Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1111
So much noble pedestrian domesticism. I found the racists from my high school. Chaotic good glasses shelving methods, test obfuscation. A USB stick from a satanist cocaine disco bondage band.
Good morning! Hello! You know, I often miss commenting on a milestone GMHHAY issue number, but #1111. That is something. Serendipity. How exciting.
And boy is it exciting because I have so much noble pedestrian domesticism to tell you about. Where to even begin. I am overwhelmed. Let’s see. We lost the butter knife. My soup inexplicably went bad and smelled like vinegar. I spilled some smelly foul soup on my black cardigan so I am back in the Care Bear cardigan today. I cannot for the life of me find a second blob of therapy putty with the same consistency as the blob my PT gave me. I missed my PT appointment Monday because it was a holiday and I forgot. Pool company vendors are all jonesing to get paid even when they haven’t finished the job. So much, so much. I could write whole essays about each of those. I have an abundance of minutiae.
The consensus seems to be to put the glasses mouth up, unless they are a) on an open shelf, or b) the kind of glasses, like pint glasses, that can interlock if you put ‘em up and down. Also c) it seems more okay, though not completely, to put glasses mouth down if you have shelf paper. As the votes rolled in and mouth-up was clearly becoming the consensus winner, I commented to my friend Tim that I was sorta surprised, because it seemed like shit could float into your glass mouth up, whereas mouth down at least you could control the cleanliness of the surface.
Tim suggested a third solution, the pure archetype of chaotic good: mouth sideways.
Jane went to school just fine today, which was a pleasant surprise because her friend George is still here and he doesn’t have to go to school. Well, she did like a 90% fine. She made me put her socks on because she was feeling lazy, and in the truck while waiting in the school drop-off line she wouldn’t let me brush her hair with my new goth brush. She took it and threw it across the truck which made me sad.
Also her friends Enid and Marlowe came over yesterday, along with their parents, our Adult Human Friends. So we had three ex Barbarians in the house: me, Ashley and Nora. A real reunion. ‘Twas lovely. We all ate Mexican and then had fake margaritas with my fake alcohol Tequila and they were actually… pretty good? We busted out the blender and everything. I give them a B. They probably would have been better if any of us knew a good margarita recipe and most of my bar shit wasn’t at the other house. But still! They made the illusion work. Enough so that I might just purchase another bottle of fake tequila, even though until yesterday it wasn’t clear if we were ever going to finish that one.
After dinner all four kids got into their jammies and did a dance party and it was the cutest thing ever. But boy, kids sure feed off of one another, start to talk like one another, try and one-up one another. Absolute chaos. But cute chaos. Cuteoss. Eh, they can’t all be winners.
After dinner and after the kids went to bed, Emma, Ashley, and I watched the new Mean Girls and that was very hard for me. Longtime, eagle-eyed readers of the ‘HHAY’s playlist segment will know that I have been a Renée Rapp advocate for a while now, since the release of her stellar single “Pretty Girls.” She’s great. But that was a hard movie to watch. I mean, musical, whatever. But, god, watching kids be so mean to each other is unpleasant I do not like it. Most of the secondary characters are good and that song about sexy halloween costumes was funny, actually, a lot was funny but oof. The pain. The pain.
Other goings-on as I try to live a life devoid of too much ambition and hubris, endowed with the understanding that great man theory is mostly BS and leads to more problems than good in our world:
A couple weeks ago I was in a very specific place of sadness and was suddenly overwhelmed with the desperate need to commune with the single greatest thing that Alaska has to offer, the white birch. I love white birch so much and I miss them all the time and whenever I’m home I take pictures of them and I have this great vase made out of white birch made by the Fairbanks institution, the Great Alaska Bowl Company, but suddenly I needed some bark, right now. And wouldn’t you know it, you can buy white birch bark on Etsy. Seems like it oughta be illegal, like trafficking in elephant tusks or something but what do I know. I bought a piece in a fugue state. And of course, I knew that by the time it arrived I would not be in this particular mental state. So when it finally arrived, I had forgotten I had even bought it. And it sat around in its envelope for a while before I finally got around to opening it. “Ha ha, you silly man, thinking this stuff was gonna make you feel better,” I thought as I was opening it. “You’re beyond such things.”
But then, NOPE. I opened it up, little flakes of birch bark came fluttering down, gleaming in the sunlight as they filled my room, and I pulled out a glorious 11x17 sheet of white birch bark and oh yes. This shit rules. Birch trees rule. Then end.
The school gave us Jane’s standardized test scores. They use a system called DIBELS 8, made by OSU, which seems designed to intentionally obfuscate exactly how good or bad your student is doing. They give you context-free numbers, placed along a color bar that has sections for “well below benchmark,” “below benchmark” “at benchmark” and “above benchmark” but even a cursory glance at things tells you a few things: they intentionally make it so a mark on a bar cannot ever go past, say, 85% of the way up the bar — like no matter how well you do, you will not hit the top of the bar. I assume this is true in the reverse direction as well. There are no percentiles.
BUT you can go to the Dibels site and download a pdf and decode it, do all the research and manual poking around yourself. Which is… weird? Like it’s doable, but hard? So they figure only committed parents will do that? Or, rather, commitedly neurotic? Well sign me up. Done and done. I correllated all of the scores and holy wow. The test changes completely after fourth grade so comparing beyond that is difficult but Jane’s composite score is in the 98th percentile for fourth graders and her word fluency is in the 99.9th. It is… nuts. NUTS. I can only imagine the absolute insanity going on in that brain.
I bought the new Wax Trax! deluxe vinyl re-release of My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult’s seminal album I See Good Spirits, I See Bad Sprits, which I think I mentioned last week. Two additional points here: I am so proud of the daughter of Wax Trax! founders Jim and Dannie for picking up the mantel and re-forming and reviving Wax Trax! It really is a nice treat in life. It must be a helluva thing to have a life and then one day think “yeah you know what? I need to dedicate my life to my parents’ legacy instead.” I wonder what Christopher Tolkein woulda been had his dad been a plumber.
Anyway, I was also going to say that the TKK release came with a USB stick in the form of an underground cross. I am not sure what’s on it. Because it’s occurred to me you have to be slightly loony to insert a USB stick from a satanist cocaine disco bondage band, don’t you? Really seems like this USB stick probably has some STDs on it.
I found all the racists from my high school class. This one woman from my class used a @highlight feature on Facebook that I guess tells Facebook to promote the post or something? I don’t know, it was super weird. And Facebook told me that so-and-so highlighted the post. And the post was her saying “what do you think of this” to a screenshot that was clearly from a prominent MAGA republican that I had not heard of. And it was the kind of thing you think a real political party would wrestle with, but I was surprised to see from within the cult: It said, in effect: “look, I’m pretty libertarian, if some people wanna pretend to be men or women, who cares as long as they’re not hurting anyone. Let ‘em be.” And in case this is giving you a glimmer of hope, don’t let it, because the next part was “we can’t let this distract us from the real issue of Biden’s pedophilia.”
So anyway, my Trumpy high school classmate posted this acting all innocuous saying “what do we think of this?” Well, I will tell you what her commenters thought. They all thought that was bullshit. Because it’s about the children. And those trans people are hurting the kids, so let’s kill em. Interestingly, they did not even attempt the faux intellectual anti-trans arguments of JK Rowling and her ilk. These people don’t even pretend that it’s about the safety of the kids who are considering transitioning. They are firmly in the “the trans people will come for your kids” category. Interesting distinction that seemed completely missed. But I suppose that is not surprising since one guy, a guy I was a little scared of but was assured was a good guy (and actually I am 90% sure he was a good guy) unironically called himself a “sexist, racist homophobe.”
The post had about 20 comments on it, all in this vain (Vein? Vein, right?). About 15 of them were from people in my high school class. Not sure why that was. Maybe she never made friends after high school.
I did not comment. I just sort of walked away from that sad scene. Does that make me better than them? haughtier? A coward? Probably all of these things.
I had been, of late, sorta thinking that maybe Alaska wasn’t as racist and awful as I remembered it. But wow. Wow. Illusions shattered.
In more pleasant news, Pitchfork reviewed the seminal Mercury Rev album Yerself is Steam and it is a very-well written history of that album, the musical scene right before grunge came along, the band’s dynamics and deep influences into the Buffalo avant garde (Tony Conrad and Robert Creeley shout outs). Most importantly, it made a distinction between Yerself is Steam’s profound influence on the noise and avant garde movements and contrasted it with the band’s later, second, major impact on a different milieu with the release of Deserter’s Songs. This is a nuance lost to many, and I appreciated the distinction. I love late period Mercury Rev but nothing in the world captures the absolute insanity of their first album. Seeing them with My Bloody Valentine on the Loveless tour (shows that did happen in the US despite this article claiming they were only in Europe, my one quibble with its history) ranks, to this day, as the single greatest show I ever saw.
So. New Pitchfork is, I guess, getting a second chance, or at least that particular freelance writer.
Also I would like to apologize to that goth girl who had to sit through listening to all of Yerself is Steam at top volume in my car while me, Mike and Rick drove her to Kathryn’s goth night in Providence in 1995 or so. All she wanted was a ride. She did not sign up for that.
I still feel bad about it.
Here’s a post rock playlist for you as today’s Media of the Day. I hope you enjoy it very much. Do you think someday my daughter might appreciate post rock? Do you think someday I could go see Mogwai with my daughter? Is that too much to ask in life? I will not hold out hope. But a man can dream.
Thank you, friends. Oh yeah speaking of which, yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Big Star’s Radio City. I suppose that should be the media of the day. Oh well. Too late now.
i didn’t weigh in on the mouth up or down dilemma yesterday but feel compelled to do so today…i am mouth down on shelf liner exclusively UNLESS the vessel is bottom heavy or isn’t stable in that orientation. example, my Spode Christmas Tree stemless wine glasses are mouth up when they are in use for the holiday season 😁