Check check one two, one two, testing, testing. Hello. Good morning. hi. Howdy. Are you doing okay? Man, that was a brutal Monday for me, not gonna lie. Holy moly, man. The world, man? Have your read the news lately? Jesus.

RFK out there just being insanely racist like it’s totally normal to do now. Coupla years ago they were like “oh cool now we can say the R word again” and now they’re just like “well, you know, Arabs are the worst.” And it’s just completely normalized. Absolutely batshit and horrific.

It does not help matters that all along the way they have been publishing their blueprints and commentating about how this was all planned. I think it’s easy if you’re not paying attention to just assume this is some sort of will-of-the-people or sign-of-the-time vibe shift and not, like, a giant global plot. And then of course they call you a lunatic when you point out their self-admitted giant global plot. Fun.

A week of chores meant a week of not reading the news as much and, I mean, yeah, I read the news, but I didn’t doomscrolling's and mainline the news. That was probably healthy.

Israel election today. They are not allowed to poll past last Friday by law, isn’t that interesting? In most polls, Bibi is behind, but it’s close, and they are a multi-party system so it’s more about the holistic sense: who can form a coalition government, who gets first crack. I am not optimistic about this election. But man it would be amazing if he got ousted. Or, if, like, a coalition of, you know, peace-loving pacifists won. I like pacifists. Most of the time. I definitely like any all pacifists in the middle east at the moment, though. Come sit next to me, pacifists.

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Listening this morning to Newly Sentient Being, the new 4-LP live album from Swans, a recording, I believe, of their “last American tour.” Do I have that right? Let’s look. Yes. That is correct. 2025, Berlin. I went to the Boston show, their second-to-last American show of the tour, and ever, supposedly. Or “in this incarnation,” as they said when they announced their “breakup” which you can’t really do when you are, at the core, a one-man band. It was good to see them again, one last time. In the same room where I first saw them on the Love of Life tour in 1992. They played this crazy dirgey almost reggae song and I am hoping there is a recording of it on these 4LPs, because it’s not released anywhere else and it was awesome.

No colored vinyl, just black. Michael Gira does not do colored vinyl. Gotta respect him for that. Why would Swans have, like, purple swirled vinyl, come on. They don’t even have choruses.

So instead, here, have a Suss record I listened to yesterday. Such a great band name, Suss. Or, I guess, Sus would be. And they are a great band, but they’re a mellow ambient band and I feel like someone more… amped should get the shortened word for “suspicious/suspect”. Sus. Be kind of a dick move to name your band Sus now, though, wouldn’t it?

So I’ve been on, this, like, six week journey to buy a fucking USB cable from Amazon and I gotta say I think Amazon is basically entirely scams now? It is fucking insane. To summarize:

1. First I order a cable that meets my specific needs. It is on sale, even. $7. Amazon tells me it has shipped. Amazon tells me it has arrived. Amazon says there is a photo of its arrival. The cable never arrived, the photo of its arrival is non-existent. I have been meaning to report this to Amazon for like a month now but haven’t gotten around to it because I keep forgetting and am lazy and of course for the first few days you’re convinced they threw the small cable package into a box with, like, 50 pounds of cat litter or some shit, so you’re never completely sure it didn’t arrive at all until you do the recycling and check every box. But no, it didn’t ever arrive. This, I suppose, is the main crux of whastever scamming is going on. List a cheap-ish product with an unbeatable price, and just never ship it. Only some portion of the populace will even complain.

2. I re-order the same cable because it’s exactly what I need and cheap. The second one spends three weeks in supposed transit before Amazon helpfully tells me it is never going to arrive.

3. I order a third cable, though this time I’m not going to order the same one, obviously. Plus, I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but when I got to my order details and click on the cable to go to it’s product page, well, surprise surprise, it’s not even there anymore. But hey lucky me, a new cable that meets my needs is on sale. It’s a dollar more, but hey it’s actually even better than the fist one: it has an angled head on one side that would be useful in my situation, and it’s length is even more perfectly suited to my needs, owing to it’s round number in metric instead of feet. I order it.

4. A cable arrives, but it is not that cable. It has no round head. It is the round number in feet length instead of the round-number-in-metric. (Specifically, a 3-meter cable is closer to the exact length I need than a 10-foot one). So this, I suppose, is scam number two. Except there is a mystery here! This cable is a high-quality, brand-name Anker cable and not the no-name Chinese brand I ordered. WTF! How is this a scam? Is it a fake Anker cable? Sold off-books from the factory and they just threw in the package whatever they had lying around? Probably that, right?

Whatever the second scam is, I am now six weeks into this fucking mess and I still do not have the cable I need. It is ridiculous. It’s fucking insane how fucked Amazon is. Fuckin fuck fuck. Exhausting.

And yes I would buy this cable locally if I could. I would buy it from, I don’t know, reliable-trustworth-independent-cables-are-us if I could. Which I guess is LTT store dot com. They make awesome cables. Wait hrm. You know what? Fuck it. Done. $30 cable, $8 shipping vs $8 and $0. But, then, I suppose the cable will actually arrive this time, huh?

Jesus. Slightly-more-ethical capitalism is so expensive. Oh well. Be the change you want to see in the world, amirite?

Walter Koenig died that is very sad. When I was a kid Walter Koenig came to Alaska, to Fairbanks, made an appearance at a sci-fi event at the Tanana Valley State Fair. I was so starstruck. First celeb I ever saw in person. I was probably eight or so. I brought my little Ertl USS Enterprise model kit to the fair. I remember that detail for some reason. It was a major day in my life. I think about it a lot.

We watched STIV: The Voyage Home last night. Had been a while, too long. That movie is so engrained into my subconscious that it seems almost unnecessary to watch it again. But it really is just a gem of a film. It’s the kind of film that makes knowing fun of it’s plot holes, so you don’t mind them: “and they will be again, that’s the beauty of it.” “How do we know he didn’t invent it in the first place?” Chekov losing his phaser to the Navy is hilarious. An actual Chekov’s gun for completely fucking up the future but whatever, oh well. Was that intentional? No idea but it’s just so great.

People say that Koenig was fantastic as a creepy secret policeman in Babylon 5. They say that he is a great actor and has some amazing post Star Trek performances. I’ve never seen him in anything else. I have been, coincidentally, idly thinking about watching all of Babylon 5 of late. Because I need some sort of kinda-pathetic, nerdy, obsessive new thing in my life. Or feel like I do to, you know, stave off the oblivion. I should buy a boat. I think if Babylon 5 had received the HD-conversion love that The Next Generation has, I would do it. But I’m not sure I have the stomach for SD content at this phase in my life. I am soft. I need my definition.

Anyway, he is missed. Childhood hero, never did anything problematic, to our knowledge. Nuclear Wessles. RIP.

It’s my daughter’s birthday today. She is nine years old. That is crazy. I have had a kid for nine years.

We had a nice drive to school, we listened to “Soul on Fire” by Spiritualized (I did not cry are you proud of me) and “Freedom of 76” by Ween. She was unimpressed with my long cultural description of the Ween phenomenon. Which coulda gone either way, I suppose, since she did find the Gathering of the Juggalos an interesting phenomenon a few weeks ago. And though she did not add either song to the Daddy-Jane playlist, she did like them both, or so she said.

Then we listened to Suki Waterhouse, which she did add. Then we looked at pictures of Suki Waterhouse because, and I don’t know if you know this, Suki Waterhouse is very attractive.

Then I said “sook-eeeeh” like Vampire Bill does in True Blood and Jane was like “Why did you do that” so then I had to explain Suki Stackhouse and Vampire Bill and True Blood to her and for the first time I realized both Suki’s names end in “house” and now I have a lot of questions.

I still feel like I am mostly useless as a parent. Yesterday she had a fun new game of leaning all her weight on me and staring into my face from a half-inch away and it was cute and fun for ten minutes or so but eventually I got claustrophobic and sore and kept asking her politely to stop and she would just get more aggro about it and we got caught in some sort of doom spiral where the more I panicked and asked her to stop the more oppressive she became. And I was keeping my cool, trying to think of any other strategy and couldn’t. Looked at my wife and plead “what am I supposed to do here?” And all she could think of was get up and make us all leave the restaurant.

I’m sure after 20 years of parenting I would know what to do. I’m sure it’ll be real useful. By the time I learn this skill, I will never need it again.

(and for those keeping track, the kinda-reggae Swans track is, in fact, on this album, and it is entitled “The End of Regretting” and it is, if I am being honest, not that Reggae-ish on this album, which makes wonder if the song evolved, or if I am remembering it wrong.)

OK let me see if I can get through today without nisediving into a black hole of despair. Wish me luck.