Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1032
Petty domestic complaints that are secretly a polemic against techno-optimisim
Good morning! What is up shoppers? How’s tricks. Greetings from the exurban outskirts of America’s sixth most educated city, following Arlington, ATL, DC, Austin, and Madison. Suck it, Cambridge. In your face, Berkeley. I mean I’m not the king of city spirit or anything, but that is pretty funny.
Also I gotta give props to me for my sign-off yesterday: “Feel better, talk soon.” That was a great sign-off. Might just use it all the time.
Listening to this fellow Jack Ladder. He is kinda funny. Enjoying it.
So yesterday was my weekly solid day of one-on-one meetings with various department heads, except David and Lydia were off to Gamesforum so in the middle of the day I found myself with a bit ‘o free time and I had just gotten off a call with Adam and I was wandering around in the driveway of the other house. I had been planning to go to the county’s free mulch day today, pick myself up a truckload of free mulch. And I was looking at the front yard, where the crew had spread the “good” soil over the Piedmont clay. And it was a little uneven. So I decided to grab the rake and spend 20 minutes leveling it out.
Except as I started, I realized that the “good” soil was infused with tiny pieces of green plastic netting. And I realized that way back when the excavator was here, he had dug up the soil, and didn’t see that there was some landscaping erosion control netting in it, because it was green and basically invisible to him. And I had stepped inside to do some work for a second, so I didn’t catch it. And then they offered to haul the dirt but I was like “naw this is good dirt ima gonna use it, dog” I said it just like that, I did. But in the end I shot myself in the foot because then I had to spend an hour raking the dirt to an inch, half-inch thickness and slowly, manually pick out all the little fragments of torn-up green plastic netting. It sucked. And it sucks, because I doubt I will ever get it all, and I wanted to grow things in that dirt, and it seems so wasteful to just have it hauled away. And I was planning on putting containers on top of it, so those containers will be fine, but i was also planning on growing in-ground, and that will probably not be fine. Because microplastics.
So I guess I can only grow flowers n shit in-ground, and not food, which is probably fine, but, like, I have to remember this for what? A dozen years? Twenty years? My memory is not that good. So I guess the one silver lining is I get to make some sort of timeless sign indicating the problem, kinda like that one guy had to do with Pluto in the last book of The Thee Body Problem: a sign that lasts forever.
It is so stupid why do people put plastic in the ground it is fucking dumb and I am annoyed. And I’m annoyed at myself for not catching it when the excavator was here but you can’t stand there watching all your contractors all the time like a hawk except you kind of need to watch them like a hawk if you want to get exactly what you want and I mean no disrespect here, shit, I own part of a contracting company.
Ugh. Plastic. The shit is just the worst. The worst! Okay, second worst to the microplastic-slash-rubber slough dust that comes off of every tire everywhere, constantly, killing the world. Fuckin love that one. That one’s really been throwing me for a loop recently. But my friend Guan showed me this company in England that is working on little sort of scoopy suck-it-up doohickeys that go on cars behind the tires to catch all the dust and my god I need those right now, I do.
But don’t mind all that be a techno-optimist! Technology makes the world better, blah blah never mind that hundreds of years after the invention of something, we’re still discovering that it is actually killing the planet.
Technology doesn’t necessarily make the world better, it often cheats. It pulls time forward. It makes unspoken, unseen faustian bargains with the future, giving the present generation convenience at a cost to subsequent ones. Okay not all technology not all men.
And then! I am sitting there trying to do work and I get this persistent “cheep! cheep!” going on in the house and it takes me forever to find it, and the whole time I am thinking “fucking technology why the fuck do they make everything beep? We have the ability to have our tech tell us whats wrong but we don’t it just fucking beeps. And why does it beep every minute so I have to stand here waiting for 50 seconds every fucking cycle until it does its microsecond-long cheep again and I move to another spot until I can triangulate the thing.” I had been convinced that whatever stupid tech that was doing this was something I had added to the house, and my mom is coming soon so I need to get this fixed. But in the end it was the smoke detectors, which were sixteen years old, and there were two beeping, which is why it took me so long to find the stupid things. And of course this means all the smoke detectors need replacing and I just did this in the other house and also I have to figure out some way to dispose of the things.
Anyway, I unplugged them, took them down and threw them in the garage so I could do work. Which was fine except the unplugging them and putting them closer together made them cheep more. Like dude, I unplugged you, I know. Shut up.
Raaaaaage.
While I’m on the petty complaint kick, I got a false charge on my credit card from Ambit Energy in Texas, which is definitely a thing I did. And so I go to the site to cancel it but the only option is to tell them I didn’t make the charge and get a new card, with a new number and man that is a giant hassle and I seriously doubt this was some larcenous thing because who steals a credit card to only pay their heating bill and nothing else and I check my credit card charges every day and its been like three weeks and there have been no other charges and if it was a test to see if I was paying attention you’d think they would use it again and I don’t want to go through this giant hassle until I know for sure.
So… what? I guess I just pay $200 to save myself from the hassle of not getting a new credit card number?
And how did this happen, anyway? It’s not like you can fat-finger a credit card number — the numbers have algorithms, plus the expiration, plus the security code, plus the zip. Something is suspicious, and I think we all sense that some merchants secretly have the power to charge cards without all the info. Credit Card companies clearly trust certain types of merchants more.
Someone ought to do a lawsuit about that just for the sake of the illuminating discovery.
Speaking of lawsuits, a bunch of states sued Facebook because Instagram makes kids feel bad. Which, like, yeah, it does. And I am all about Facebook getting repeatedly sued. But also, a bit skeptical of this one. But I downloaded the suit and am going to read it one of these evenings when I’m not drop-dead tired, and I will report back to you, never you fret.
Jane threw a forty minute fit last night because we got “good” Mexican instead of the normal Mexican, and her quesadilla had white cheese instead of yellow cheese, and she was not having it. And then after a forty-minute fit, a switch just flipped and she walked over and tried it and said something like “I was wrong I like this and I guess I like white cheese” and Emma and I were both amazing models of restraint and didn’t say “told you” or “WTF man” or anything we were just like “yeah its good huh” and we all proceeded with our evening like the last forty minutes didn’t exist and as I am telling this story, every parent knows exactly this story and the whole thing is so absurd but also so common it’s absurd on two levels.
We are all Job.
(also I used “faustian bargian” and “larcenous” in both today’s and yesterday’s GMHHAY’s. Forgive me.)
Here have a rawwwwwwk (seven w’s) mix. Been a while. The other day I had one of those brain farts and could not remember the Dropkick Murphy’s name, a band to whom I was endlessly exposed for decades and did not like at all until I left Boston. I guess now that I have an apartment there again, I have to stop liking them, alas. Also mad props to Taylor Momsen who threw away a promising acting career to be a metal rocker. I mean it is real commitment, and she is delivering. Will be forever grateful I got to see them at Don Hill’s that one time.
Feel better talk soon.
i called the DMs the "dripcock murphys" by accident recently and have never been more proud of a freudian slip.