Good morning, friend, how farest thou? All good? What’s new? Everything cool?
Very happy about Kansas this morning. Really kind of a miracle. A deep red state decisively supporting abortion rights. By seventeen points. Not even close. Of course, there wil be few opportunities to have such a pure poll on ballots elsewhere — they will usually have human individuals to vote for, and human individuals are easier for the Republican machine to demonize than basic concepts. And, of course, as Emma points out, in many states the abortion rights side will need to pass an amendment to protect abortion, and in many states, that might require 2/3rds of the vote. But still. It is huge, it is heartening. It is humanizing. I felt a little glimmer of hope there for a second, the second one in a month after the “inflation” bill. Not used to these feelings.
Here is a video for a song called “Kansas” by the Wolfgang Press that played on 120 Minutes in, like, 1988 and changed my life:
God that band was so good. Kinda think they might have been Nazis or something, though? I have been avoiding looking into it cuz I liked them so much. Man. Might have a Wolfgang Press day haven’t listened to The Burden of Mules in ages.
But that Kansas result sure was nice since the rest of the day mostly sucked, I am still constantly tired, having to take a nap to make it through the day. My head is still burning. The optometrist, despite a third call, has still not sent me my reading prescription. In the end I completely wussed out and Emma ended up calling the car place to schedule my car inspection because for some reason that task seemed utterly impossible to me. And a good thing she did it yesterday, because we couldn’t get an appointment until three days before my plates expire. So waiting any longer would have been… bad.
I did get my Wegovy prescription filled, though, and I did finally return those shoes, a thing I’ve been meaning to do for like two weeks, and I did, you know, actually do my job, or at least 90% of it, there’s still one task I have been procrastinating on, which I can’t say I am proud of. I will try and finish that today, honestly.
And I am still drying peppers, every batch takes about 36 hours which…seems long? But I persevere.
But… Jane. Man. Jane was rough last night. She’s been rough for… a week? I knew last night was going to be rough. All day I was dreading it. Did I manifest it? I swear I didn’t. I was so kind and patient through it all. But she was just relentless.
“Daddy play with me.”
“I’d love to play with you, Jane, but I need you to be kind. Can you say please?”
“No.”
“Okay, when you want to be kind, I will come play with you.”
“I want to be unkind.”
“You can be unkind but I don’t want to play with you if you’re being unkind.”
“Daddy play with me.”
“I’d love to play with you, Jane, but I need you to be kind. Can you say please?”
“No.”
“Okay, when you want to be kind, I will come play with you.”
“I want to be unkind.”
“You can be unkind but I don’t want to play with you if you’re being unkind.”
“I think I already said please.”
“You didn’t say please, Jane. It’s not kind to lie. Besides, if you said please, it means that you want to say please and be kind, which means you wouldn’t mind saying it again. Will you ask me please?”
“No. I want to be unkind.”
“Okay, you can be unkind, but I don’t want to play with you if you’re being unkind.”
Repeat, over and over again, for an hour.
She skinned her knees while we were out on her walk, so I had to put some antiseptic cream on them after Emma washed them out.
“I don’t want the cream.”
“It will help your boo boos. It won’t hurt. Look… see?” (puts cream on his own disgusting, terrifying boo boo) “Doesn’t hurt.”
“No. I want to feel pain. Jane wants to feel pain.”
“I mean, I have some other cream that will hurt. Do you want that cream instead?”
“Nooooooooo!”
Scream, cry.
At one point we did the routine chore of walking downstairs and opening the dishwasher and turning the lights off for the evening. We do it every daddy bedtime. This evening, though she did do the chore, she felt it necessary to scream at the top of her lungs the entire time, that ear-piercing scream that so terrified so many of our friends when she was a baby, that she rarely does now. She felt compelled to scream that scream the entire time we were downstairs, for a good two minutes straight, for no apparent reason, at least none she exhibited or none she would divulge.
It really took a lot out of me. After much effort, I finally got her to bed. Immedistely after I left the room she started screaming “I need Daddy” at the top of her lungs for fifteen minutes. What do you do with that? Emma offered to go in and soothe her but of course if that happens I have lost all credibility as a bedtime doer. Going back in just encourages her that screaming things at the top of her lungs gets her what she wants, but also we know full well she will go to sleep much, much faster if I go in and soothe her. So I do, and we have to do all of bedtime over again, because she felt so guilty about being so terrible through the bedtime routine the first time. To atone for that, she decided the best thing to do was to be terrible all over again through a second bedtime routine.
But in the end, as we were doing one-kiss, two-kiss, she said “hold me like a baby” and I did, and we did the kisses, and we sang the song, and she finally went to bed, let me tuck her in.
And she was asleep in less than five minutes.
I went downstairs and Emma said something like “did that take a lot out of you” or “did you lose it” or something, and I denied it and bragged about how I stayed calm and kept it all together but then proceeded immediately to admit it by saying that I was convinced that either there is something profoundly wrong with my parenting style or that Jane is special needs in some way. Me just sort of losing all perspective of the horrible truth to which I alluded yesterday, that this is what parenting is, that 90% of parents — all those of us without perfect angels of kids — go through. And, of course, it’ll get worse in a lot of ways as she gets older, finds better ways to push our buttons, has real problems and real opinions (“tiny kids, tiny problems, bigger kids, bigger problems” Emma helpfully reminded me).
Then I started crying and talking about how, look, I’m an okay person, I’m not really a bad person anymore, and I was never a really bad person, but in a lot of ways I was a deeply problematic person, I did some pretty bad things, but more to the point, I just wasted a lot of time being self-absorbed and frivolous. And that I saw a direct line from the way my parents indulged me to that lost decade of self-absorbed frivolity, and that I was embarrassed about it now, and that I would like, if I could, to help Jane navigate that a little bit better, which means not throwing my hands in the air and giving up when Jane is on a rampage so similar to my rampages at that age. And I don’t blame my parents at all, because Jane makes me understand so clearly how much of a terror I used to be. And yes, I do feel some reassurance about how I “turned out okay” but that I wanted more for Jane. And man, it got kind of intense there.
And then Emma said “I think you might be depressed” and I just laughed and said “yeah, but it will get better.” I told her about how that morning when I got Jane from bed, I was just sitting in the chair waiting for her — because she was already being recalcitrant and willful and I could tell it was going to be a long day. I told Emma that I was just sitting there staring off into space like a broken, middle aged sad man, devoid of any happiness in that moment as I was numbing myself to endure the onslaught of “nos” and screams and commands. And how I realized how gloriously cliched American Beauty it was or something, and I had never felt a mid-life crisis so before and it made me laugh inside.
But then Jane actually noticed. I had been bitching and moaning a bit earlier in our conversation about how badly I want Jane to exhibit any sign of conscious understanding of empathy. Any comprehension at all any time I try to explain to her — these hundreds of times I have tried to explain to her — that the feelings of other people matter. How she never, never wants to hear it.
But the thing is she does notice other people’s sadness. She has innate, subconscious empathy. She doesn’t like it one bit when you’re sad, and she doesn’t comprehend, at all, despite many explanations, that people like to be cheered up when they’re sad. The ability to recognize other people’s feelings is there. It made her profoundly uncomfortable that I looked so sad. Which is good. Of course, it’s also its own little mini-struggle as you try and make yourself look happy, convincingly, while you’re feeling sad, a little fake-it-till-you-make-it minigame sidequest at 9 in the morning. It’s a bitch, yet probably for the best. One does need to snap out of those funks.
And that is one great thing about having a child, about Jane: they snap you out of your shit, keep you grounded and tethered to the here and now. Emma also asked, somewhat trepidiously, if I regretted having Jane. I was, after all, sitting here completely laid low from a single bedtime.
But my answer was immediate and resolute: God no, I do not regret it at all, the thought never crosses my mind.
Which is really crazy! But it is true.
And relatedly, when Emma said “I think you’re depressed,” I was thinking yesterday about how “wow, yeah, here I am going through a bout of depression this is never particularly fun,” but even then, I knew that it would pass, it would get better. Been through it so many times, and it always gets better, eventually, with the passage of time.
But more than that, I also knew that I believe my best days are still in front of me. I take that as a given. It is a core belief. And it occurred to me what a blessing that is to feel, still, at fifty. That I don’t even question that I will do more, that I still have many interesting days and projects in front of me. That’s such a gift, such a gift.
I just wish they’d hurry up, lol.
This whole Batgirl thing is crazy and really boggles my mind. Imagine spending a year of your life and ninety million dollars of someone else’s money and then your clients say “eh, it’s fine but we’re gonna bury it.” What a professional setback, I would feel that so hard. Professional setbacks are so fascinating: virtually everyone has them, and virtually everyone feels hurt by them, even if they pretend otherwise. And everyone around you can kind of see it and feel it and you know it and you feel awkward and awful, but there’s really no other option but to shake it off. These guys also just directed the first episodes of Ms. Marvel and people loved that shit, it’s always nice when the professional setbecks are apparent simultaneously to professional successes. That helps. But still. I empathize. I empathize.
Speaking of which, man… I realized last night I just don’t have a bunch of hippie dippie empathatic magic-loving people around me anymore. Of course in Alaska in the 70’s and 80’s there was no supply of these people. And in Boston I found enough of them to survive. There were even or two — not many, but a few — in New York. But these days, they’re few and far between. I miss that. I miss the naive kindness of those people. I miss how they humanized and sensitivized me. These days everyone is too cool and into awkward situation comedies where people are made fun of or something. I don’t know. This is a new thought. But man, real hippies, the second-or-third generation ones, the actual children of the 70’s and 80’s, not, like, their hippie-turned-Reaganite parents. They’re all still out there, still hippies, still feeling magic and love, still trying to live lives of kindness and magic. Good for them. I wish they held support groups like AA or something.
There’s this bag on our counter now. It says SAY:Media on it. It is a promotional item from SAY:Media. I had a friend that worked there ages ago, he has since passed on, RIP. God, I miss that guy. Anyway, not the point here. The point is that I do not know where this bag came from. I can only assume it came from the same SAY:Media party that I went to in 2008 or so at Angel Orensanz Foundation with my friend Sarah Kunst when we decided that we needed to, like, understand people that worked at media agencies. SAY:Media wasn’t really a media agency, but most of the invitees were. So we went. It was a great party, Sarah and I just interviewed lots of drunk party guests about what it was to work at media agencies. And as a party favor, they gave me this really, really nice umbrella. I love it so much. It is still my favorite umbrella. When Timehop decided to make promotional umbrellas for Nimbus, (get it?) I insisted we use this umbrella type, and we did, and everyone loves those umbrellas. Real class act. Now I mostly use my Nimbus one since it is, oh, fifteen years newer, but I still use that SAY:Media umbrella all the time.
[N.B. This was not the Angel Orensanz Foundation party around the same year where LCD Soundsystem played. That was a Webby party, I think. God, that was awesome. I knew even then that was the last time I’d ever get to see the in a club that small.]
But this bag? I mean, maybe it came from, like, a SXSW party the next year or somethign but it is definitely from that timeframe. And I have not seen it at all in, like, well over a decade. Where has it been this whole time? You mean to tell me this bag moved with us from Brooklyn to North Carolina? It’s just been lingering in the shadows forever? And now it’s back. I mean, obviously my wife has something to do with this but how? What was that bag doing all this time? And how was (is?) SAY:Media so damn good at promo swag? It is insane!
Here is a picture from the fifteen minutes of last night’s bedtime where Jane was in a good mood and kind to me, because I put on an episode of Cardboard World and let the opiate of the masses do my parenting for me like some sort of 80’s parent.
Drone rock for the mix today. Spotify just gave up on this one, offered zero recommendations for additional songs at the end of the playlist that was kind of funny. All hail the algorithm. Got some classic oldies here, Spacemen 3, the very band that got me into drone, except this one droney new age song I heard on public radio in Alaska in 1988 that I still don’t know who it was but I hear it in my head all the time and it drives me crazy. Listened to a lotta Windham Hill samplers trying to track that one down. Too many. I have scars. Real journey when you listen to twenty Windham Hill samplers. Disdainful at first, then you sort of get into it and think “man I have been besmirching this label unjustly for years” and then you keep going past the light into the dark and things just get… well. Don’t do it is all I’m sayin.
Also I still remember when I finally found an original pressing of the Dreamweapon. Mike and I were in Montreal to see the Pink Dots. They were great. We listened to Playing With Fire on the way home it was intense. The drones while going through the tunnels. Felt like THX 1138 or Tarkovsky or something.
Thank you for indulging me I feel better already. Talk to you guys tomorrow.
I had a similar 120 Minutes experience the day I saw the "Cut the Tree" video by Wolfgang Press... the scene where Michael Allen gets water (vodka) poured over his head and flips his dreads back in slow motion... life changing.
And to calm you fears, I have never heard anything about any of Wolfgang Press being alt-right or anything like that, hah.
I can’t sleep (5 am in Fairbanks right now) so I googled that band, not much besides Wikipedia but they do not appear to be Nazis. And listed Nick Cave as a major influence so. Your consistency remains consistent.
I took a screen shot of your wisdom about depression and yet still feeling like the best days are ahead. Inspiring words, Rick Webb. 💗 hope your head stops hurting soon