Good morning. Hello! How are you? Holding up okay? Excited that it’s Friday? Sick of the pandemic? Just done with it? Doing just fine? I hope you’re doing just fine.
It’s my birthday. I am forty-nine years old today. It’s 9:12 AM here on the east coast. I was born at 7:04 AM in a Time Zone that no longer exists, known then as Alaska-Hawaii time, or UTC -10 (UTC -10 is now called Hawaii-Aleutian). That’s five hours behind UTC -5 here on the east coast, which means I don’t turn forty-nine, actually, until 12:04 PM this afternoon. This is always a whole thing when my numerologist, Chinese astrology friend tries to draw up my chart.
Forty-Nine is seven divided by seven, which means I am secretly seven seven year-olds standing on each other’s shoulders in a trenchcoat.
I went to the hardware store this morning. It was raining, so I couldn’t really peruse the garden center. That was sad. They had no tomato clips. I bought a nice hose holder bowl, but it didn’t have a barcode on it and I didn’t notice so I had to wait forever at self-checkout. I also bought a smaller pump sprayer for squirrel repellant on the porch, a fake whiskey barrel planter, four small, cheap, grey pots, and some buckets. I think went through the Bojangle’s drive through and bought Emma a bunch of biscuits and got a Diet Mountain Dew. Then I stopped by Harris Teeter to get myself an ice cream cake, and to double-check that they weren’t lying the other day when they said they were no longer carrying Fage’s BestSelf Lactose-Free yogurt, which is my mother-in-law’s favorite food, she basically lives off of the stuff, and the Teet was the only place around here that sold the stuff. Not even Whole Foods or the Hippie store or the new Wegman’s. Actually haven’t checked the Publix in Cary yet I should do that. But anyway, they did not have it. I feel bad for her. I haven’t broken the news yet. I suppose I will do that now.
Done. I feel bad. Who likes being the bearer of bad news. Especially on their birthday.
I had big gardening plans for today, but it’s raining, so… not just yet. I do have the next four days off, though. I’ll find time to get that tomato trellis built, just you watch. Today, instead, I am going to go to Schwab and put Emma’s SEP deposit into her SEP account, like we told the IRS we were going to do. How’s that for an exciting fucking birthday?
I was so productive yesterday. Just insanely productive. Plowed through two huge deliverables, got them both “done.” Well, you know, v1 done. I had that euphoric feeling afterwards when you’ve been in a great, uninterrupted flow state for hours and hours. It took a lot of planning to carve out the time to get these things done, but I’m glad I did. I felt so good about it.
Wish that feeling was still here. Never lose that feeling, as Swervedriver said.
One nice thing is that a record came in the mail for me yesterday, and I didn’t notice it and Emma forgot to tell me it had arrived, so I didn’t open it until this morning. So I got a birthday present! This is a rarity for a 49 year-old man. I just opened it and it was a beautiful, mint copy of Rain Tree Crow’s “Blackwater” twelve-inch single. It was from the era of vinyl that was vinyl’s last, dying breath, as everyone stopped buying it and started buying CDs. When barely anyone was buying it. When barely any bands were allowed by their labels to make it. I’m guilty of this! I already own “Blackwater” on CD. Or I did. I think I sold it. Anyway. But David Sylvian seems to still have had enough pull with his label to get a 12” out in the UK. But it’s so thin. I mean, it’s probably… 45 grams? One of those ultra-thin, cheap-ass records they were making at the end. But the cover is matte paper and it’s so gorgeous. Just beautiful.
The crappy scans on the internet don’t do it justice. Just a gorgeous sleeve.
And a beautiful song, really stroking the right wistful yet melancholy tone you need on a rainy morning on your 49th birthday.
So Twitter bought this company Scroll, which is some sort of “subscription” company that lets you remove ads. I could talk a lot about that, I have opinions on that topic, but that’s not the point of this little diatribe. Scroll also seems to own Nuzzel. Everyone is describing Nuzzel as an email service, because it lets you make an email newsletter of links or something. I don’t know about that. I hear a lot of people use it, and it was the business that had “potential” for Nuzzel or something. But before that, Nuzzel made an app. It was a news app. It was gloriously simple. You could connect your Twitter account (or your LinkedIn if you were masochist) and it just went through all the tweets in your account and made a newsfeed of the most popular links. You could set the look-back duration to 1, 8 or 24 hours. I had it set to 8. I found that one hour didn’t have enough links to really get good signal, unless some major news event had happened. And 24 hours was so long that you probably knew the news by then. But eight hours was perfect. I have been addicted to this thing for several years now. I mean, it’s on my home screen. My home screen! That means it’s like family! It’s one of the first things I check in the morning. It’s brilliant because the feed is of the news article links, not people’s tweets about them. You can read the tweets if you want, but Nuzzle makes the whole experience more about the news than the commentary, maybe? I mean sure, sometimes a bunch of people are talking about an op-ed or a blog post or something, but even then, Nuzzel was so convenient. The actual link people were talking about is right there, for you to read it for yourself, and then go read the commentary you liked. It is wonderful. I don’t know how I would live without it.
But apparently i’m going to have to, because this sub-product of a comapany owned by another company, that’s focused on another thing, that just got bought by an even bigger company, has decided that this product that a bunch of people know and love and use needs to be shut down. And it needs to be shut down on May 7. Like, they just bought the company last week. Usually when these deals happen, the purchasing company — and the newly-rich CEO of the purchasee company — say “oh hey we’re gonna shut this service down in six months” or a year or something. But these guys? Nope. ONE WEEK. Not even a week! THREE DAYS! I am fucking pissed about this.
Like… give people time to develop a replacement? Put some effort into selling the thing? They’re all like “oh we have to shut it down so we can build you a new, better offering.” Being a guy who took over a beloved, abandoned app and kept it alive and made it profitable I have some experience here. NO YOU DON’T.
And of course no timeline on this supposed newer, better version. Because what does our productivity matter.
And let’s remember: Nuzzel is mostly an email service now. If you read the articles about this event, they just talk about Nuzzel the email service. They don’t even mention the app! The app is persona non grata. Yet I swear to god, half my friends use the app. The app is like the Velvet Underground of apps.
But hey, the “core functionality will be integrated into Twitter.” Maybe. Someday. Like Vine was, I suppose. And, of course, one assumes by “core functionality” they mean the email stuff, not the brilliant, irreplaceable, indispensible Nuzzle app.
Grrr.
Okay okay, we will let it go. It’s our birthday. Ommmmm.
Instead I shall write about our beautiful little neighborhood. I love our street. Our neighborhood is one street, a half mile long, ending in a cul-de-sac, with no outlet. 21 houses. You can walk up and down the street safely during a pandemic, and we have, all year. It’s been super lucky. We see neighbors when we walk – yesterday we saw four of them – but it’s perfectly safe and not crowded at all. It’s been the biggest blessing during this pandemic. I mean look at the thing, it’s like a fucking Windows 95 startup screen:
Forty-nine. Man. I don’t know how I feel about this. I mean, at least it’s not fifty? And I seem to be in roughly the place I wanted to be in at this age? Maybe a couple years behind, but nothing major. Life is mostly on track.
But this is my second birthday of the pandemic. That’s kind of nuts.
I kinda figure I’m just going to ignore this birthday, like I did 48. Worry about it next year. NEXT YEAR I hope we have another three-way birthday party for me, Sean and Jussi. That would be nice. Or three separate ones that we all go to. Or something. I hope that next year there is a reason to celebrate, is what I’m saying.
I was listening to “Been Caught Stealing” yesterday on XM First Wave while making my lunch, and I feel I need to admit to the world I was wrong about that song. It’s weird to think about how we all thought Ritual de lo Habitual was a sell-out? Like the first single was ten minutes long? My god we were so fucking picky and demanding about bands back then. And then “Been Caught Stealing” came out and got big and I was like “ehh that band has sold out that song is so pop.” Because I was a loser snob.
But you know what? “Been Caught Stealing” is one of the most subversive, counter-cultural pop singles ever! It’s amazing! The lyrics are amazing! They are so gloriously anti-capitalist, anarchist, and it’s just played EVERYWHERE. A song unapologetically about shoplifting is routinely played in grocery stores and other shoplifting venues of choice, and everyone is okay with it! Now, sure, maybe everyone is okay with it because music does not actually possess the political power people ascribe to it, and capitalism is so all-powerful it can co-opt these things. But still! Nice try, Jane’s Addition!
Also, you know how I don’t like poetry? Look at these lyrics! They are just some dude writing down his thoughts and arbitrarily inserting carriage returns. I love that!
I've been caught stealing once when I was 5. I enjoy stealing. It's just as simple as that. Well, it's just a simple fact. When I want something, I don't want to pay for it,
I walk right through the door.
Fantastic. Fantastic.
I mean, does the song make me question my very existence, make me feel completely alive like “Mountain Song?” No. But. Still. A band making a song about shoplifting as the follow-up single to a ten minute single about funerals and drugs? Maybe we were a liiiitle too quick to accuse people of selling out in the grunge years. Maybe we had our own hysterical witch hunt thing going on.
Also, I’ve wrestled with a long time about what to do about song titles in writing. I don’t like italicizing them — that’s reserved for album names. I know you’re “supposed” to put them in quotes but I’m not a journalist and this is not a book and I get to make up my own style guide and I don’t particularly like putting song titles in quotes. But I am trying it out today. Because doing nothing just… seems wrong. I’m really torn about this. I have been for years.
Okay, well, I don’t want to spend the day in front of the computer, so I’m gonna go. Here’s a mix. It’s a mix of oldies, because I am old. What do we have here? Martika, fuck yeah. I own that vinyl. From back then. Bought it when it came out. She’s the best. Some bands from the ballad mix or some that almost made it - Christopher Cross, Air Supply, Pat Benatar, Lionel Ritchie, Heart, Styx. My favorite Dylan track. Yeah, this is good stuff. Let’s enjoy being old today.
Have a lovely day! It’s Friday! Enjoy the weekend!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BEAUTIFUL FRIEND! I know what you mean about looking forward to a time when there’s something to celebrate and furthermore being able to celebrate with people we love, but I would assert that managing to stay safe and sane after a year+ of crazy life is cause for celebration. ❤️
OLD PEOPLE! happy birthday, rick—i enjoy looking up to you as if you were my elder. xo