Good morning. Hello. How are you? #368
The perils of the cataloging of ailments and miseries, public intellectuals, the No Ban Act, Trillium Asset Management, the demise of Stitchtagram and In Your Ear.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. Feeling better, in that guilt-ridden way we all have felt as our fire dies down after some injustice and we return to our normal life, even though we academically know nothing is better and we should just stay outraged, but we’re too exhausted to continue feeling outraged all the time and we just want to bitch about how hard it is to find the Graham crackers at the store or something.
Programming note: I forgot all about the Q&A I said I’d do, and I have half a draft done for it already, so I am renewing my vigilance on it. Ask a question! Let’s do a Q&A post. Here I’ll eve put a button right here:
Isn’t that nice?
Last night as I was falling asleep I kind of got a little bit of a shape to one of the constant, underlying thought cycles I have, that I’ve had through the course of the pandemic and I suspect is somewhat universal. I hit upon the GREAT idea, really just great, to try and write down every single thing that is profoundly unhappy in my life. The idea — half-formed as it was — was that I would pull some Wiccan hippie shit and look at the list and burn it — mentally, at least, but maybe even physically — and that would be me saying “fuck off” to all of the horrible things in my life. It seemed like it was a good idea, and gave me a momentary, fleeting sense of happiness. It was 11:30 and I was in bed, lights out already, but I decided I better turn on the light and at least jot down two or three things into my note-making app to get me started.
And then I started listing them in my head — how much weight I’ve gained, my dad, Andy Shea — and when I got to Andy, I was just like “this is a bad idea this is not going to work.” It suddenly became very clear. I tentatively thought about two or three other Very Bad Things in my life that I never think about and I was like “BIG NOPE THIS IS A REALLY BAD IDEA.” I thought of two or three I am definitely not going to mention here, but the one thing I DID write down in the notetaking app, before I shut down this line of thinking completely, was this:
Every pain I’ve ever written about or complained about is still there. They don’t go away. They just become part of living.
I was, at the time, mostly thinking physical pain, but of course it works on multiple levels. And I realized this one I should actually share with you because in the last year, as I’ve been writing this thing, I have complained about one or two or three or four physical ailments for good lengths of time, but then I just stop mentioning it. And I guess it’s suddenly very important that you know that none of those physical ailments went away. They’re all still there. And they are a perfect metaphor for the larger emotional picture as well.
My arthritic finger still hurts, all the time. I am unable to make a fist with my left hand anymore. My friend Nick gave me some exercises, and I do them, and maybe they’re keeping things from getting worse, but it still hurts. All the time.
My neck still hurts. All the time. My neck has hurt continuously since the mid 1990’s. It got noticeably worse in one fell swoop on a Delta flight back from LAX to BOS in 2006 or so. They didn’t properly diagnose it for another four years. I spent a year in PT and the exercises help, but it never gets better. Nor do my shoulders, which both ache from it.
My nose still drips, all night, even with a rhinoplasty, a CPAP machine and four allergy medications. All night, it gets clogged, I have to roll over. I can physically hear it dripping. This happens regardless of what weight I am. No doctor has ever figured it out. It just constantly irritates me.
This week I have this weird foot thing where it feels like someone slipped a two-inch rubber disc into my left shoe and I walked on it till my foot got bruised from it. But I suspect hat one will go away.
So, yeah, I guess not all of them stay forever. Some injuries do heal.
Where was I going with this? Oh, right. Yeah. Our pains just stay with us, and we keep living. Sometimes we try to not think of them. Sometimes it works. For months. Sometimes one of the pains comes to the forefront and we get kind of sad. Sometimes a few start bubbling up at once and we think “uh oh I got shit to do I probably shouldn’t sit here and think about that terrible thing” and we just push it back down and get on with our lives because who’s got the time for that sort of thing.
Sometimes I think it’d be useful to, like, take the time, but how is that going to work? Who’s got the time or money or solitude to take a year and work on your shit. We have lives. In any case, whenever you do start that process you just end up realizing you should quit your job and go work in a soup kitchen and you’re not going to do it anyway, so why remind yourself that you’re a greedy asshole.
So that’s how I’m doing today. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming, only slightly more depressed.
Thank you for your kind words on yesterday’s posts. Though I do think that post was evidence this is a decent forum for it. It feels safe enough. I believe profoundly that an NTSB-style division to investigate every act of police violence is a good thing. If I were a stronger person I’d campaign for it. But at a bare minimum it seems important to get the idea out in the world. I used to write stuff like that all the time, but like I’ve recently discussed, I’m too scared to write long political essays anymore. In addition to the total fear of being the main character on the internet that Charlie Warzel wrote so brilliantly about yesterday in one of his first solo Substack columns, somewhere over the last few years I have become deeply skeptical of the occupation of public intellectual, which was somewhat disorienting as I was definitely on a career track to end up as at last an aspiring public intellectual. But the job seems so dumb. This is not a rational belief, and I cannot square it with my deeply held belief in the power of words. I think it has something to do with some self-loathing belief that writers shouldn’t make their living as writers, they should have some other job and write on the side, like Mel Gibson was secretly a farmer in The Patriot but that simile right there ought to tell you how dodgy the belief is. I should probably get over it. An NTSB-style commission for police violence is a good idea, and it should be heard by more people, and I should not be ashamed of it and I should work to get that idea out there more and in my lifetime I have watched things go from just being ideas to reality in no time at all, just because someone wrote some powerful words about a thing, but… BIG NOPE. Too terrifying.
Ha. I should probably go to therapy about that. I did, for a while. On paper, she was amazing: she had dual doctorates in law and clinical psychology from Yale and specialized on high-achieving New York media and tech people, and in a lot of ways she was really great but in a lot of ways it was very clear she chose her specialization because of a fascination with the biz, and it was to her detriment. I swear we spent more time talking about book advances than my happiness.
Anyway, a few interesting items for you today, in the really-we’re-not-becoming-a-newsletter-of-lists department:
Have you heard about the No Ban Act? It is an act endeavoring to work its way through congress that would a) make it illegal for a president to, hypothetically, ban anyone from immigrating to the US due to religion and b) take back some of the emergency powers that congress has given the president in the realm of immigration authority. This seems like a good idea? Remember when Trump was president and we all fantasized about how when he was gone we would patch up every loophole that asshole exploited? Well, here’s one being patched. Put in a good word for the No Ban Act. Not getting a lot of press love.
In a bit of delicious capitalism-will-eat-itself irony, a large hedge fund who holds a significant stake in Google is pushing Google, via a shareholder resolution, to strengthen its whistleblower protections in the wake of maliciously, definitely-being-evilly firing AI researchers Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell. Trillium Asset Management not unreasonably states:
Reporting suggests that many Google employees who have resigned or been fired … publicly report retaliation after voicing human rights implications of company practices, including systemic workplace racism and sexism... These red flags suggest the potential for culture, ethics, and/or human rights problems internally.
Enemy of my enemy, something something.
So, anyway, if you own stock in Google, vote for the resolution. Not that anyone votes for resolutions. But you should totally vote for resolutions.
Finally, I would like to say a fond farewell to Stitchtagram. Stitchtagram was my friend Doug’s pillow business, with his sister Rachel. It made it ten years on the internet. They sold thousands of pillows. Tens of thousands, I think. And totes. And throws. It was on The Today Show and they got invited to pitch Shark Tank. It was 100% a family-operated, zero-venture-backed small business on the web and it was great. And I was their first customer:
Also, they made a musical video, which was really pretty good. Farewell, Stitchagram. You will be missed.
Yesterday I used Substack’s “Line” tool for the first time since it seemed too jarring of a transition from talking about police violence to talking about The Moon Seven Times (and, by the way, I just listened to their later-period album Sunburnt and they were still really good I wish I saw them again). I thought it would be a one-off but I think I like the tool and am going to use it more often. Like the button tool. Except I’ll probably forget. Like the button tool. Here, have a button.
Lovely.
Today’s mix is a drone mix because it’s the only one ready out of the 20 or so mixes I am currently working on. I need to work on the mixes some more. Maybe I can make some progress today. Probably not till tomorrow, though, today’s a bit busy at work. This is a good mix, though, and that Lost Boys song by the Courtneys is really so great. Pay attention to the lyrics. I should see if they have a new album out. Alas, they do not. Well I look forward to that, then. That’ll be a good day, some day in the future.
I bought two records the other day from Discogs - a Wedding Present 10” that I didnt’ know about from the Watusi era and a live Big Star album. The dude who sold it was like “I’m old enough to have seen Big Star at Max’s Kansas City in NYC in 1974” and, firstly, jealous, but secondly I noticed the record store I bought these from was In Your Ear. So I asked him if it was the In Your Ear in Boston and told him I had been a regular there for more than a decade. He said he was working out of the Providence store (there’s a Providence In Your Ear? Providence seems better and better) but that he was one of the three original founders. So that was cool. I think one of the founders was in Mission of Burma? Am I remembering this right? Or did he just work there. Maybe I’m talking to a member of Mission of Burma right now!
Okay, well, nice talking to you today. Thanks for letting me mope a bit. Hope you like the mix. Hope your Wednesday goes all right. Hope your Cherry Blossoms haven’t given up the ghost yet.
And have another button!
Questions for Q&A:
- What from pandemic times are you going to keep doing?
- What from pandemic times are you most ready to stop doing?
- What's the first non-work place you'll travel to post-vaccination?
My mom has Plantar Fat Pad Atrophy which makes her feet feel bruised all the time. I think it happens to people much older than you generally, though... so your foot thing probably isn't that. But who knew? You can lose the fat pads on your feet. Yet another thing to suck.
I also have the perpetual nasal drip. I hate it.