Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1078
Switching pedal paradigms and kid bumps, BMWs as political metaphors, South Africa's complaint, lost slippers
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am well. The time is 8:04 AM. I am listening to an album by a band called Men I Trust. Track 1. So far, so good. Just back from taking Jane to school, wherein I mixed up the gas and brake pedal on my truck, had to suddenly brake from a terrifying speed of like 4mph after Jane had unbuckled in the school parking lot, and she bumped her head. Took about 9 minutes to calm her down. I felt like a terrible parent, but I also felt like a genius because it’s for situations like these that I try to get to the school 20 minutes before cut-off, so I had time to park and hug her and inspect her and calm her down and still do the drop-off loop again, but I felt like an idiot because ten measly days driving an ICE vehicle made me forget how to do one-pedal driving on electric again, and that is pretty dumb.
Also all of this happened because I was trying to be a good, kind driver and leave room at an intersection to not block the other direction. Shows you what kindness will get you. It will get you everything being fine, but a moderate chagrin. Story of my life. Dye my eyes and call me moderate chagrin.
I got to thinking about BMWs and whether there was a metaphor or comparison to American politics to be made here. A parent drove by driving one of those little tiny, almost Smart-car BMWs. Mighta been an i3. I don’t know BMW models. I generally ignore them. But then I noticed there was another BMW in front of me, and I remembered back to my days working on VW and their focus on “German engineering,” and when we pitched BMW and we pitched Benjamin’s idea to do a sort-of sensual film with Herman Vaskee about the Hofmeister Kink and how they turned us down. But the German engineering part stuck with me and I thought “you know, I do like well-engineered things, I wonder if secretly all this time, I would have liked BMWs, but I never tried them because the drivers but me off.
Huh. Is this like Bernie?
“Is there a lesson here? Are BMWs secretly awesome and I am making my own life worse by not driving them? Am *I* the prejudiced and terrible one here? Shit. Shit Shit.
Cars and politics, kinda weird. A few minutes before that, as Jane was rattling off car makes in the line (she’s still having trouble with BMW, Lincoln and Cadillac), I was thinking about how it was kind of a great industry in that there was no monopolist. And last night Emma and I were having a long discussion about whether multi-party systems are better. I contend they’re not, and people who spend their time focusing on that are wasting political capital. But the car industry is definitely better for it, so maybe she has a point. Wow that is facile. But we are in this world, now, of horseshoe theory and Klein’s “the far right and the far out” and whatnot, and it’s funny to wonder if they map to cars. It’s weird that aside from Tesla, cars haven’t really been politicized. When I was a kid, with the whole Japan-bashing thing, they were way more politicized.
These days, I’m not so sure a BMW driver is definitely an asshole, and if that’s not evidence that the world’s gone crazy, I don’t know what is.
Yesterday I read South Africa’s complaint to the UN Registrar of the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide, and my god, it really was horrific and damning. It’s 84 pages, but a quick read because one of the most damning things about it is that it’s half footnotes, none of the stats seem to be coming from Hamas. It is horrible in every way. Twice as many kids have been killed since October 7th by Israel than were killed in the October 7th attacks just in the West Bank. More than two hundred times as many kids have been killed in Gaza. Not two hundred percent: two hundred times. Do I condemn Hamas kidnapping and want them to release the hostages? Of course. And I also read about the thousands of Palestinian women and children held by Israel, never mind the now one million displaced people in Gaza. Do I condemn the sexual abuse of the hostages? Of course. I also condemn the sexual abuse committed on Gazans by Israeli soldiers on a much more vast scale, documented by the UN for the last twenty years. It is all so horrific.
But the worst is the meticulous documentation of leaders at virtually every level of the Israeli government repeatedly calling Gazans animals, calling for the place to be leveled, saying there are no innocents, calling for the complete destruction of the entire region. The consistent, repeated dehumanization.
There’s this bloke on Threads who keeps going on about how he’s a human-rights lawyer, and Gaza is terrible but it’s not genocide because he knows the law, pedant pedant. But here South Africa meticulously breaks down the components of the law and applies evidence to each and every component, going all the way back to quotes from the inventor of the term. There really seems no debate.
It’s just so awful.
And you wish you could do something and I will be fucked up till the day I die by this feeling: this feeling of having a life, a good life, in a world with so much suffering. And the minute someone tells me about how they have found acceptance of this, my pain hardens, never lose that feeling as Swervedriver says, “I need my pain,” as Captain Kirk says. I’m not searching for a moral justification to ignore it. I am not looking to feel better about it. I’m looking for their pain to be lessened.
There’s barely even any point in donating for relief because Israel has killed more aid workers than have been killed in the last 50 years. They have killed more doctors. They are still barely letting any aid in, and what aid they are letting in cannot be distributed because they are bombing the relief centers, because there are no trucks to deliver it, there are no doctors.
They knocked out the internet then posted the “safe routes” to “safe zones” only on the internet. Didn’t bother to drop flyers.
Then they bombed the routes to the safe zones and bombed the safe zones.
They are meticulously poisoning the water, destroying their only aquifer and desalinization plant: and this is according to the Israelis. And, according to the Israelis, they did this in the original Nakba: poisoned the wells so the Palestinians can never come back to their homes.
It’s too much, it’s too much.
What I was going to write about today is my slipper problem, so fuck it, here is my slipper problem. It was going to be really funny and we were all going to have a nice laugh because my wife — oops, sorry, my daughter — “bought” me some great new slippers for Christmas. And they are so good that I can wear them up and down stairs, so my previous system of having a pair of slippers on each floor is no longer necessary, except now I leave the slippers in places I never left them before, so now I can’t find my fucking slippers, and I am sitting here typing this to you with cold feed and everything’s all fucked up because people were kind to me and I got an awesome new pair of slippers. Also this is exaggerated because I brought the old slippers to the Somerville apartment so now I have no backup slippers and woe is me and all of this slipper business is sitting in my “number one” brain, as Daniel Khanamen would call it (except he meant something else entirely but we’ll ignore that), is obsessing about slippers while my number 2 brain is obsessing about Trump and the “new Nakba” (a term a proud Israeli official gave to the current situation).
And it’s all just in there on equal footing and also once you have a wife and kids you don’t own your life and you can’t just sell all your posessions and go to… do what, I don’t even know, because you can’t get in there to help anyway, but you can’t just unilaterally do these things because, you know, your kid, and even so, that’s just an excuse because you are a soft-ass American blah blah wooo living is fun.
Theory: we are seeing more and more people talking about screen time and “everyone looking at their phones” because nothing is any fun on the internet anymore, and we’re all depressed and enshittified (first application of Doctorow’s term to the actual humans? Also I am so proud that enshittification already has a Wikipedia entry but we won’t talk about that cuz its distracting from my point) (also thank you readers who gave me permission for discursive parentheticals) by our phones that we now feel more bad about it, and our only hope is to become scolds about screen time but really we’re only saying that because the dopamine hit of Farmville is long gone, Angry Birds too, and Twitter now, and Threads is turning to shit and Instagram is already turned to shit and Reddit is all TikTok posts and TikTok is all Greek except its a kind of Greek where if you take the time to learn it hey congrats, now you hate yourself.
Anyway, just a theory.
One good thing yesterday is that we got around to opening the holiday cards that arrived while we were in Somerville and I have some thoughts:
First, of course, thank you all for the cards
Second, I plead with everyone to put their name on the envelope. I guess it’s considered fancy to not put your name? But then it makes our system for sending em out next year harder — you know what? Never mind. We’ll suck it up. Stick to the fancy.
But I do ask that you put a picture of you in your card. I want to see your face! Your kids are cute but I don’t know them as well as you and I want to see how you’re doing.
Love Christmas letters and I always mean to do them and I gotta figure that out, but of course I have GMHHAY so maybe we’ll just put a QR code to that next year anyway no one can accuse me of not keeping people apprised of things.
90% of us are using Postable or some equivalent but the ones that are handmade or with personal notes really are more appreciated.
Props to Ashley for getting her kid to decorate the envelope what a brilliant idea I bet that kept him occupied for a good long time we should totally do that next yer.
Daddy bedtime last night and it was gloriously routine, same old songs, same old Bed Party games. Oh one thing that made me really happy the other day, one of those pure moments of true happiness, was on the drive home when I put on “This is the Day” by the The The and Jane sang along and man I was just a proud papa. Today in the car going to school we had a talk about Daddy music and Mommy music and how Daddy likes all Mommy music but Mommy does not like all Daddy music and how that is okay and how Mommy likes to know songs and sing along and Jane said “I like that too” and I said “I do too but I also like to learn new songs and listen to songs you can’t sing along to” and Jane was very non-committal about that but you know, at least we had that birds-and-bees conversation.
Next stop: Mogwai.
Today’s Media of the Day or whatever it’s gonna be called is the album Silt, by Mistle Thrush, which is recently arrived to the streaming services after a long, too long, absence. I listened to all the stuff that’s now streaming yesterday, which is all three albums and the Agus Amàrach EP, leaving only the original Beside 7” single and the cassette demos (which I do not have) not streaming. And honestly it’s been so long, I can’t remember if either of the tracks on Beside are different mixes than the ones on the other releases. I feel like it’s maybe a more raw mix of “Shine Away?” Man I used to have this all memorized.
Anyway, still as great as ever. Enjoy.
Off to do recycling and Walmart, I have missed you, my old friend.
i love men i trust! not super exciting live, though, i gotta say. and i *hate* when people only put their kids on the card for the same reason as you. xo
Love the new Media of the Day.