Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. Just sold an LL Cool J CD on Discogs for $4 this morning, so today is off to a roaring start. It’s this kind of revenue channel that will transform this family’s finances. There is a beautiful sunrise happening right now and it really makes me think it might be time to start trying to do the time lapse videos of the sunrise again.
Programming note: Tomorrow’s edition will be later in the day (if at all). Mom has an appointment at 9 at the big fancy new UNC clinic, and then we gotta to go the pharmacy.
Had an exhausting day yesterday. Things went downhill rapidly after finishing yesterday’s edition of GMHHAY. Breakfast was mostly fine, but then Jane and I went downstairs and I peed and I forgot to let her flush the toilet and she was not having it. Usually you can just say “sorry” to her and let her flush it again but not this time, nope. She needed more pee. Only there was no more pee. And I had a meeting to join. So I join the meeting and she is screaming and, well, the whole company got to see me be a bad parent. Awesome.
I will chalk that up as being a manager who leads by example and makes their employees feel as if their boss understands the stresses of working from home while simultaneously parenting.
That, along with the extended discussion on the Facebook version of this post about growing up in Alaska, really kinda took a lot out of me yesterday.
Coincidentally, yesterday my random desktop on my left monitor was this photo from the early 90’s of a bunch of dumb kinds in Alaska burning pallets on the banks of the Tanana River under the midnight sun, and damn do I miss those kids:
I hope all those pallets were heat-treated.
I’m just gonna keep tying the word “pallets” now that I know how to spell it.
Then, out of the blue, Slack launched an ill-conceived feature where they decided they wanted to be a messaging app and made it so anyone could DM any Slack user out of the blue. It was a manifestly bad idea, and Matt and I immediately set to work trying to figure out how and where to disable the feature without accidentally turning off all intra-company DMs in the process. It took a while. God. What a bad idea. By the end of the day, Slack realized it was poorly implemented, and removed part of the feature, but not all. I’m super annoyed with them. It’s kind of astonishing how badly implemented this is, and what complete chaos it will cause to, say, any company, say, hypothetically, implementing software for clients? Just what we need: a complete breakdown of the walls in the software assuring that clients can’t disturb your engineers willy nilly. Who needs account people, solutions engineers or PMs. Just DM the engineers! The software will let you! Whether you want it to or not!
I my moodiness, I made some (pessimistic) predictions about the future in the Facebook comments to this post yesterday. I said that there would be a constitutional convention in our lifetime, but that it would be a complete failure and shitshow. I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t want to be in the prediction game. I mean… Okay I think a lot of us feel this way? We see something coming, it comes. We are not surprised. We even want to say “I told you so,” but the thing is we see a lot of things coming. All the time. I used to be friends with this amazing guy Napier Collyns, who was one of the dudes who pioneered the use of scenario planning in business. I really liked learning about it because it’s generally how I manage. It’s a difficult way to manage in tech because people always want to know what the plan is, but the plan is a vast decision tree of factors, results, reactions, and mitigations. It can go a million different ways depending on what transpires. This is very native way for me to think: I’m always thinking “okay, this could happen, and if this happens, then this will happen, maybe, or this might happen instead, and we should have plans for both of those possibilities.” And I do want to talk about those possibilities, those outcomes I see that might happen, but I also don’t want them to come off as predictions. Like this Tim Cook stuff: I wouldn’t be surprised if this China stuff was a threat to his leadership. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being a complete shitshow. I also won’t be surprised if it mostly works. They are both plausible outcomes! So, Emily, I would like to revise my ‘prediction’ from yesterday: I would’t be surprised if there’s a constitutional convention in our lifetimes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the outcome is a shitshow.
Regarding recycling, there was a good op-ed in the Washington post from a plastic researcher who found 2,000 plastic bags inside of a camel. Plastic is everywhere. It’s so bad. It is ridiculous. It was definitely one major flaw I found with Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future: One throwaway line about how plastic doesn’t send carbon into the atmosphere and that was it. Well, yes, correct (sort-of), but it does poison our water, our animals, our very bodies. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the Children of Men situation going on with the declining sperm counts in men.
PSA: Kacey Musgraves is selling tarot cards. Her current batch of merch is bonkers.
My mom’s new counsellor doesn’t take Medicare. Fine. She works for a larger firm - it’s how I got the referral to them. Fine. It’s $80 a session. Fine. You have to pay in advance. Fine. BUT you have to pay in advance once a week, every week, by phone, in advance of the session. It is such a pain. They won’t store a credit card “due to HIPPA regulations” which is hilariously untrue. Every single week I have to deal with these people, which is fine. But this whole system is absolutely going to break when and if my mom goes home. Half the reason I picked these people is because it is remote and my mom can keep her therapist, whom she quite likes, when she goes back to Alaska because it’s impossible to get a good therapist there because everyone is depressed (Alaska friends don’t hate me for this blame my sister I am getting this info from her). I just do not see my mom pulling this off in the future. So… am I going to just keep paying this billing department, every week, for the rest of my life? I told this to my mother-in-law, who is a working therapist, and she agreed this is dumb. And yet this is the situation in which we find ourselves. Awesome.
On a not-really-related note, it is fucking galling how bad banks are with 2-factor authentication, especially 2FA that does not rely on SMS. I have as much of my life as possible locked down behind app-based 2FA, but actual money? NOPE. It makes me so bad. Also. Someone explain to me this: why can’t every bank, every cell phone company offer an option to enable that says “only verify my identity in-person at one of your branch locations?” Do not let ANYONE reset my passwords over the internet or over the phone at all? If I lose it? great. I will drive to a branch and show my ID? Why isn’t this an option? It is so dumb.
There is a new Consolidated album. Came out this week. How crazy is that? Longtime readers my recall my reminiscing about them earlier in the pandemic, noting how dead-on their politics were, especially for the early 90’s. There is a very good interview with Adam Sherbourne of Consolidated and he speaks a lot about mental illness, and implies he’s not proud of a lot of Consolidated’s output (though he does seem to stand by their politics). I think he is selling himself and the band short. They were profoundly unique. Their live shows were very impressive. The new album, We’re Already There, is more dubby, more electronic, less industrial, waaay more sonically diverse (there’s a Flamenco song on there. Honest. You can really tell that Mark Pistel, another founding member, went on to work with Michael Franti)1. The “militant tolerance and humanity and footnote-heavy diatribes against capitalism” lyrics (as the Quietus describes them) are somewhat subdued in deliver but not in message.
On the one hand, I’m glad I don’t feel the same sense of dizzying confusion as I realize that my politics need profound re-evaluating, like I did in the early 90’s when I first heard them. On the other, I kind of wish I heard this and felt dizzying confusion and a realization that my politics need a profound re-evaluating.
I read a really good overview of the current state of the Judiciary, and McConnell/Trump’s damage to it, and how much Biden can realistically undo. It was… eh, good and bad. Trial courts look promising, appellate courts seem fucked for a good while. It’s a quick read. Recommended. Basically, surprise surprise, the Trump McConnell dynamic duo did a lot of real damage. The thing about McConnell and the filibuster is he barely cared about anything other than the judiciary, and it took 50 senators to confirm a judge. His rule about the filibuster wasn’t “we keep the filibuster,” it was “we keep the filibuster except for the things I care about.” I am fine if we keep that rule too. My friend Ryan tells me that Manchin’s posturing is part of his process, and that he still might come round on voting rights, or gun reform, but I am not so sure. It is irrational how angry I find myself at Joe Manchin when there’s a whole party of manifestly worse people in the Senate. But I can’t help it. We only have 19 months until the mid-terms. We don’t have time for this stupidity.
My Timehop yesterday told me that by this day last year, our cherry blossom tree was already blooming. It is not yet blooming this year. I am awaiting with much anticipation. I love that tree so much. It’s such a short few weeks that it’s in bloom, but when it is, it is the best. Soon. Soon.
It’s been warm enough to do our walks through the neighborhood again. That is nice. There are no leaves on my favorite tree yet. We saw some neighbors yesterday, said hi to a bunch, chatted with a few. One or two are still complete strangers. Still, though, at this point we know most of them and it’s nice. Kinda silly how winter came and most of us stopped seeing each other, but spring is here, so it’ll be good to see them again. And the sun. And getting some exercise walking up that hill each day. The walks help my mood, too. Really keep me stable. Like this writing. When I am doing both, I’m in such a better place emotionally. So, thank you guys. People actually reading the writing isn’t required for my emotional heath, but it sure helps.
Today’s mix is volume fourteen of the W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe. This really is my favorite mix series. It is by no means my favorite type of music but, I dunno. It’s fun to imagine it: A hotel that actually played good music. Because there really aren’t any. I mean, maybe the Phoenix Hotel in SF. Is that still around? Seems to be. That place was great. But, then, it didn’t really have a lobby, so. No go. I snuck in one really old (well, very early 90’s) song on this by Beaumont Hannant and Lida Husik. What a great collaboration that was. Those two really put out a bunch of beautiful music together. But most of the rest of… Oh no, I lied I also threw 2 Wicky on this one. Oooo good back-to-back 90’s vibe right there. Makes me want to go watch Stealing Beauty again, 2 Wicky. I wonder how that film holds up. Shit now I have to do that.
Okay time to face the day. One more. Gonna take tomorrow off. Mom’s got an early appointment and we also need to hit up the pharmacy but I am secretly hoping that I can also make it to the awesome gardening store in Carrboro, which would be fantastic, and if that goes well maybe I can even get started on filling up my crazy tower planter with dirt. And I gotta start hardening off the seedlings. It is going to be planting time soon! SO EXCITING!
Oh! Also, I kinda wanna do Q&A! If you have any questions, send em my way! And I’ll put em all in a post with actual, thoughtful answers instead of the quickies I do in comments because after this hour I never have another minute of spare time during the day. Talk soon! Miss you!
Mark Pistel also founded the Cold Waves festival, I learned.
Always great stuff!
Hi Rick, I have several questions for your Q&A and a few general comments. First, I feel your love when I read your updates, and really deeply appreciate the earnestness, curiosity and openness of your voice. It's that gift you have for bringing community together and around you that was so pronounced in the culture at TBG. Thank you for it.
A few days ago you talked about being in 8 to 10 meetings in a week, and that particularly resonated with me. I have 35 meetings this week, but I took most of Tuesday off for Lowell's birthday; I'm averaging somewhere in the 35 to 40 over the last few weeks. I'm looking forward to having some more unstructured time but I'm not quite there yet. It's in the plan. Anyway I felt seen by that comment. Before I get to my formal Q&A questions, how do think the meeting culture of corporate work environments shapes us in this culture (and shapes our political lives)?
Also, I'm pretty gut-punched by what you shared about Alaska yesterday and the death that surrounded you. I've lived through a two suicides, one of a pretty close friend, and then another suicide by drink, and no doubt some other tragedies I'm blocking out now, but nothing at the level you described in Alaska.
On to the questions:
I've noted some pessimism about your sense that you'll write another book. Why? Is it real or just this moment?
How do you find time to write every day, parent, work, support your mom, and stay up to date on politics and music and stuff? What are your strategies for managing time or how do you allocate attention for your various interests, responsibilities and projects?
Have you drafted any principles that guide the way live? I wondering if you have an explicitly written them down and I missed them.
What are ways death by cop looks like in Alaska? Have you done any research into how common it is?