Good morning, friend. Hello. Hi. How are you? Doing okay today? Holding up? I thought I was on the emotional mend today, after a couple-days’ post-fun downturn. But then I went to McDonald’s to sit with the old guys and pretend I knew about sports, and the always-solid Muzak played “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and now I am emotionally fucked for the foreseeable future. I do not handle that song well. It has always been thus. That song is baked into my soul, one of the legacies my mother endowed me with fuck dangling preposition fuck it who cares people don’t even read anymore, etc. etc.

I mean it’s not like I want to go to McDonald’s. I want to go to… um… Like a Miracle of Science-type place? A coffee shop that has breakfast sandwiches? Something a bit more classy? But you take what you can get in these parts. There’s a coffee cart or two, if they just upped their game like the coffee carts in Alaska we might have something there. Alas, they confine their wares to, well, coffee.

What fresh hells do we have today? I was enamored with the Greenfield lesbian bar story yesterday, not gonna lie. Really delivered. There are those on the left saying that thew whole thing is basically anti-trans propaganda and whatnot, and that these people’s feelings are valid, and of course they are. It is valid to feel left behind, it is even valid to want someone to, I guess, firebomb your favorite bar or something. But maybe don’t say that.

I do think there’s a valid critique in here, though. Most of us leftists are party-less leftists for just this reason. Organizing with these people is exhausting and annoying and no fun and any time I get involved beyond giving money I end up wanting to strangle people for their bureaucracy.

And, man. Something about that poor woman crying about how she never wanted to do this, she was just there to support her co-founders, who had left, and now she is in debt and everyone hates her, and her supposed clientele being so utterly unsympathetic? Kinda broke me, not gonna lie.

And there’s a new “takedown” this morning in the Times of Mary Peltola and man, I cannot bear to read it. My activist friends in Alaska have been darkly muttering such things for a while, ish, sort of. Not so much mean-to-her-employees as willing-to-throw-trans-people-under-the-bus. Which is a maximum bummer though I suppose not surprising if you plan on getting elected in Alaska and have no bravery or imagination. Eh crap I just read it because I am a glutton for punishment. It’s fine. I mean, it’s not, she is obviously a terrible manager and, well, an Alaskan. But it will not hurt her at home.

And I think I am depressed about the Paramount deal is that unreasonable? Should a media consolidation deal be effecting my mental health? That seems… well that seems a bit much. I should maybe take a break, you know. Maybe get away from computers and, like, do some home improvement tasks — YEAH RICK WOULDN’T THAT BE SWELL GREAT IDEA WHAT ABOUT JOBS HUH?

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I am listening to American Football this morning. The red on. Which one is that? The newest one. American Football IV. It is swell. It is pretty. It is sad. It is helping me stay in my moody cranky zone which is exactly what I want today I DO NOT WANT TO FEEL BETTER I WANT TO FEEL SAAAAAAAAAAAADDDDDDDDD.

Oh right I am also sad because the New York Times — god, you know, maybe I should stop reading newspapers — anyway the New York Times is doing this 100 best TV shows of the 20th century and they are now up to number 20 or something and every time they put out a batch it becomes increasingly less likely Mrs Davis will be on the list and it clearly deserves to be. So now for the next 24 hours I am in this liminal space where either something went right in the world and they actually placed it somewhere close to where it belongs — in the top 20 shows of the century — or, far more likely, they shun it completely. I am not mentally prepared for this. Like WTF man you put every other Lindelof show in the top 50 but pretend this one doesn’t exist (Lanterns aside. It is too early)? The horror.

I will bottle up my ire for another 24 hours. Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised and it will cause my depression to break and everything will be amazing and right in the world because Betty Gilpin got the recognition she deserves speaking of which where the fuck is GLOW in this list?

OK someone who knows me well just sent me this and it may have cheered me up a bit. Thank you, Todd:

Wait do reels not unfurl? Oh that sucks. Here I will screencap it and link to it in the cap like someone in the 90’s. A Keyboard. How quaint.

Hooky may be a bastard but at least he kills it live.

While we are continuing to be depressed about corporate America let me tell you about WakeMed. WakeMed is the health system founded and owned by Wake County, the liberal county that encompases Raleigh and its posh suburbs. I mean, this is awesome, right? A freakin’ COUNTY made a health care system. And it kinda rules. I mean, we also have UNC which is arguably better but WakeMed is PUBLICLY OWNED. It’s great.

And now the county commissioners those fuckers are going to sell it off.

And all the dems are letting it happen cuz they’re like “well we’ll still have three health care systems in the Triangle because we’re not letting UNC or Duke buy it.” And yes, the new buyer is a nonprofit but so fucking what, man.

It kills me that one batch of commissioners can Thatcher a thing that has existed as a publicly owned good for over 70 years. Fuck em. It reminds me of that old IRA saying: “you have to be lucky all the time, we only have to be lucky once.” Get the right set of commissioners, just once, and you can sell off a beloved public good, no problem.

Oh and Foursquare sold. To an AdTech company called Infillion, that used to be TrueX. I am a shareholder in Foursquare, always have been since Ye Olden Days. Several days after the announcement I got the paperwork about the sale from Foursquare’s legal counsel. It is long but the gist of it is that Foursquare seemed to be making lots of money but seemed to sell for basically nothing and I will not get a penny even though somewhere in there they said the valuation was like $800 million but I might be reading that wrong because seriously this PDF is like 125 pages long of dense legalese and I ain’t got time for that. It took me like an hour but buried in there somewhere around page 50 was the sentence I needed to see, which said that “each share of Preferred Stock was cancelled and extinguished, without any conversion thereof or payment of any cash or other property or consideration therefor, and ceased to exist.” Cool, cool.

It was fun to angel invest for a couple years. Thanks to one lucky break where I got a… eh, 25x return on an investment, the entire thing panned out and I did slightly better, overall, than plopping my money in an index fund for the same decade or so. But also angel investing mostly sucked, most of the companies abandon you, ignore you, don’t tell you anything. Well, most of them die. But the ones that do well, eventually they want nothing to do with you. If you are lucky, they will pay you to go away. If you’re not, they will do something like this and find a way to get rid of you. You can’t get your money out if you need it for an emergency. It’s all perfectly legal, I am sure. And shit, man. I’ve done it to investors too. I am basically doing it right now. Gee why do I hate my job sometimes. Hate the game, etc. etc.

But if you find yourself recently endowed with a large chunk of investable funds, take my advice and ignore angel investing. It’s even worse now.

Oh also they called the whole deal “Project Frodo” jesus H read ONE OTHER BOOK.

CHEERY EDITION TODAY.

BUT: Jane is great she was so cute this morning and we beat the Honda Fit to school and she gave me so many hugs and we listened to Trentemøller and Allie X and she liked them both and we added “You and Me Song” by the Wannadies to our Daddy Jane playlist and she even told me a single story about what goes on at school, felt like I was winning the lottery with that one.

All right do we have any playlists ready? Nope. Three of them at 49 minutes. So close. I guess I will have to go with a video again. Here is the recent KEXP session of Wu Lyf, that band I am always going on about that I was supposed to see this spring in Boston but they postponed and I could not make it back for when the show was. I am still very sad about that.

Until tomorrow. New music day! Exciting. Got some good stuff coming out this week.