Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1163
Rough night, Pearl Jam, against travel, illicit sand mining industry, My Kindle Scribe workflow
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am… well, I am a bit better. Yesterday was rough, what with Jane and the morning, then another bout in the evening where she insisted that cheating at Connect Four was the only thing she would do, and I had to keep playing and I had to let her cheat and whoops, there goes the pieces flying all over the room, and here come the warm screams (Eno reference) and then oh here is an email from my job that I need to deal with immediately oh boy the screams just kicked up a notch. Ended the night basically comatose on the couch occasionally grunting out a solo, sad giggle at a particularly good 30 Rock joke. 30 Rock did not cheer me up as much as I hoped.
But then I woke up oddly upbeat and feeling pretty decent. And Jane was pretty much an angel this morning. And maybe everything will be okay.
Though I am oddly sweaty this morning.
I am listening to the new Pearl Jam. I was never much of a Pearl Jam fan. I liked “Alive” when it first came out, cuz I figured they were another great Seattle grunge band like Screaming Trees or Nirvana or something. And they were, I guess? I don’t know. Things are hazy after that Smashing Pumpkins/Pearl Jam/Red Hot Chili Peppers tour for Ten. They got big. I got disdainful. I never thought about them again until a year or two ago when I listened to that solo album by one of them that had that great song about Nasa or whatever. Okay I had to Google that. Eddie Vedder teams up with NASA for “Invincible.” Great song, great album. And then this week people were going on about how great the new Pearl Jam is. And, I mean, yeah, I can see it. If I loved this band for like thirty years and then they put this album out, I would be psyched. Probably better than the new Mary Chain, as much as it pains me to say that. But not better than Damage & Joy, that album rules.
Hard to reconcile my snobby-ass Gen X grunge disdain for success and top forty hits with the fact that some of these bands are pretty good.
Also, Todd, you will be horrified to know that I am considering going and seeing Live on this tour this summer, even though for twenty years or so of my life I considered Live the worst live band I ever saw. Haven’t done the digging to see who’s actually in Live these days, but, you know, as long as we get Ed’s overly-earnest, vaguely creepy antics, I think it should be a hoot. They’re on tour with Soul Asylum and Stone Temple Pilots, har har har.
Maybe I’ll drink another $35 frozen margarita.
Here is a super interesting article about the illicit sand-mining industry. Yes, that’s right, sand. The world uses more sand than it uses of anything else except water. Sand is everything; the concrete in our buildings, the silicon in our phones. And, you know, to the extent that I ever thought about sand as a material in the past, I thought to myself: “whatever, if there’s one thing we have plenty of, it’s sand. Mine the entire Sahara. So much sand.” But wouldn’t you know it, the best sand is river sand, because it’s more jagged and less rounded than desert sand. Great. And, of course, sand is heavy and it is cheaper to get sand from nearby than it is from far away, so people secretly mine sand from everywhere, all the time, fucking up the wetlands and, yeah, I mean, if you saw some people with a digger and a dump truck at a river bed would you even think to yourself “there are some environmental thieves!” I mean, maybe. You would after reading this thrilling article in Scientific American about sand.
Haven’t read a book in ages but I’ve been making my way through my article backlog pretty solidly. I have a good workflow now. I have an Automator action on my computer and a Shortcut on my phone that take web articles, convert them to PDFs, and email them to my personal Kindle address. They are then sent to my Amazon Kindle Scribe, which is a great device, big screen, reads PDFs, has a pencil for highlighting and underlining and annotating. And then I email them back to myself with the one-click quick-send in the Kindle, so I can file the document in my filing system. Most every night, I read the new articles I sent myself that day — though I am two days behind on that big New Yorker profile of Daniel Radcliffe. And I try and knock out one or two of the backlog ones from when I was sending myself tons of articles, but never reading them.
Given my limited time, I have not managed to do this and read books, and this year is looking like it will be my lowest number of books read in quite a few years. But the idea is that once I’m done with the backlog, I can read the day’s articles, then maybe a single chapter of a book before bed. Or something. We shall see.
Anyway, Kindle Scribe. A+ recommended. They are constantly updating the software, too. A recent update now auto-zooms the PDF in to make it so you don’t have needless giant white margins, and so all the text is bigger.
It is, of course, Amazon, and you may rightfully hate Amazon, but they are my biggest work expense and a giant work check each month, so I am pretty wrapped up in Amazon in my life, plus, I am already locked in to the Kindle ecosystem what with my 200 or so books in there, and I like e-books and I did try the bookshop.org e-book ecosystem but it’s not quite there yet and switching to Apple accomplishes nothing.
Choose your battles.
Alas.
A couple weeks ago we were at the burger place and I overheard a mom woman at the table next to us unashamedly say that she just didn’t travel, didn’t like traveling, thought traveling and I was so in awe of her utter lack of shame and/or embarrassment at feeling this totally brilliant and correct feelings. As I prepare for a one-day trip in two days, I am confronted again with the fact that travel sucks, travel is the cost you pay for having friends, and… okay I am being polemical but travel absolutely has diminishing returns. It is so weird to me that people won’t even acknowledge that. The first new country you visit? Mind-altering, consciousness-expanding, amazing. The 50th? What’s the Pringles and/or Kit Kat situation, what can I get arrested for here and how bad is this pollution?
That’s all I got today. Gonna shred some serious cardboard today, very excited about that. Fight this headache. Spend a lot of time on the phone with lawyers for work. Do Daddy bedtime. Try and not play Connect Four with her. Maybe learn more about China. And I am going to half-ass the Jane photo today with this blurry photo of Jane trying to pet Roy that I took like an hour ago because it is not a good photo but it is a good memory, it was very cute and I knew in that moment that we were going to have a nice morning together and, you know, cherish the wild years.
Don’t have a playlist ready or anything so the Media of the Day today is this song that came on shuffle this morning, from my 7,000+ song playlist “All the Good.” I don’t remember the band, I don’t remember the song, but it was great and Jane and I both enjoyed it.
All right sorry for the brevity (lol) today I am… I AM TRYING DADDY TRIED.