Good morning, hello, hi howdy-ho what is up friends? MAN. I had a day yesterday. Too much day. I mean I am just a lowly, small-town businessman and father. I do not need to be wrapped up in geopolitical and high finance shit I am trying to preach a gospel of pedestrianism here. I’m starting to think I might not be white picket fence dad man but that villain in the middle of The Boys or Enemy of the State or something where the main villain goes to see his boss out in some house in the country and The Man Who Secretly Runs the Everything (or woman in the case of The Boys) is out in his greenhouse cutting orchids. Do not want. Too much. Too much.

And of course I can’t talk about any of that, so, whatever. Moving on. Still. I HAD A DAY.

Do you think maybe I was too simple when I decided to abbreviate Good Morning Hello How Are You as GMHHAY? Do you think it’s too late to do that? Shouldn’t it be, you know, pronouncable? Shouldn’t I have done, like, Gomohhay or something? Go-Mo-Hey!

It’s too late isn’t it.

Had some crazy dreams last night. My ex Judi was in my dreams, I didn’t get any sleep in my dream, kept trying, kept failing. At one point I was trying to sleep and my sister showed up with Kristen and all the other girls from Bad Man Good Coffee, and a bunch of other old Alaska friends. I had forgotten they could crash at Judi’s, didn’t tell Judi, she was not pleased. There was an old lady living upstairs. It was Mae from Ted Lasso, RIP. Then we all went out onto the streets of London — I spend a lot of time in my dreams on the streets of London, not sure why. Maybe in this case it’s because of all this Joy Division I’ve been listening to. Sorry, Manchester.

Anyway, not a great dream. There was a whole Trump component too, which was even worse, bien sur.

Finished Lanterns and Ted Lasso and I think I felt basically the same about both of them. Amazing acting, fantastic direction, really heartfelt performances (especially Hannah Waddingham, Tanya Reynolds, and Kyle Chandler). Really felt something watching both of them, enjoyed them both immensely.

Buuuuuut…

Both had significant plot problems in several ways. Both had ostensible mystery plots that were de facto unsolvable because they violated every core tenant of building a mystery (not the Sarah McLachlan type), which is fucking annoying. The people of that small town sucked and owed Hal a debt for their lives, they would have been dead in minutes were it not him, and the share count plot in Ted Lasso was completely fucked up. No only because it completely cheated and ignored every previous intentional easter egg the series had set up, but because even in the final moments of its resolution, the share counts still did not add up! Maddening! Rebecca was never in danger of losing the team by their own math. The mystery of the second manhunter was bullshit there is no way that person could have broken out Sinestro on their own and more to the point why?

I am sympathetic. Lanterns is a new show and Ted Lasso had never really tried to do a mystery before. And it’s not their fault we now live in this fucked-up train-spotting world brought on by ARGS and NIN’s Day Zero or whatever, carried all the way through to Taylor’s exhausting eEaster eggs and Westworld season 1 where it seemed all the hyper-obsessives were in their own little world of insanity and then whoops, nope, they were right and all their hyper-focus on background details and clues turned out to be correct and the “proper” way to watch the show. No one wants that! (Reader: people, do, in fact want that). Okay, I don’t want that! I just want a plot to fucking work in reality.

And then whenever I say this, Emma says “dude we are watching a show about Space Cops” and, touché.

Also I am sympathetic to the showrunners! Emotional resonance and great performances are more important! Everyone thinks Lanterns is a great show even though it makes no goddamn sense! And it is a great show even though it makes no goddamn sense. Do you know how much money it would have cost to do a fuck ton of re-shoots to make the mystery make sense too? Especially when you completely change the episode order? Impossible.

If you gotta err, err on the side of great performances and emotional resonance.

Fair enough.

ALSO: lotta people complaining about Lanterns “not being a comic book show” because, I guess, comic books actually do have nothing but fight scenes and super powers being used, despite what they have been telling us for decades now that they can be a Grown Up medium. Weird one. I ASSUME this was done for budgetary reasons. I am great with that! It would be awesome if, in this world where everyone is trying to reign in costs in the ultra-competitive battle of Prestige TV, we get fewer fight scenes and giant effects shots. I would be totally cool with that. Maybe the single silver lining in this fucking debacle of Skydance.

(Buttondown should have spoiler text, really is one of the best features of Threads.)

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!

More Joy Division today, continuing on the new 16-disc live box set, Eternal. Listening to a solid version of “Disorder” from Futurama 1 in Leeds, September 8, 1979. Barely audible, terrible recording, even with the bringing to bear of all modern technology, but a fucking perfect performance my god.

“Disorder”: Great Joy Division song, or Best Joy Division song?

All right here are the things I can tell you about yesterday.

Morning leadership meeting for Nimbus, went great, lovely people.

Then the guy who installed the backup gas generator at Chore House came by. Chore House has a backup gas generator. When we bought the place, the previous owners told us it runs to test itself once a week, and if anything happens someone will come and check it and there is a maintenance plan. Didn’t think much about this. It seemed to have kept working for a long time but in the last few months it has occurred to me I hadn’t heard it test in ages and also none of this made any sense and there was no way some company was giving me free monitoring and maintenance forever because this is a capitalist hellscape we live in. So finally I sucked it up, found the little plaque on the thing, called the company, introduced myself as the new owner, and they sent a guy out. And he was literally the dude who installed it fifteen years ago which, I mean, this company must be pretty good for some dude to have worked there that long.

He did a tune up and checked everything out and changed the oil and inspected the solar integration which happened when I bought the place to make sure that was all done correctly. It was. Good job, Carolina Roofing.

But most fun, he taught us how to care for and monitor both the generator and the interchange with the house power, including the surge protectors. My god Chore House has so many surge protectors — THREE whole home surge protectors. Great place for a studio. Also he told us there is a ten rod industrial-grade grounding system there, previous owner spent like $10k on grounding, which is fantastic. Very into that.

Natural Gas generators are basically just old four-cylinder engines, like you’d find in a car. Very straightforward, except you gotta change the antifreeze and oil more often. One thing that suuuuucks is that you have to change the oil every 100-200 hours of use? Which is not long! So basically if there’s some catastrophic weeks-long outage, which is why one would even want the thing, you’re fucked, because every natural gas generator in the region will need an oil change all at once. So I don’t know, man. Seems kinda pointless. But it’s there, it was free, and.. Well, it’s not free now. $2k for the refresh, needs an antifreeze change which is absurdly expensive, and $600/year for maintenance contract. Did the math, though, and that’s all way cheaper than swapping it out with house batteries, would take multiple decades to save money going down that path, and I won’t live that long. Plus we have a fuckton of house batteries at home, and it’s nice to have a little diversity of power backups.

Then the whole family went to the Boat and RV Storage Company ribbon cutting and it was so cute and I met the sheriff and the chamber of commerce chairman (who I’d met before, he was the realtor that showed me that recording studio) and some other cool people, saw all my pool/storage coworkers, Jane drew on the office white board, Rocky gave a toast, Rocky’s kid cut the ribbon, Jane and I held it, lots of people took pictures it was generally a wholesome small town good time and I wish I had the pictures yet but no one has gotten them to me yes. Soon.

But man, great wholesome time. The small-town business-man I wanna be manifested, no publicly-traded or geopolitical drama. A+ time.

Then to Jane’s gymnastics, where I spent most of it on phone calls like an absentee dad and hated myself.

Then I fed Jane cheesy rollups while I drove her straight to Chore House for Girl Scouts which was lovely and adorable except I fucked the whole thing up by applying proper ranked-choice voting to their vote on which mascot to have. There’s all this lore about Girl Scouts and Mascots, there used to be 12 troops, and each one had a mascot, but eventually there were too many troops and now you’re troop number 2,845 or some shit, but as a Heritage Tradition™ they all also select one of the original 12 mascots to be their troops mascot. I did not know about this lore, bit too Skull n Bones if you ask me.

But anyway, I applied my election-theory college education obtained from my professor who aided in implementing the first national-ranked choice procedure in the modern world (was it Holland? I don’t remember) and taught us all about the various types, the Borda method, equal-ranked, truncated, instant runoff, single-transferable voting, defeat-dropping Condorcet, I am looking at the Wikipedia page now and it is giving me PTSD.

So anyway, I ran it as a Borda count, Unicorn narrowly beat out White Rose and, ohhhh fuuuuuck, my daughter did not like that. Lost her shit. In front of all the other Brownies. I mean, good for me, I guess, no one could accuse me of rigging the election, but then Emma and I had to go take her into a side room and spend like a half an hour calming her down.

It’s fucking insane when she does this. She threatens to hit us, disown us, almost threw a theramin, if you try to talk to her she just says “go away go away” over and over again, refuses to listen to a single word, says she’ll do “anything in the world” to get, I think she wanted Shooting Star? It’s HARD man.

And, of course, no other kid did this.

Now we were the only people there with two parents — I was there for IT duty cuz, as you’ll recall, I recently changed the entire AV setup over there. And it was Jane’s house. So maybe she felt more comfortable there than the other kids?

But god. It suuuuucked.

When she was in the “I’ll do anything” loop, I started asking if she would do certain things to get Shooting Star. Would she jump off a bridge? Well, no, she would not. That’s good at least. Then I went for silly. I asked if she would stick her tongue out 10,000 times or kiss my knee 6 million times. This got her laughing.

BUT the thing is, even as she’s laughing at my silly jokes, she’s still fucking pissed and angry and yelling at us. AT THE SAME TIME.

It is heartbreaking, beautiful, and kinda concerning. My god. All the feels.

You really do never see anything like it.

She’s better today, but she still didn’t want to talk about it much.

She needs some better coping mechanisms for disappointment, but I don’t know how to instill these. I can only try and tell her over and over, for the rest of her life “disappointment fades every second and while it might not completely go away, every second gets easier” and say that over and over for the rest of her life.

Which I will do.

But man, she doesn’t want to hear it.

So this morning I did a predictable “Guess What Chicken Butt” routine, except, surprise!

“Guess What?”

“What?”

“Disappointment fades every second and while it might not completely go away, every second gets easier.”

“Noooo la la la la!”

Mwahaha.

We are listening to the Daddy-Jane playlist in the mornings now. She is learning the words to songs by the Wannadies, Stars, Cocteau Twins. It is great. That is working great. New addition to the DJP yesterday, She Sells Sanctuary by the Cult. Marvelous.

Because I spent several hours at Chore House yesterday, I did actually listen to something other than this Joy Division box set. I listened to the new EP from Replaced by Robots, the current project of Dave Goolkasian, of the Elevator Drops and Texas Governor, and his wife Heather. Their new EP has a remake of a Texas Governor song that was a big hit from the era when I was in the band, 1999-2000ish. Pretty sure Buttondown doesn’t expand Bandcamp embeds, let’s try:

ReplacedByRobotsThe Human Touch

Nope, weird. Alas. Here you go:

ALL RIGHT. Hope you’re well. Talk soon. Stay safe. Eat 30 plants or some shit.