Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1015
Jane's back in school, Jones Sausage Chicken Sausage Links shortage, Plastic is bullshit. Death is bullshit. Telemarketers is good. Attic structural plan progress. Another Techo block delivery.
Good morning. Hello. Hola. Jane is at school. First time in a week. And she made it on time. Yay us. And she was excited to go. And we did not cause a scene in the car line. We are almost normal people now. Traffic in the middle of nowhere, 7:30 in the morning. It is insane. Why doesn’t this place have sidewalks. This county has 3x the number of people as my home “borough” in Alaska, and that place had frickin sidewalks for miles. It was 9 miles from my house to town, to school: there was a sidewalk. Here? Nada. It is maddening.
Went to the grocery store this morning to pick up a thing or two because that is a thing I can do now, on the way home from the school. Bought some strawberries and cucumbers and liquid bandage (that stuff rules). There is a shortage of Jones Sausage precooked chicken links, but not the patties and I need a journalist to write an in-depth expose on this topic, like that Barilla Bucatini tell all during the pandemic. I do not need another article about the Cybertruck, I need an article about Jones Sausage.
Here is a thing you did not want to know, thanks to that bastian of good news Psychology Today: dying people may be conscious for up to an hour after flatlining. Nope nope nope nope nope big ole nope no siree no thanks pass. I did not need to see that article. Dying is bullshit. Dying is for the birds and I am super annoyed that it exists. If I am being honest I have been very annoyed about this fact since I was twelve or so. It has not faded. It will not fade. Dying sucks I don’t want to do it, I don’t want you to do it, it is totally not cool. And if you are one of those “oh I don’t mind it” people well you can just keep that to yourself, thanks, I definitely don’t want to hear it. I used to think it was some sort of failure in me that I was perpetually afraid to die and did not want to do it. But no longer. I think it is a perfectly rational and healthy feeling and I do not want to evolve into some enlightened person and/or Klingon who does not fear death. Death can do screw.
Man I am so ripshit about death. I did not need that article.
Jane bedtime was pretty good. Dance party was short, lotta lego play, and a “lazy bed party” which was basically snuggling. We have a new ongoing game where the wall behind her bed is sticky and if you get stuck to it someone has to help you get your hand or whatever off of the wall. We have a lot of weird games — several of them also involve her pushing my arm as far as she can and me judging the strength of the push on a scale between one and ten. It was nice to do lazy bed party, though, because we were both so, so tired.
But then she couldn’t fall asleep because she was so excited about school. She made me tell her about my book, which is about the global recycling industry and there is a lot of good news in there and a lot of bad news in there and I tried to focus on the positive but found myself indoctrinating her with the myth that recycling is actually a positive solution about things because I did not want to focus on the negative, and that is probably not good parenting. I mean, we recycle, you recycle, everyone should recycle (my neighbor doesn’t I found this out once when their trash can got knocked over and I am scandalized) but it is also 80% bullshit. Not complete bullshit, mind you, but a lot of bullshit (maybe the neighbor has galaxy-brained themselves into a poor decision about recycling). Metal, though, that stuff has a near 100% recoverability rate. Metal. Metal things never go back in the ground. Unless you’re a terrible person and put them in a plastic trash bag and tie it up. Don’t do that. Take it to the recycling center.
There is a town in China that recovers a 13,000 tons of gold, platinum and silver from e-waste every year. That is more than $300 million of precious metals taken out of our old phones and computers. Cars are nearly 100% recycled. All the steel is immediately reused, then the rest of the ground up car is sent to this place in China where hundreds of women sort through the ground parts, separating out the aluminum, copper, etc. It’s a skill, like sexing chickens. They are amazing at it. The whole car eventually gets recycled. The insulation off of wires? Gets recycled these days (lotta shoe soles).
But plastic? Plastic is bullshit and it should be banned completely and I wish I could stop using it.
We watched this 3-part documentary on HBO called Telemarketers and I highly recommend it on multiple levels. Thank you, Doug Pfeffer, for alerting me to this gem. It is a) a hugely informative documentary about the world of telemarketers, b) further evidence of the corruption of cops, c) an amazing character piece about a recovering drug attic doing his best to get by in the world, d) an utterly non-conventional documentary production that spans decades and it is amazing the thing ever saw the light of day let alone on prestige television. Really is something. Strong recommend.
After Jane fell out of her chair and I wrote to you and I thought my day was settling in to just be a hard day of monstrously difficult emails, the structural engineer called, letting me know he was at 34. So I had to run over, with Jane, who I had opiated with her iPad and was engrossed in watching LEGO videos. So I literally (with her permission) picked her up, sitting style, and carried her to the truck, and tossed her in, drove her to 34, put her on the couch, all without her stopping watching the iPad. It was a really amazing feat on both our parts and I want an award.
I sawed a few more spots open in the attic floor so the engineer could look at various joists and beams and whatnot and we are very close to a structural plan that allows me to get rid of all the annoying columns in the middle of the attic, as well as the super-annoying wall in literally the worst place. IT IS HAPPENING. Get a revised plan in two weeks. And the place was engineered with steel beams so we’re looking good for a) double 3/4” sheetrock, and heavier instruments like pianos and wurlitzers and whatnot, lord knows how I’ll get ‘em up there but at least the floor will support them. All very exciting. Now I just gotta figure out when the roofers are coming.
And while that was happening a dude on a forklift randomly showed up and dropped off another seven pallets of Techo Block, so now I have like 14 of these things filling up my driveway it really is pretty intense. It is all black. It is gonna be so, so goth.
A thing that was disturbing, though, is that the 10 or so cans of paint I left open to try in the crawlspace are stinking up the garage, which is weird. They’re not stinking up the actual house, which they are directly under. I might need to ventilate that crawlspace a bit more.
It’s always something.
Here is a classical playlist for you. It is unclear why Spotify chose to not put a thumbnail image on this playlist. Maybe they hate classical music. Maybe this is why Apple made that classical music app. I wonder if that thing is any good. I wonder if they would consider Sigur Ros, or even Philip Glass, classical. I wonder what’s in that app. I should really check it out.
Until tomorrow, dear friend.