-cable-management technique inside the assorted joist bays and oh man it works so well. Some day in 50 years someone is going to tear down this house and discover my technique and become its herald to the rest of the construction industry and it will take over. Buy slap bracelet stock now. Go long.

Now being out of the patio, I can now begin the final section of attic floor that has had no floor whatsoever forever. And with that I can finally get a sense of the true scale of the room. See those 4 or so panels of floor on the right? Where the shop vac is? I did those this weekend. It’s all clear sailing now to get the rest done. And I can take those last two vertical struts down. I have been using those to hang stuff but NO MORE. I want to see the room HUGE. You know what? I will use that weird feature in Buttondown to make this image huge right now so we can all see its majesty. I never use that feature I hope this doesn’t screw us all up forever or something buttons are scary.

No words. Shoulda sent a poet.

Really hard to get a sense of scale here. That ceiling is around 18 feet. It’s biiiig.

Also I had a brilliant idea about HVAC ducts and baffle boxes in the control room area. I have been working on this project for, oh, three years, and I still have brilliant ideas constantly that will radically improve the place. I am so glad I’m going slow to continue to give my brain time to think about it.

What else happened this holiday, let us see. Emma found a sweet antique sewing machine at the thrift store and we picked it up. Nine bucks! Very exciting. We had Waffle House and the Pig — amazing local barbecue — and… um… I made a lot of salads with vegetables from the garden. Emma and Jane did lots of swimming at the friends’ pool. Went to Walmart. Watched a bunch of that Larry David American History thing it is kinda funny. Gets funnier as you go on. Watched Obsession. People are right it was very good. Though I don’t view the guy as quite the villain as others do, and he ultimately did what needed to be done to make up for his mistakes.

Jane and I did a lot of snuggling. She’s been getting up later, waking me up later, and then we’ve just been laying around in bed. Got breakfast at 10:30 AM on Sunday it was lovely. She’s been very (playfully) difficult about me taking pictures of her this weekend so I do not have a whole lot of them.

Emma felt a little nauseous on Saturday night so I did a full bedtime with Jane, and I was too sleepy to bother being stubborn about it so I just let it go at its own pace, gently reminding her about teeth, drops, etc., but not pushing it. Assuring her I would not leave, spending a lot of time playing silly games. At one point she spent an hour or so muttering to herself going in and out of her fort constantly, very engrossed in some important fort mission. In the end the whole thing took about 90 minutes more than her normal bedtime. In the 30 days she has not been going to school, she has self-shifted her wakeup time about an hour. But that worked out, because today she is back in camp — just back from dropping her off — and it starts an hour later than school. Very civilized. She is in a tree-climbing camp in the mornings this week and a fairy house camp in the afternoons. Camps are so much cooler than when I was a kid when all we had were god camps, gun camps, and get-bit-by-mosquito camps. Okay that is not entirely fair when I was older I got fine arts camp which was one of the single most formative experiences in my childhood.

I am sad Jane’s month with me is over, but we’ll have Boston in August, where she’s not in camp and we go get breakfast together every morning. I think it’s time she goes to the Miracle of Science. We will sit at the bar and eat eggs. It will rule.

Hey look we actually have a playlist for you today. Michael Brook put us over the top in finishing up this Ambient playlist. This one has been so long in the making-of that I don’t even remember a lof ot these artists. Gregory Uhlmann who’s that? No idea. I guess I will have to listen to this whole thing after this Michael Brook LP finishes playing.

OKAY well I guess it’s time to go to work. Wish me luck. My first 5-day week in yonks.

God, “yonks” is a great word. One syllable, concise.