Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1342
Amazing insurance renewal tool, meditations on depression, HBO's Watchmen, rock shows (of course), frunks, 80's Tercel Wagons. Planning a trip to Alaska. Stir fry recreation. HOA meeting.
Hi hi hi. Brain racing a bit this morning, all over the place. As they say on the Youtubes, let’s jump right in.
Before we begin I would like to shout out my insurance broker for Nimbus on the absolutely majestic, amazing tool they have for applying for your renewal insurance. Every year with them it’s a new tool and they always suck. But this one? so good. Might be one of the best online tools I have ever used. Just amazing. And it is ridiculously hard to attract and retain solid engineering and especially product people at companies like that, but whatever company that was, they nailed it.
Okay I looked it up, they seem to be called Indio. If you are an insurance broker, highly recommend. Maybe I’ll go sell it to the three other insurance brokers in my life. Wait. Four. Do they pay a referral bonus?
Been having a bit of a rough mental time last few days but I think I am out the other side. Spent a lot of time thinking about all the stupid shit I did as a kid, how there are a bunch of people out there who probably secretly hate me for some stupid thing I did when I was young and I wish I could apologize to them but, you know, don’t remember it. Not a great line of thinking. Anyway, sorry, sorry.
It also struck me. Well, here lemme just do a rare cut-and-paste from the personal journal here:
I have been thinking a lot back to those early months I was on Cymbalta and how happy I was. It was really great. Nothing was different in my life, I just... looked at it differently. Felt differently. Which is so weird because it is nothing, it's not real, but also it is everything! The same life, and a vastly larger amount of happiness and contentment. I hate that. I know it's chemistry but I am not convinced that going down that road there is any permanent solution. Not super excited about a dosage spiral. But I guess I don't actually KNOW what happens when you go continually down that path. I am really sad it stopped working. I am deeply tempted to go back on and eventually up my dose. But where does it end? Can you just up your dose forever with no consequences? Of course not.
I can feel it coursing through my blood right now. Indignation, anger, humiliation, hatred, shame. NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. I have had a totally normal week. But it's just burning through me right now. I DO NOT WANT THIS. It is so weird and so frustrating. I just want to be happy, man. Without running around the planet manically chasing a high and the latest thrill. I want to be content where I am.
Wait, sorry, that’s not the epiphany that’s the normal run-of-the-mill bad week. Oh yes, here we go:
The sheer number of things I need to not think about in order to survive is staggering.
That was a real epiphany for me. I used to — well, obviously, I still do — love thinking about stuff. But more and more I’ll be, like, reading a group chat, or the paper or something and I will just think “well I am not going to think about that.” Like Delores when in programming mode in Westworld. “Doesn’t look like anything to me.” This is kind of new. No, not new, it’s been building up for maybe a decade. But newly recognized.
Don’t think about what could have been in life, don’t think about past mistakes, don’t think about Trump or Gaza or this or that.
I really used to look down on those people — I remember dating someone who loved to cope by not thinking about things and I just thought that was so lazy.
And I still kinda think that, but… now it’s about myself too! Woo!
Well. We will just not think about that anymore. Har har.
On the mend today.
Listening to a single by a gentleman I do not know named BD Reeves. Got a bit of a Freedy Johnson feel to it. I like to think BD Reeves is lawman Bass Reeves from the HBO Watchmen, which I recently re-watched and is still amazing. When you first watch it, every episode ends in an insane, bonkers revelation and that is markedly lessened the second time, with binging, but even without that, it is still just phenomenal. I struggle to think of a better recent show. One and done. No need for a second season, though plenty of hooks were dangled. Just phenomenal. Not enough one-and-done seasons out there. Considering re-watching Mrs Davis next, which is also amazing. If you got a one-and-done sci-fi ish show out there, hook me up. Though mostly these days I need the comfort of a re-watch because life itself is scary enough, maaan.
Basically demolished the “To Investigate” playlist yesterday. Only three hours left. I am ready for this to end. There has been a lot of great music, though. And the new “To Investigate” playlist has 22 hours of stuff in it. But we can take that at our leisure, there isn’t stuff in there that’s been sitting in there for seven months.
Jealous of everyone in Boston that went to the PJ Harvey show last night. The setlist was not to my liking — few of my faves at the end but a poor, poor showing for Rid of Me. But that doesn’t matter because a) PJ Harvey is an amazing artist and even the shit I am not super into is an awesome artistic document, b) friends! Man I miss seeing shows with tons of friends, knowing everyone there, and c) Still would have gotten “Man Size” and “Dress” and that would have been worth it.
I did get tickets for the Mogwai show at the Paradise next spring, though. I am confident it is going to line up perfectly with Jane’s spring break. Even though this is knowable right now. I am not going to look because I don’t want to be disappointed. See you there. Honest.
I worry for the Ford Lightning and I am annoyed with America for not buying more of them. Worried Ford will give up. But, man. I am committed. These things are so great. What a world we live in that something could have a 10,000 pound towing capacity, 320 mile range, 900+ horsepower, zero maintenance and ownership costs, and we talk about a failure. Also, the frunk! I am never going back from having a giant frunk it is a gamechanger. As far as I know, only the Lightning and the Mach-E have frunks, Ford really nailed that (The Model S or some shit probably has a frunk, I acknowledge, but we are ignoring him). Once you’ve gotten into the habit of setting a pizza flat in the frunk, once you’ve gotten used to not having to smell the shit in your cargo space, you don’t want to go back. And I can’t blame ICE vehicles for no frunks but there is a disturning trend where even most EVs these days don’t have frunks and it is so lame. Frunks rule, especially on giant trucks that are a pain to back out of parking spaces with. Pull-through parking, no reverse, and still have access to a giant storage area? yes please.
Yesterday we talked about the Tercel Gen 2 Wagon SR5 and I talked about how a bajillion people in Alaska had one and sure enough, four friends got back to me saying they had one (Chandra did not have one, my memory was incorrect there). G– summed it up nicely:
It was an 85 SR5 and was one of my favorite cars I’ve ever owned. Fun fact, there were so many kids at west valley that drove them they took a picture of all of us next to our Tercel Wagons for the yearbook one year. Which makes sense as it was the perfect car to give a newly licensed teenage driver in Alaska. They were 4WD with a relatively wide wheelbase and very light which made them AMAZINGLY safe on snowy roads, that with the fact they were slow as hell, and boom, perfect car to give your kid.
Idly thinking about these two things as I was headed home from dropping off Jane today, I wondered if, in fact, it was a perfect car for a kid, because what about safety. Then I started thinking about how the real reason we lost all these cool small Japanese box cars was safety. And I started wondering if this era of giant trucks, everyone driving F-150s was, in fact, as unsafe as people say. And low and behold:
Car fatalities per capita going down, down, down across the age of the big truck and SUV. Curious.
Not making an argument here, just pointing it out: new cars are so much safer. For pedestrians too.
Now, of course, if they were all EVs, we wouldn’t have the gas crap. Then again, the MPH on a 2024 ICE F-150 seems to be the same as the 1982 Tercel SR5 wagon. Weird.
Cars, man, cars.
(Writer in me idly wondering whether this newsletter would hook a reader in better by starting off with Tercel talk or depression talk.)
Speaking of Tercels in Alaska, I bought my tickets for Alaska next summer. Whole family. Ten days. Over solstice. The waver gang — three or four generations of em — are having a reunion for the dances we used to have. I am very excited. I hope someone plays Supernaut by 1,000 Homo DJs. Woah for a second there I couldn’t remember if it was one thousand or ten thousand homo DJs. It is a thousand. Thusly, 10,000 Homo DJs would be a pretty funny band name.
Anyway, I have a wife and kid and they like to travel in comfort and have a nice hotel room and hey I am old and would definitely prefer to have a nice flight and hotel room. So the whole trip cost a fortune, just a painful, painful fortune. After this, the next time I’m bringing my daughter to Alaska will be by car because it will be a whole, whole lot cheaper.
She better be old enough to remember it.
I am excited. We will go to Chena Hot Springs we will drive by all my old homes, do the Chena Ridge Pump loop, maybe drive down Rosie Creek. Maybe drive out to Harding Lake or something. Probably not enough time for a Parks drive but never say never.
Question: is the drag show still happening at the Palace? I have been missing that and would love to go again.
And the Boatel, of course, gotta take her to the Boatel, named by Jane’s great grandmother.
Anyway, it’ll be fun. Hope to see you at the dance thing.
(Also this new Starflyer 59 album is great I think there was an Alaskan in this band at one point maybe even a West Valleyan (is that a word? What is the demonym for someone from West Valley? Probably West Valleyite, huh.) but memory escapes).
So for maybe two months now, I have been making my famed stir fry for lunch again. I took maybe six months off: just got tired of it, all the complexity, the umami and switched to a boring-ass chicken-and-swiss sandwich for lunch with a side of cucumber (the one thing the stir fry and sandwich had in common: a side of cucumber). But somewhere around July I started bringing it back, the stir fry.
And let me tell you: this has been like NASA trying to bring back the Saturn V rocket. This stir fry is insanely complex: making chili oil and Sichuan sauce every day from scratch, on the fly. The first results were not great. But now, after a few months… getting pretty close to perfection! Every day is a new memory of some little trick I had in the past. Every day is a small incremental improvement.
One day this stir fry will take me to the moon.
We had our HOA meeting yesterday, and I finished my five-year run as treasurer. Yay me for giving up a responsibility, more of that please. It was nice to see all the neighbors, everyone got along. I gave my presentation and acted like an adult, which is always hard in front of boomers. It’s fascinating, the gulf in casual speech between Gen X and boomers, still playing out 40 years later. We still say “awesome” and “like” and they decidedly do not. Feel like I should bring “gnarly” and “tubular’ back just to trigger em. NO. I am kidding. I like my neighbors they are nice even if they don’t say “awesome” or even “cool.”
Jane got to play on the fun playset that the hosts had out back, she was pretty well behaved, she did not spend the whole day saying poopy butt. We are making progress on that, by the way. She said one poopy thing — I think it was “poop in the center of the earth” and Emma and I were like “see, that’s novel, that’s different, that’s funny and interesting. You gotta find new interesting things to say with poop in them, and not repeat the same ones over and over,” and I gotta say, I think she’s taking it to heart a bit?
She had a really good one this morning about poop on the side of the road for breakfast. Solid. The joke. Can’t speak to the poop.
Shoegaze playlist for you today. Very into the way the Air Formation and Whitelands covers mesh in the icon Spotify auto-generates for a playlist. Oh shit there are two Whitelands songs on here, sorry. My old friend Skot makes an appearance, love the shoegaze he makes these days, check him out. New Mercury Rev always very exciting maybe they won’t cancel their Cats Cradle show this time round. Honestly most of these bands I don’t even really know well, but I am glad I finally sorted out in my head that Cigarettes For Breakfast = awesome shoegaze band and Cigarettes After Sex = moody AOR in the EBTG vein. Speaking of CAS, they seem to be doing an arena tour?? Are they really that big? That seems crazy.
God I think I have starred every track on this Starflyer 59 album might be a modern day masterpiece.
Righty-o. Jolly good. Off you pop.