Good morning. Hello! How are you? I am doing all right. Arthritis in both my hands is especially bad this morning, which is mildly disconcerting for someone who hasn’t reached his 50’s yet. Emma was complaining yesterday that I’m never gong to get grey hair, which I thought was just fine with me. But I would gladly trade my non-gray hair for non-arthritic hands. It really is disturbing. One of these days I’m going to have to, like, go to the doctor. Alas.
Yesterday morning when I went in to her room to pick up Jane in the morning, she was dreaming. “Mommy was just here and daddy was just here. In the bed,” she said.
“You were having a dream,” I said. “Can you say dream?”
“NO.”
Oh. Well then.
She did take some nice selfies of us at breakfast, though.
She’s over at Janet’s this morning. She spent the night there.
I got my gardening video done yesterday! It is a looong one. What can I say I planted a lot of plants. And I needed to get all that cute footage of Jane in. And the tarp washing time-lapse really couldn’t be cut, I mean, tarp washing. Who wants to miss out on that? I do confess that half the reason I am doing all of this is to get better at my video editing skills, my camera skills. I used to be really good at it, and I am trying to re-learn. Look at those great edits of me walking around the property! That’s some serviceably average camera and editing work, right there. Still haven’t taken the plunge into Premiere, though, alas. Just added the top two search results for “Adobe Premiere tutorial Youtube” to my Watch Later list.
Speaking of which! I don’t know if you have this problem, but I don’t like it when people send me YouTube links during the day. I am busy with work and don’t want to spend all this time wastching YouTube videos. I save those for later in the day. So I make use of the “Watch later” button on YouTube, which really is pretty great. You can click it, and it adds the videos to a playlist, and then later, like, say, in the evening, when you’re sitting in front of your TV, you can go to YouTube and find your Watch Later playlist and watch all the videos that people sent you during the day, all comfy on your couch, on a big tv. It really is pretty nifty. Here give it a try with this one:
Speaking of gardening, yesterday I was doing a one-on-one with a new employee. She’s pretty great everyone is very happy about her arrival at the company. And we’re still small enough that when you join you can, over the course of a week or two, do a one-on-one with every employee and get to know everyone. I will be sad when we get too big to do those. Anyway, she’s been with the company for a couple weeks now, and all she knows about me is that I like to garden, because I posted one of these videos into Slack a few weeks back. And so here we are, having this one on one, and it’s clear to me that I’m just this weird old man, by far the oldest guy in the company, living out in the country, and I’m just this old gardening dude to her. I almost got my gumption up about it, but then I thought:
“That’s fine.”
I’m content to just be the weird old gardening dude at work.
Yesterday I had to make a run to the post-office-slash-gas-station-slash-convenience-store, which is no longer the post-office-slash-gas-station-slash-convenience-store-slash-Burger-King, because the Burger King seems to have closed during the pandemic, which is sad, even though I think I’d been in there maybe four times in the last six years. Anyway, the regular woman was working there, who I haven’t seen in ages but I used to see every single day for a year when I first moved here and I was sending out Discogs orders every day and was buying my e-cigarettes from her. She has shaved the sides of her head and I gotta say it looks pretty bad-ass. I also like my post-office-slash-gas-station-slash-convenience-store friends because they’re not like “oh hi it’s been so long how are you how are you holding up during these difficult times are you staying safe how is your family?”
Instead, I say “nice haircut.”
And she says “Thanks. You need one.”
Love it.
Anyway, I was there to drop off a package, but since I was there I figured I’d get a special treat for myself and bought a diet coke and a Big Kat. Do you know the Big Kat? It is a Kit Kat bar, but it is supersized. Like it’s 4 times as big. It’s actually a little weird because it’s probably twice as thick, and twice as tall, but it is definitely not twice as long. Also the chocolate-crunch proportion is a little out of whack. So it’s kind of it’s own thing.
You probably didn’t know this, but the Big Kat has been around for at least twenty years. I mean, I think it’s been around exactly twenty years, or at least it’ll be twenty years later this summer. I’m a little surprised they don’t put a big “20th anniversary!” label on it, though you get the distinct impression that even though it’s been around this long, that they are still trying to make the Big Kat a thing.
I know that the Big Kat is a thing because the Big Kat is a source of shame in my life. In fact, even looking at a Big Kat makes me feel shame. This is because the night before 9/11, I posted an entry to my LiveJournal (I really have been doing this journal-on-the-internet thing for a long time) about how brilliant and amazing I was because that night I had bought four Big Kat bars and meticulously melted them together, using a cast iron tortilla skillet on very low heat, in order to form a single, large MEGA KAT. I was so proud of myself. I took a picture and posted it on the internet. I do not have this picture anymore, thankfully. But after 9/11 happened, and I realized THAT was the last thing I posted on the internet, I just felt so embarrassed. Like I was living a life of frivolity, and I needed to change. I have since changed, sort of, and also the shame has diminished, but until yesterday, I was still pretty scared of the Big Kat.
And actually, I just went and looked back in my LiveJournal, and it turns out the whole thing was a lie. Yes, my last entry before 9/11 involved the Giant Kit Kat, but a) it was on Friday the 7th, and b) it talked about many other things too! And while I wouldn’t say it was a paragon of virtue and seriousness, it was more wide-ranging and thoughtful than my guilty conscience has been telling me all of these years. So I think perhaps i will let that guilt go. Not that I should be eating Big Kats all the time or anything.
There’s a great part in that entry where Jill and I write Nerve dating ads for each other:
Mine was "wanted: someone for 2 nights a week for cuddling, easy sex, and domestic harmony. the other five nights a week are yours. " Hers was "wanted, someone to lavish me with affection and attention until I walk away, expecting you to lavish even more."
Still miss that woman. She really was fantastic.
Another thing I noticed in that entry is that the week of September 1, 2001 was the week the Big Burrito closed. “Just fucking gone,” I write in my journal. “No warning.”
God. I still miss that place.
Speaking of beloved retail institutions, I have a sinking feeling that Tom and Jerry’s is permanently closed. People drive by and send me pictures, and it’s never open. And it feels like almost every other bar in New York is open at this point? It is… concerning. I mean, every time someone asks me where I want to go first after the pandemic, I say Tom and Jerry’s. So, like, if it doesn’t open, does the pandemic ever really end? Will I just never leave my house? Seems plausible. Makes sense, since I still haven’t renewed my passport.
Okay, short one today I actually gotta go do a thing so I need to get a move on. Also, it’s 4/20, so, you know, happy 4/20 day? He says, with a question mark, adding some vocal fry because he doesn’t really care and the statement was semi-ironic, semi-mocking. I don’t really have a 4/20-themed playlist for you, but I did finish a club mix, so, you know, kind of the same thing, right? Because if there’s one thing stoners love it’s dancing to clubby pop music. Back in my rave days, I definitely saw a lot of stoners on the hard core dance floor. Anyway, this mix is a mix (ha) of some classics and some newer stuff and stylistically all they really have in common is that they have a drum machine banging out a dance beat. There’s really no club in the world that would play all of these together, unless someone lets me DJ at Kinfolk again. Miss that place. God. I miss so many places.
Talk to you guys tomorrow! Drop a line! Say hi! Buttons!
I finally got around to watching one of your gardening videos (oops!) and I loved it so much. The Jane parts were especially wonderful. I’m not a subscriber and can’t wait for the next installment. 😀