Good morning. Hello. How are you? #396
Oh hey images work again, insufficient mulchers, a new gardening foe, SF Chinatown, mechanical reminiscing.
Good morning! Hello. How are you? I am okay. It’s Monday. You might not know this very special, and unique, and secret fact about me, but I am not the biggest fan of Mondays. Especially grey Mondays.
Welp. Let’s see if images work today in Substack:
Oh that god. Man. Yesterday was such a bummer. I was right on the edge of not doing that email, and then I rallied. And then the stupid no-pictures thing just ruined it. Yesterday was a day full of frustrations like that. My new shoes gave me blisters. The last hour of my alone time was taken away from me because Emma was doing some major hedge trimming and asked me for my help in disposing of the cuttings. This could have been a bummer, but I was done with all of my tasks for the day, and it was a chance to use my shredders and mulchers, and who would ever turn down a chance to use those. Except these particular bushes — Juniper — make cuttings that are basically impossible for either of my machines to shred: the branches are too thick for the Worx shredder, and the pine needles are too sticky and much up the gears of the Sunjoe chipper. Neither worked. So in the end I just loaded it all up on a tarp and we dragged it to the woods, and while dragging massive piles of junk around on tarps is kind of fun, it’s not as fun as shredding.
Man. I am so bitter that super powerful electric mulcher is only available in Europe. I’m gonna have to start an import-export business.
I did get some gardening done this weekend, but I messed up the video there, too. Like toward the end of the video I just forgot to switch back from Time Lapse to regular video, so the video just sort of peters out. But I did get the full garden tour. Didn’t do much this weekend. It’s basically a period of never-ending squirrel battle and potting things up. I DO need to install the drip irrigation, and I think I’m almost ready. Maybe next weekend. Gotta get that done before I head off to Alaska, because Emma does NOT want to spend a half-hour a day watering my stupid plants while I’m gone and she’s already gotta take care of Jane all by herself. Anyway, here’s the (deeply imperfect) gardening video of the week:
Man I wish I could take Jane to Alaska with me. I know it’d be tons of work to do it solo, but it would also be super fun, she could meet her cousin, Emma could get a break. But there’s no way to do it yet with these insane CDC guidelines, so I guess it’ll just have to wait another year. I am bummed.
Oh right! So one more thing about the gardening. The thing about the gardening and the endless, tedious, miserable home-networking work I spent hours up on hours doing this weekend, is that they are related. They’re related because all of this networking shit started because I decided our mesh network needed another Wifi mesh node in my office, becaise Wifi’s always been a little weak in there, and I have this Logitech HomeKit camera that I had set up in the window, and it was always losing its connection. My main computer is wired in my office, but I have a lot of toys and doohickeys and whatnot that exist mainly on a wifi connection, and it’s always been spotty since we moved here and I was jut tired of it.
So I set up this new node, and while on Friday I then got distracted with Emma’s Wifi project — getting our stupid doorbells to finally work properly — on Saturday I turned back to the original project: getting decent Wifi in my studio, and getting this Logitech camera set back up. And I did it. And! BEHOLD:
I am NOT doing battle just with squirrels in the garden! The BUNNIES are coming for everything too! Those bastards!
I don’t know if bunnies are sensitive to squirrel repellant! I don’t know if they hate capsaicin as much as squirrels. This changes everything. I am so screwed. These critters are going to eat everything. They have no fear.
Fuckin’ nightmare.
BUNNIES.
I read this tweet about Chinatown and it explains so much:
I mean, put aside for a moment Vox seems to have not linked the actual article. But I get it. My god, it makes perfect sense. It explains so much. I remember first going to SF Chinatown as a kid, maybe 10 years old, as a tourist, taking an actual tour, with a tour guide, buying stupid souvenirs in the shops like it was Disneyland. I didn’t know anything about ethnic neighborhoods, the history of Asian Americans, any of it. It was, in some ways, a learning experience, but in others it was… unfortunate. And then, years later, the Barbarian Group had it’s office on the edge of Chinatown, and my apartment was on the opposite side of Chinatown, and I would walk right through to go to work every day. And at the same time my New York apartment (I had a lot of Apartments for a while there I was a jerk) was on one side of New York Chinatown and my office was on the other side, and when I was in New York I’d walk through Chinatown there, and the contrasts are so obvious, in hindsight. Night and day. And when we’d go visit the gang at Goodby and drink at Cathay House which was, in retrospect, a ridiculous bit of architecture. But Willie (was that his name? God, it’s been so long) was a great bartender and Moutai at 6Pm is always a great idea.
Anyway, I want to read that Vox article, but I think I can imagine the contours. I’m ashamed I never noticed the differences in architecture, or more accurately, thought about what the differences in the architecture the two meant.
Important public service announcement, on the order of magnitude of my shocking discovery that the Emmerichs of the film industry are not related: Brian Krebs, leading internet security researcher and the author of Krebs on Security, the influential computer security blog, is not related to Chris Krebs, leading internet security administrator and man who was fired by Trump for telling the truth about the election. Not related! I did not see that one coming.
So, the automatic tendency to think of specific incidents and scenes from my past, or specific stories or movies, while doing specific tasks, is creeping back into my subconscious again. It always happens, of course. And I suspect it happens to all of us. Even if I have something on my mind, while brushing my teeth, I will always think of Han Solo in the hangar bay on Hoth. It’s been happening for most of my life. I have dozens of these.
Six years ago, I wrote a poem (I know, I know) — the only poem of the last 30 years or so. And it wasn’t really a poem, I just threw some half-assed poetry framework around the thing and then wrote out a list. I had been working for years on this poem, which was a comprehensive list of all of these moments that I could get written down. It’s hard to write these things down! You have to have the thought, finish the task and still remember, after finishing the task, to go write it down in your notebook. I prepped for this “poem” for like two years.
I’ll spare you the whole thing (unless you wanna click that link yourself), but it had many “stanzas” like this:
When I cut my nails,
I think of Bo Derek in Tarzan, or rather the accompanying Playboy pictorial.
Early confusion and sexuality, shamefully and illicitly felt.
When I cut radishes,
I think of hunting squirrels growing up in Alaska.
The moment I first experienced the horror of killing.
When I trim my mustache,
I think of Yoda on Degobah, inverted Luke, entombed Vader.
My father teaching me to be a man with a razor.
When I chop garlic,
I think of a hometown sports shop in Fairbanks.
I loved it for the skis, my friends tried to rob it.
Like that. On and on. No effort at rhyme or meter. Just a list.
I stuck the thing on Medium — the first entry in this writing project I was working on that never got off the ground (an early attempt at finding a successful outlet ultimately satisfied by GMHHAY, I am now realizing) — and like three people read it and that was the end of it.
And it really was the end of it! Because the act of writing that poem got my mind to jump the groove and stop obsessing over these flashback recollections. It was almost as if they stopped happening. It was such a relief.
The relief lasted six years.
But I can feel it creeping back in.
And… I guess I will just continue the whole cycle? Make a new list of the things? Write them down in a new format (hopefully not a poem)? Maybe compare and contrast the lists? Because I feel like a few of the actual habitual recollections have shifted.
Then, to quote Matt Johnson, the whole goddamn thing… will start… all over… again.
I’m scared to even go re-read that piece. I suspect it’ll make the problem worse.
Good news I won a Civ VI diety game with the new Lady Six Sky. Man that was hard. I am not good at using her Observatories in lieu of the traditional Campuses. It’s very hard for me to imagine where the plantations will be. It’s hard for me to even remember which resources require plantations instead of farms. But eventually I hunkered down and sorted it out, actually used pins to plan things, and got a few good +3 adjacency and better Observatories and eked out a very close science victory. I got Sinbad and Hercules, that helped. Sinbad really is a little money-maker, that guy.
Okay time for a playlist. Some quality old goth. Admittedly a little heavy on the Doctor Death series, but I am just so excited those are now on Spotify and I can share them with you. This is a moody one I hope you are feeling dark today.
Okay off to water the plants, get Jane, breakfast, then work work work work work. Oo let’s add that Rihanna song to some playlist I’m working on I love that song. Here’s to another week. I hope we all get through unscathed!
this memory thing is interesting! i wonder if it's like some variant of synesthesia (which i admittedly know very little about to begin with, but maybe someone else can comment)?
I've heard Milorganite is good for repelling rabbits, but I haven't tried it yet myself.