Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1352
Tolkien, water bottles, Crippling Alcoholism (the band), NC relief, Crossings by Ben Goldfarb, generalized screen anxiety, blueprint printing and pining for my prepress yesteryears.
Morning, how’s tricks. Not too bad over here. My lightweight illness of the last few days seems to be lifting. Helps that I got enough sleep. Man waking up at 6:30 sucks I am not good at this and I do not seem to be getting better. Plus a bird keeps pooping on my truck this week, not sure what is up with that. I just got the thing washed, maaan. Stop pooping on it. What have I done to deserve this. I’m not parking in a different place, I’m not doing anything different. Maybe it is migratory. Move on, birds, move on.
Birds are disappearing, eh? I bet by the time Jane is an adult it will be considered super rare to see a bird, any bird. Something like seeing a bear. Rare.
And the bugs too. Remember when you were a kid and you would drive down the highway and your windshield, well, your parents’ windshield, you were just a kid, your parents’ windshield would absolutely get covered in bug splat? When i was first a driver, at the age of 14 in 1984, admittedly I was in Alaska, but… you had to wash your windshield every single time you got gas. Because of bug splat. How often do you wash your windshield these days?
I didn’t talk enough about Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb when I read it last January. Really a monumental accomplishment of a book about roads, about animals, about where roads and animals meet. I think about that book constantly. Those lightweight pop-science non-fiction books about some obscure subject are usually great, extremely up my alley. But this one was special. I wish one of you would read it so you could text passages back to me as you discover the insane revelations therein.
God, am I going to have to re-read it? I don’t have time! I have two new volumes of Anaïs Nin unexpurgated diaries to read and like 45 unfinished stories of Middle Earth, my god Tolkein wrote a lot of stuff that he never finished. Celeborn? Galadriel’s husband? Might be Silvan, might be Sindran, might be freakin Telari, you don’t know, Tolkein kept changing his mind right up till when he died. The orcs and elves and whatnot, they’re fine, but Tolkien’s graphomania, Tolkien’s insane giant entire universe in his head, it is… It is hard for me to grasp that a single human being could keep all that in his head. You know that cool scene in Return of the King when Merry and Gandalf get the beacons of Gondor lit so that Rohan knows they are calling for aid? And you kind of idly think about the lives of those beacon-tenders and what it must be like living up in the mountains and do they have shift rotations or what? Well! You’re in luck! Because Tolkien wrote a whole hundred page story about the backstory of those beacons. I mean, he didn’t finish it, he didn’t finish much of anything, which is also crazy. My friend Nick said that once publishers turned down The Silmarillion, he sorta had a hard time publishing anything else since they were all connected. Fair. Also, The Silmarillion is not finished so, you know. Coffee is for closers.
What would the world be like without Christopher Tolkien who spent a lifetime cleaning up his fathers mess? That is a pretty insane life choice!
I would like a 200 page-ish biography of Tolkiens senior and junior and the conception and creation of this whole Middle Earth sitchooashun. I mean, Christopher is pretty transparent, I just read this hilarious passage where he really chastised his father and his mapmaking friend for fucking up and not putting the marshes of Swanfleet (not to be confused with the Dead Marshes of Gladden Fields marshes or the Nindalf lotta marshes in Middle Earth) in the right place on a map. He calls out super-obscure errors of his father and his editors all the time. But, like, how is anyone expected to keep all this shit in their heads?
And I know other authors do it, like George RR Martin, but, like, then there are the letters! Tolkien just gamely answering every fanboy letter asking about every nuanced detail for decades of his life, all there in his head, probably a ton more that never made it to paper.
Absolutely insane amount to keep in a brain. Is it normal? Can we all do it if we so choose? Can we all make up our own Middle Earth? It’s a lifetime of work, isn’t it? We’re all too late. We should have started in our 20s.
And, like, I know paper costs were high in post-war England but imagine having a global bestseller like Lord of the Rings on your hands and the author is like “yo I wanna publish a bad-ass prequel” and then just saying “nah.” Like you can get a prequel made now of an orange. But literally one of the best selling books of all time, possibly second only to the bible? Nah bro, we don’t need more of that.
Sorry, god. It’s gonna take me like a year to read all this and I do not plan on subjecting you to a year of Tolkien minutiae. Good in a pinch, though, when I am short on topics. And I read a lot of it yesterday.
Hey question for you: at what age do kids stop bringing water bottles to school these days? Or do they not stop anymore do all kids bring water bottles to school and the only real question is when you change that water bottle from a Contigo kids bottle to, like, I dunno, the Olivia Rodrigo x Stanley collab jam (my god I need an Olivia Rodrigo Stanley thingy so bad). That thing sold out fast. But, yeah. Like.. do seventh graders bring water bottles to school these days? People shit on the uselessness of American academia but I personally would read an ethnographic history doctoral thesis on the water-bottle-bringing trends through time of the American school child. Why does that not exist.
Today we (royal we) are listening to a band with the absolutely great name of Crippling Alcoholism, and their album is called With Love from a Padded Room and it is… more sophisticated and nuanced than you would assume from a band with this name. They also have an album with the brilliant title of When The Drugs That Made You Sick Are The Drugs That Make You Better so hats off to them. They have a real Oxbow vibe, sorta dark, sorta goth, sorta metaly but not, like speed or grindcore metal. Maybe they ARE Oxbow or related or something, their Bandcamp only lists their first names, Discogs has no info. Quality mystery.
Oh speaking of, Bandcamp Friday this week. Sponsored by Roland. I would like to officially register my respect and jealousy at that Sponsorship match-up. Choice.
Still 350,000 people without power in Western North Carolina, over a million from Helene in general. I kinda wanna go help build homes. Or clean debris or something. Something manual and tedious and brainless but necessary and helpful. There is probably nowhere to sleep, though. Guess I could sleep in my truck. Be cool if EV trucks had an AC vent that you could turn on that vented to the bed so you could keep a camper shell temperature controlled. I… you know. It’s hard. You gotta take care of your own, I’m needed at home. And by the time Jane is out of the house and I am retired will I have the physical strength anymore to even be useful? Probably. There are always manual, tedious tasks to be done, even if they are not Herculean.
Noble Pedestrian Domestic Relief Corps.
Doing some quality blueprint printing today for a fountain job we’re doing at a commercial complex. I am very into my blueprinting responsibilities I sure did love my pre-press life. Those jobs were so great. Why oh why did I follow computers to the internet instead of staying in the print world where things are so much cooler and fuddy duddier and analog.
Spray foam people still not done. He keeps sending me texts at the end of each day expressing surprise they’re not done, and, I mean, I am not a spray foam expert but it always seemed obvious to me it was going to be at least a four-day job. They might be able to finish today but I suspect it’ll be one more day. Then I will have to figure out if they did the soffits or if I need to figure out some soffit-sealing situation before I put down the Rockwool. They make plastic soffit sealing panels but, like, plastic and expensive AF. But it does need to be sealed. Like… what is the cheapest cuttable, shapeable panel I can plop down and seal with spray foam?
Shit maybe I should just ask them if they are doing it.
Did Jane bedtime last night it was okay. We did not really talk. She watched videos from this real-life civil engineer playing engineering games and I read Unfinished Tales. Every once in a while I would think we needed to be connected more and go over and give her a hug and she was loving and hugged me back and that was nice. And then, just like last time, time came for teeth and jammies and she became an uncooperative lunatic. I swear, I ought to be better at this after all these years.
She did play with a lot of Lego yesterday and of course her whole day at school is screen-free and everything she watches is educational to some degree. I dunno, man. It’s all better than the MTV I watched? And she does not watch near as much screen time as I did at her age. Maybe it takes generations to fix this. Luckily Jane already knows the words to “Love my Way” anyway she doesn’t need to watch MTV.
Maybe this whole house needs to get rid of all the screens.
Which would, I suppose, de-employ us.
A pickle.
Got a shoegaze playlist for you today. All new? Yes. All new. Man I barely even know most of these bands. Oh except Skot Kremen, the closer, he’s an old Boston friend of mine I very much enjoy his current shoegaze work. And Starflyer 59. New album, but band I’ve known for more than three moths. Of Slowdive and Grouper too, of course. Remix collab is new though. Cigarettres for Breakfast did I know? Did I just get them mixed up with Cigarettes after Sex? I know I have talked about this confusion before. But I really think those two bands need to do a collaboration and call it, like, Cigarettes All the Time.
Have a good Thursday bye bye.
Do you know of any places that still do like... BLUEprinting, like diazo printing? I miss the diazo machine at Charrette so much.