Good morning. Hello. How are you? #361
Insomnia for childhood homes, Reconciliation, Joe Manchin, Kurt Cobain, Indie Rock Retirement communities, carnivorous cats, Lisa Carver reviews Godzilla vs Kong.
Good morning. Hello! How are you? Doing okay? I am doing good. The sun is shining through the trees and window, it is a real nice sunrise happening over the pond right now. It’s lovely. Couldn’t fall asleep last night. Read some more of my woke sci fi book and the plucky teenage heroine just escaped the evil slave planet and I felt a euphoric high and could’t sleep. I laid in bed trying to remember all the names of the streets in my childhood neighborhood. I could remember the name of the street I lived on — Jack — and the three closest streets (Bridgewater, Hilling and Fern) but that was it. This neighborhood used to be my entire world, I had every nook and cranny of it memorized. But I couldn’t even remember the name of the street two blocks down on which my aunt and my sister’s good friend lived on. I couldn’t let it go, couldn’t sleep, had to get out the phone and poke around and remember the names of all the other streets. Then I had to look on satellite view. Then street view. Then Zillow. The house is worth $217,000 now. I wonder what my parents bought it for. I’ll ask mom today. I wonder if it was more than $100k.
I spent ten years in that house. It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere. I’ve been here six years now. Feel fairly confident I’ll surpass that record eventually. Feel fairly confident I did not need to spend an hour thinking about this last night. But it was also… I don’t know. I felt something, thinking about little old innocent Rick, running through the closets, playing dress-up, helping his sister escape from his crib, helping my mom garden, burrowing below the playhouse in the back yard. Sitting in my dad’s blue Mazda pickup playing “driving.” That spruce tree in the picture above was only as tall as me when I lived there. Maybe I needed that last night.
So! Good and bad news on the infrastructure front. Good news! The Senate Parliamentarian, who just casually holds the fate of the world in her hands, NBD, has decided that the Senate Democrats can use reconciliation up to three more times this congress. I was under the impression they could use it once per year, and the dummy Senate Republicans didn’t use theirs last year, so they had the one they just used on COVID, one more this year, and one more last year. A Congress is two years. So I was off by one. I’m not sure exactly how this decision was arrived at. Best I can find is an article that says they’re allowed to write new reconciliation rules into the next budget bill, but it’s not clear why they can’t write new rules that say “we can use reconciliation a bajillion times.”
But anyway it probably won’t matter because good ‘ole for the people Joe Manchin is suddenly saying, surprise surprise, that he wants to be in the headlines and spotlight — er, sorry. Suddenly saying he has “grave concerns” about the size of the bill. Shocking. But here’s the best part. Good 'ole man of the people is, get this, is worried that the US has “to be competitive and we’re not going to throw caution to the wind.” And he’s worried that a twenty-eight-whole-percent corporate tax rate will kill this. Put aside for a moment the fact that to be competitive a country needs roads and internet and water that won’t kill you and electrical grid that won’t crap out. Just leave that aside. What Professor Joe Manchin is saying is that a 28% corporate tax might make us less competitive. He has clearly thought this through and used science to come up with this number. The fact that, right now, China has a higher corporate tax rate than the US and does seem to manage to be competitive, means nothing. The fact that for the last couple decades, China has mostly had a higher tax rate, and that up until 2007 theirs was 33% and they still managed to be competitive means nothing (leave aside that China also has, shockingly, higher other taxes as well). Clearly this one metric — corporate tax rate — is the only metric that matters when it comes to international competitively.
I am so sick of this guy. If I were a billionaire, right now I would be on the phone with my ad agency prepping awesome, low-design billboards for the state of West Virginia, listing every single thing in the state that Joe Manchin isn’t going to vote for because he wants lower corporate income tax. I am done with that dude. I get that Schumer and Biden and Psaki and Pelosi are the abused children in this metaphor, so they can’t say anything bad about the guy. And I suspect they’ll get him in line eventually. But seriously. Fuck this guy. Done done donezo.
Got my gardening video edited yesterday. Sadly, the exact moment of the Greenstalk planter collapse was not caught on timelapse - seems the battery died just before it, but you can still get the gist from the aftermath footage. It was scary. Yesterday after dinner I meticulously went over every joint on the thing to make sure they were all locking properly, and I also cleaned it up from all the dirt I got smeared all over it repairing it. My sunburn is a little bit better. I put some sunscreen on last night before our evening walk, and when we got home, Keely and Roy went crazy for it. Apparently cats love sunscreen. They were trying to lick my arms all night. Who knew. It was kinda cute.
Our walk was nice. I road tested my awesome new Convenience West trucker hat. I also ordered, at the suggestion of my friend Ashley, a proper gardening hat with a flap on the back to keep my neck from getting sunburned, so be prepared to see some ridiculous getups in future Youtube episodes.
I forgot about Kurt Cobain yesterday morning. Or, you know, I wake up, brush my teeth and immediately start writing this thing, and don’t check my Timehop or any other anniversaries until later. Always a little sad about Kurt. I was working at the University of Alaska Fairbanks college radio station KSUA when I found out. I was on the air. We had one of those actual newswire machines, and the news came over it, printing it out onto dot matrix paper. I tore it off and ran into the studio and announced the news, just like you would announce the news in some old movie. I told Fairbanks the news. Felt like I was the right man to do it, since I was a huge fan, since I’d seen them play, since I’d been following them since the beginning well, you know, not the beginning but pre-Nevermind. I wonder what Kurt would be like today. My buddy Aaron from the Sheila Divine explored such a topic on his recent, majestic album The Beginning of the End is Where We’ll Start Again:
What would Kurt say if he were alive today
Would he still be the voice of change
Or would he be on Twitr spouting stupid things
Palling around with Elon on his sub
Would he be a middle aged legend slightly balding
Railing against corruption and the greed
Or a millionaire rock star with a winery
Island hopping on a yacht at sea
It’s a fair question. I like to think Kurt woulda kept it real. That’s the great thing about dead heroes: they can’t sell you out. This seems particularly relevant about Gen X heroes. More and more I am thinking maybe we’re not gonna be that awesome of a generation at all, and mostly go down in history for making the monstrosity of the internet, even though it was the millennials who made all the bad parts. Except malware.
It’s sad Kurt won’t be around for the Indie Rock Retirement Community. My lifelong dream. Why are all the boomer retirement communities built around the sun or golf? Why can’t we have the exact same thing built around something else? Like… art. Indie rock. We could have a community center with a nice pub and theater that showed arty films and a live stage and maybe a dance floor so we could hobby around on crutches to Common People. There would be a programming director who booked all the 80’s and 90’s alternative and rock bands to play in the pub. We would compensate them nicely. They would be old too. We’d sit round in comfy chairs or in our wheelchairs and Owen Ashworth would do a piano ballad version of Bobby Malone one night then a few nights later (never two nights in a row, we’re old), Aimee Mann might do one of those songs from Magnolia. The shows would start at 3PM. Nothing would be beige. There would be a record store. Probably with a swap component.
This is where I want to grow old.
Of course, it’ll never work because the rockers want to stay in the cities until the bitter end, like David Byrne, or stick close by, like Thurston in Northampton or Mac and Laura down here in Chapel Hill. And retirement communities need cheap land so they have to be out of the core a bit. And we probably need sun because even though we’re gonna be cool old people we’re still gonna be old and cold all the time but what goth or grunge geezer or shoegaze senior whats to live in Arizona (though did buy a really rare Wedding Present 12” in Arizona once).
But I can dream.
My friend Lisa Carver has a great Patreon. I’ve mentioned it before, but I love it. She’s in Botswana and posting frequently and I left on the email notifications for every post, so it’s like she’s emailing me live updates from Botswana and it really is rewarding. Her review of Godzilla V Kong, the first movie she’s gone to in years, was fantastic and I thought I’d share it because it was much better than mine:
The movie was Godzilla vs. Kong, and it was so good. Kong being the West, the earth and sky, the heart, the loins; Godzilla the East, the underground and water, the place in the body where electricity whispers--the veins, I think. Each alone, a relic, and so proud. So thrilling. Certain men could not abide their beastly dignity, their strength, and harnessed technology and stole magic in order to make themself the sole apex predator. These power-hungry scientists failed to notice the slave (self-aware computer) creating schematics for the new master.
Crap. Running out of time this morning. Overslept by ten minutes, had a tech problem where Substack wasn’t letting me upload images for ten minutes, and the car people are coming to pick up my car, which hasn’t been driven since, like, August, to get it back in working order. So time is tight. I leave you with a mix, justa mix. It’s got that Drivers License song on it because I just learned about it. New Xiu Xiu. New Arab Stral. Old Elastica and Iggy and Sarah Cracknell from Saint Etienne. Middle age other stuff. Spangle Maker is my favorite Cocteau Twins song ever I can not listen to it without cranking it for the big loud part. Strongly recommended you give that a shot today.
Hope your day goes swimmingly. Hope your cats don’t try and eat you. Hope your Greenstalk planter doesn’t attack your kid. Hope you and yours are safe. Love.