Good morning. Hell. How are you? #588
Quarantine doldrums, Banana golden ages, Miami Vice themes, veggie sausage conspiracies, a long story of eternal shame.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. I’m not, like, bad. I just.. yeah, I’m a bit tired of this whole thing. Emma was asking me about what I wanted to do for my birthday, and also about some rough April plans last night, and I just wasn’t engaging, and it took me a while to really sort it out. I know, rationally, that this Omicron wave will be more or less done by April. And I suspect, rationally, that it’s unlikely another shitty wave will be upon us by next April (though never say never!) And it’s even possible, theoretically, that this whole thing has seriously ebbed by April. And god knows the bulk of the world is going to act that way. I’m just as “ready to move on” as the next guy but, you know, I’d like to actually know it’s okay to move on, not just move on cuz I, personally, am “ready.” Weird how people just equate those two now. But in any case, I really, really don’t especially like making plans just yet. It gives me anxiety. I don’t want to get my hopes up. If I start making plans the seal will be broken. I am mostly emotionally fine these days, which is kind of an insane, amazing accomplishment. Of course, even though I’m fine, I am diminished, the realm of experience has been severely constricted. I can live with it so long as I don’t think about it too much. But if i start thinking about it, making plans, getting excited, and then everything goes to shit again? Well, that won’t be good at all.
Ha and all Emma was talking about was getting a haircut.
This kid vaccine thing is bumming me out, but I think I’m just alone in this. I mean, other people are bummed, of course, but they’re in a different state with their kids. In a lot of ways it’s worse, because they are already going out into the world with their kids, and thus their kids actually need the vaccine more than Jane. But on the other hand, they’re already going out in the world, so, you know, they get to experience that.
In other, more positive news:
The Miami Vice Theme is still an awesome song and you should listen to it today my god it is so good.
I am still in a golden age of Bananas and I am still getting a perfectly ripe banana almost every morning. This golden age will not last but boy it really has been a fantastic little perk these last few weeks. Because, like I said, I don’t go anywhere, the realm of my experience is severely constrained, and this is what counts for excitement around here.
I am convinced there’s a conspiracy in the veggie sausage industry and every time I get really into a single brand of veggie sausage, after a few months, I swear the flavor of the veggie sausages completely changes. It happened with the Impossible hot and spicy sausages, to the point where I couldn’t eat them anymore they tasted so different and bad. Now I am convinced it is slowly, subtly happening to the Morningstar Farms Hot and Spicy patties and it is making me a little crazy, I think these sausages are Angel Streeting me. We are Americans, people. It’s Angel Street around here, not Gaslight. Yes, yes, I know, Five Chelsea Lane hit America first, and the American film was named Gaslight, but Angel Street is how most Americans were introduced to it. It remains one of the longest-running non-musical Broadway plays of all time. Brought to America by Vincent Price. Opened right before Pearl Harbor and ran for 1,295 performances. More relevantly, Angel Street was the name of the paperback play scripts that were published and sent to high schools all over America resulting in me and my high school ex girlfriend playing the roles of Jack and Bella after we had broken up, which is really not a thing a drama teacher should do to two high school kids. I am not sure if that thing ever got refined enough to play in front of an audience and I’m just blocking it out, or if cooler heads prevailed and someone relieved us from our agony, since neither one of us were going to turn down a lead just because our ex was in the play.
Go ahead and tell me that should be two paragraphs, because it shouldn’t, and or what the actual subject line of that paragraph is.
Anyway all this sausage drama is making me want to just go back to my stalwart Jones organic chicken sausage, who has been there for me, unchanged, since time immemorial, and I am sorry I am trying, I am trying.
If you love fantastic stories like that you should consider buying the new book from Rick Webb, Good Morning. Hello. How Are You? Available for pre-order now from rickwebb.net and soon to be on Amazon, and probably nowhere else because I’m lazy and a terrible self-promoter, which is an odd thing to say for a man who sends out a long email to a bunch of people five days a week, but really, I’m just terrible at it.
Also, do any of you use any other e-book reader? I will see what I can do if someone has strong preferences.
Another daily newsletter, of which I am occasionally part of, Why Is this Interesting had a great edition last week about the Arrow Paradox, which is an economic theoron and proof for why we are all fucked, basically. It’s great. I mean, it’s not true, really, it has some very basic flaws, but also it really is just a tidy work of genius, explaining that because we all have different preferences, it’s not only impossible to satisfy them all, it will inevitably lead to a dictatorship, which is just a glorious, absurd encapsulation of the field of economics right there. Snatch absurdity from the jaws of profound reality.
Anyway, the edition reminded me of an episode from my childhood from which I still experience eternal shame, and I need to get it off my chest.
I was in class, probably like third grade or so, and they were teaching us about medicinal safety, you know, how to not OD and stuff. And they had this educational video where they showed a kid having some sort of ailment, for which he had been prescribed medication. And the kid was like “well this still hurts and this medicine didn’t really help, so I think I will take a lot more of the medicine.” And the instructional filmstream (I really think it was a filmstrip, not a video or even a film, now that I think about it. Those slideshow thingies that used to play along with a cassette tape and the teacher had to manually advance it to keep them in sync) then showed the kid being taken to the hospital from ODing on the unnamed prescription medication.
And I just thought that kid was so dumb. In my mind, medicines were not like ice cooling a drink, or an overn. They did not operate on a spectrum. They were binary. They were parts to fix a machine: they either worked or they didn’t. They did things, and do or do not there is no try, Yoda said. So, right off the bad, I was mostly mistaken. It is completely rational to take more of a medicine if it is not quite doing the job, and god knows I do this all the time these days with my stupid-ass headaches. But I thought the boy in the filmstrip was just so dumb because everyone knows that medicines are binary like machine parts.
So, being a smugg-ass, asshole kid of, like, 10 or so, I loudly, mercilously mocked the kid in the filmstrip. For quite a long time, until my teacher told me to knock it off, and she did not do it with her nice teacher face, she was annoyed with me and my mockery and my insensitivity, and rightfully so, because I was being a jerk, but, you know, never fun as a kid to see an adult’s true face of annoyance with you instead of their angelic, ignorance-inducing façade.
To my credit, I shut right up, but I did not grasp how wrong I was. I was mortified, embarrassed and sad, but I didn’t realize, at the time, how wrong I was,
Of course, because of the mortification and embarrassment, the incident stuck with me. I have one memory of being out in front of my grandfather’s house, the big Oregon Trail Lodge outside of Sandy, some time after the incident. Maybe a year. And I was still feeling shame at the incident.
(Incidentally last night I started the autobiography of that grandfather, which I really should have read years ago, but that’s a topic for another day).
But of course, the shame would only intensify through the years as I realized that the teacher was very rightfully annoyed with me, and, in fact, she was still being merciful, because while she did chastise me for my unwarranted outburst of mockery in the class, she let me off on the fact that, on top of that, I was totally and completely fucking wrong.
So very, very wrong.
It is completely understandable to think “oh wow I should take more of this medication that is not working very well.”
And for every year of this opiate epidemic in America, I still think of that incident, my utter lack of empathy, and I feel immense guilt.
And I know, I was, like, ten. I should probably let it go.
But I don’t.
The end.
All right well I can hardly tell you to listen to the Miami Vice theme today and not put the Miami Vice theme in a playlist, huh? And we may as well throw on the Airwolf theme as well, even though it is an obviously inferior work. Mostly new stuff, otherwise, lotta great new music going on, don’t let the curmudgeons tell you otherwise. Okay that Spiritualized song is a little old, but not, like, an oldie from their first few records or anything. Oh man that new Spiritualized album should be with us in a month or so, that’ll be exciting. Very into Andy Bell’s solo album, it sounds like melodic, acoustic Ride. It is great. Oh the Queenadreena album is “old” too — I neglected to listen to them in my last Katie Jane Garside obsession like two years ago. They are basically a continuation of their previous band, Daisy Chainsaw.
Okay take care. Maybe Wednesday will be better.
i was already bad at making far-out plans before the pandemic, but it's much worse now! the only way i even got to iceland last month was because everything was figured out for us, and almost all i had to do was buy tix/hotel.
Rick I gotta ask because I just noticed
The title today was good morning. Hell.how are you.
Was that a typo or intentional? because either way kinda suited the mood.
Also I carry some weird guilt about some asshole kid things I did too. Just a few gems (no doubt I’ve forgotten others but these few imprinted in a way no others did). I try to chalk it up to growth and life experience and how it makes me who I am today but yeah,
Still feel like a jerk. I’m with ya.