Good morning happy Monday oh boy oh boy. Kept Jane home sick today. Bad cough, lotta sniffles. Right on the edge. No fever. She was ambivalent about going, I wasn’t feeling great about getting all the other kids sick, even though they probably all got me sick in that puppy pile at the Halloween party. So she is sitting behind me, playing Cities: Skylines. I feel strangely concerned I made the wrong decision and today was going to be the single most important day in Jane’s entire education or something. What is wrong with me.

(Since tomorrow is election day and the next few days are gonna be pretty politics heavy, enjoy this politics-free edition. GO VOTE).

Went to the dentist on Friday. First time I had gone to the dentist in six years, twenty-four days. I reviewed my insurance, unchanged. I reviewed my medical conditions, unchanged. My life is stasis. Got a full set of X-Rays — not a thing that has gotten more comfortable over the years! They did a thing where they poke each tooth and call out numbers, something about gums. Then they polished them, then cleaned them with a combination pick-pressure washer. Then they scraped at them and then they washed them. Felt nice. Then the dentist came in and claimed “Brutal” by Olivia was a rip-off of “Cannonball” by the Breeders and he had fun showing his daughter that and I wanted to interject that we had seen both Olivia and the Breeders this summer, but his hands and tools were in my mouth so I did not have the opportunity.

Then he told me he didn’t know how, but I had dodged a bullet and nothing was wrong and my teeth were in excellent shape. I told him I was being responsible, and that last time I had gone ten years between visits.

They asked me if I wanted a six-month checkup and I laughed and said “good lord no. But I promise it’ll be less than six years. Maybe three or four.”

I know my luck will run out someday on my teeth.

But not today.

Went to Walmart, they are permanently out of La Choy canned bean sprouts, which is a shame. They were a nice part of my stir fry. I have a bean sprout growing machine thingy. Maybe I go back to growing my own. But that is a lot of work when you want to eat bean sprouts five days a week. You gotta always be growing. There had been a six-week dry spell on our organic peanut butter. I still hoard from covid, and keep six jars in the house at all times. And we almost ran out. BUT WE DID NOT. Because of my hoarding. And now we have six jars again. Call me COVID GRANNY.

They have no seeds. Like they usually have the garden seeds hidden away somewhere, even in the off season, like in a back corner or something. I have never experienced them just, not there at all. Which means I had to plant old lettuce seeds in the greenhouse this winter. Fingers crossed.

OH and they are installing EV fast chargers at my Walmart. Very exciting. Not sure how often I will need or use them, but I’m glad they will be there as an option. We are in a fast-charging desert here in North Chatham and I am very glad that is changing.

Friday evening we had that babysitter, and I took your guys’ advice and I went to the movies. I watched You Can See Everything. As I said in a group chat, it was very good, probably completely amoral, a wonderful cypher for people to talk about forever, depressing, terrible, brilliant and awful. Perfect for modern society. I guess I’m happy I saw it but also it was a horrific undertaking and a thing I hope to never do again.

Some spoilers, you can skip if you haven’t seen it, from here to the Slack Blurb break:

Three examples, I think, say a lot to me about the film:

First: Nathan is talking to Elizabeth’s dad in California. They keep getting interrupted by the husband. Nathan makes a big editing decision to drill down on this and highlight it. AND YET, in Texas, Nathan is talking to the dad and he says one of the most interesting things in the movie if you actually cared about the details of the case: that during COVID there was a big bidding war for the Theranos patents. Nathan has zero interest and wanders off. He very clearly didn’t particularly care about the dad’s insights, though he consciously edited a whole scene earlier implying he did.

Second: They are all headed to the jail to check in. Nathan is in the car, there is a camera mounted to the outside of the car on Elizabeth. They get to the join, Nathan is now lurking PI-style in his own car, there is no camera on the window. All of it was staged. Why. What is the point.

Third: They are both such horrible communicators, it is maddening. Look: a computer can run any program, even those not written yet. That is the chasm those two could not cross when talking about a machine that can run “any” test. To her it was (probably) obvious, to him it was (probably) inconceivable. Neither had the ability, or interest in, making a very fucking clear metaphor that would have cleared up their confusion. For Elizabeth, fine. She’s the subject. For the director? Kinda just tells me he is not cut out for his actual job.

I am generally against biopics, and fictionalizations of living human beings. When the Amanda series came out, I was against it, did not watch it. I do not like these things I think they are wrong. I know this is, like, not a common opinion, but I believe it. Wait till people are dead. So, when there’s the scene with Amanda where Nathan asked her if Elizabeth had really said “It doesn’t matter” when the machine blew up and she’s like “who knows! it’s TV!” I find that damning. Don’t do that!

I wanted to murder the cinematographer I get the artistic merit of all those fucking close ups but knock it the fuck off it is manipulative.

I very much get how Nathan arrived at the use of Amanda and I get why she thought this was a good idea, and the recreations themselves were very very good but it was probably just a bad idea. People have a hard time avoiding bad ideas when the bad ideas seem exciting and ground breaking. I am sympathetic.

All in all, Nathan made something very compelling out of what could have been a frustrating failure. Probably. Who knows. Intentionally turning it into something with no definitive point of view is depressing to me, but clever, and what people love. Boy people love talking about it. Everyone thinks they have it figured out.

I’m happy I never need to think about this again.

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!

Listening to a band (artist?) called MorMor today. I know nothing about them. I threw it in the queue cuz I thought it might have been Morr Music related but nah. Album is called No One Alive Will Listen. It is pretty good. Synthy R&B. I think I will google this act. Solo Canadian dude. 34-ish years old. Adopted. Mom’s an English professor. Second album. Well, okay. I like it. MorMor.

Halloween! We went to the big neighborhood next to us, our friends had a housewarming/halloween party. Kids kept puppy-piling me on the couch for some reason. Legions of kids dressed as ghosts and Minecraft and such piling on top of me. No one is sure why.

Trick-or-treating around that neighborhood is so great. People go all out. And so many great garage bars. Emma said someone needs do a book of the garages of Briar Chapel and man, it would be great. Nabokov has that line in Lolita about the insanity that goes on behind the respectable, suburban doors of America, and, man, he was not kidding. Just gorgeous, fully decked-out lounges, whole auto body shops, the works. So many bars. And those bars were giving out so many free drinks.

One house had mounted, into the concrete, permanently, in front of the house, a pole holding up a housing for three projectors, so they could project fully onto the house. Underground wiring, locking case, vents, the works.

Another gay couple and their son had so many Halloween decorations they said it took up an entire room of the house and a storage unit and it was mostly the son’s doing. That kid was handing out candy and having the best time. He gave me a fruity IPA.

Just amazing, all around. I will never get over it.

When Jane gets older I am going to harangue one of my friends in that hood to let me take over their garage for Halloween because it seems so fun sitting there handing out candy and booze and looking at costumes. I will wear an outfit and DJ halloween tunes or something. It’s gonna rule.

Chores! Back to the Studio! I got so much done! Got three panels of floor done so I could move the main HVAC duct junction box off of the bare joists and onto some subfloor, so I could continue doing subfloor all the way to the east wall. Then I drilled a hole in the east wall to the outside of the house and ran conduit all along the east side of the house so I could add my speakers, camera and wifi to the east side outdoor work area of the house. Does that sound like a lot? Well, it was. I had to make, like four hardware store trips and a trip to Sherwin Williams to get paint that matches the soffits so I can paint all the conduit.

It was so satisfying and cathartic to do this. I had a revelation: I do love chores, but I love chores in the attic studio the most, and I suspect it is because I am working on making a recording studio, furthering a larger goal in my life to be making more music again. I often this that working on the studio is part of working on the first album I will make in the studio. Kinda like when Zuck was like “I’m gonna kill all my own food this year” ha I wonder how that went. The goal of the chores matters, even though I do like doing chores for chores’ sake.

Got some other little things done here and there, but mostly just focused on the attic. The nights will be warm this week so I postponed my greenhouse & fruit tree winterization another week. Some fucker of a squirrel dug up my garlic but.. only from one of the four beds I planted it in? Real weird. Why just that one bed? No idea.

Had a spare Homepod mini I had removed from the Chore House garage that got hard wired for speakers. Set it up in my closet to make a stereo pair with the HomePod Mini that was already there. My god, music sounds so good in my closet now. I might never leave my closet.

Jane has had a fun weekend, so many activities. And now she’s sick. Checks out. Or playing sick. I’m not even mad. Play sick. Sometimes I think you like school too much.

After trick-or-treating Saturday she insisted I lay down with her until she falls asleep, which is usually Emma’s job. And I did. And it was great. She has told me, twice this weekend, unbidden and apropos of nothing, that I am a really good dad. Reader, I cried.

Longtime readers of GMHHAY will know I am obsessed with an Irish electronica act entitled For Those I Love, the solo project of one David Balfe, not to be confused with Blur’s manager David Balfe. He rarely does shows, will only do two this year, but did one at a festival in Ireland this summer and he posted it to his Youtube yesterday and oh my god it is so good I want to see this guy live so bad. Just a single dude on stage, but man, he owns it. Strong recommend if you have an hour of your time. Someone needs to release this dude’s records in the US.

All right. Keep the faith. We got this.