Good morning. Hello. How are you? #412
Early Verve, Gardening, The Bad Batch, Joe Manchin is a jerk, Roe is gonna fall, wiping and donating and selling old electronics, anyone know how to get a PS5?
Good morning, there. Hello! How are you? What do we got here this Monday morning. Grey skies. No rain. In comes the rest of my life. The road was hot.
We were so high, we'd give NASA a fright. I will stand by early Verve B-Sides as their finest work. Man. That band was just so phenomenal at the beginning. Has any other band started so strong only to get progressively less good? I mean, I guess that’s not so fair. Even Forth isn’t that bad of an album.
A Storm in Heaven and its assorted singles really do it for me, though. Endless Life is just beautiful. The version of “Already There” on the Hut Recordings Peel Sessions. The Voyager 1 live LP. God. I think I saw… three shows around the time of A Storm in Heaven? Just a majestic band.
Somewhere I have a signed copy of the “Blue” 10-inch. I remember they did a signing at Newbury Comics on Newbury Street. They were so not into it, and it was clearly too early in the morning for them, and they were all wearing their sunglasses inside, but my god did Richard Ashcroft look like a rock star. Really amazing. You don’t see that every day.
And then! I remember so vividly their return to the US for A Northern Soul. I would not characterize myself as being in a good place emotionally in 1995. It had been two years since A Storm in Heaven and now they were back, playing the paradise. I remember it vividly. Place was maybe three-quarters full? I was standing right next to “the pole” (RIP). And they come out, and they just break right out into “A New Decade,” which I’d never heard, and I was completely overwhelmed.
How long will I run for?
Who am I running from?
Just stood there, crying, standing alone (I went alone? I think?), thinking about my life, how much I’d fucked it up, how I didn’t know what I wanted, how poor I was, how lost.
Yeah, man. Strong starter, “A New Decade.”
All of that popped into my head in two-seconds after I wrote the words “grey skies.” I think this happens to most people. I’ve just gotten pretty good at pausing and writing them down. But I believe that any human’s internal thoughts are a non-stop barrage of fleeting past memories, coloring every word they say, every moment they experience. It’s… a lot being human sometimes.
Anyway, had a good weekend. Got some gardening done, even though some asshole bastard evil critter from hell has been eating my peppers. What kind of animal eats peppers? It is ridiculous. I actually think it’s a deer? Anyway, they were mostly devastated, and I am devastated. They may grow back, we will see. They were producing peppers too! This will be at least a one, probably three or so week setback. It sucks.
But you can see for yourself in this week’s heartbreaking episode 17 of the 2021 gardening journey:
Man. I have made a lot of mistakes this year. It’s hard to remind yourself that even with all of those mistakes, you’re doing more and better than last year. This is where the gardening videos will come in handy. Before next years season I will re-watch them all, take notes, and remind myself of all my mistakes, so that I can avoid them.
Speaking of which I have a great idea for another YouTube video that will get more than 20 views: I’m going to do a “whole ecosystem” video about Amazon box cardboard sometime this summer. How I take the cardboard, I shred it, I use it as mulch, and then when the season is over, I compost it. I think people will go gaga over that. There’s a lotta guilt in America over Amazon boxes, let me tell you. Cardboard mulch needs to be normalized. Also, I have a theory that a lot of the digging in my garden is actually because of the leaf mould mulch less than the plants — the ones with cardboard mulch seem to get much less dug-in. Anyway, that video is going to be a hit.
Jane was a big intransigent pain last night, but all in all she and I had a lovely weekend, lots of roug-housing and gardening — oh my god, she was so cute with the gardening. You should really watch the gardening video if for no other reason than the adorable footage of Jane potting plants, mulching and watering. But she did not want to brush her teeth. Actually she had two or three fits this weekend. Kinda a bit of a regression. And she didn’t eat lot. Well, except for noodles. Jesus, man. Getting a kid to eat healthy food is such a nightmare. More salad for me, I guess. One thing I’ve noticed is that she is so conversational now it’s easy to forget there are lots of words and concepts she still can’t express, and usually if she’s being taciturn or moody, it’s because she can’t say something she wants to say. I’ve also been sitting down on the floor at her level whenever she starts crying and it is amazing how well it works. Nine times out of ten, easy.
We watched some of The Bad Batch and, so far, I gotta say, it’s kinda BS that show. Like they intentionally made it more violent than The Clone Wars or Rebels, showing actual humans getting shot. Okay, fine, bring it, I say. I am totally ready for a bad-ass adult Star Wars cartoon. Except this is not that. It is still 100% a kids show, with kid’s dialog and kids plots. The last episode was so boring. All they did was get a robot head from a factory. And yeah, it was on Corellia and yeah there was some character crossover, but whatever. Kids show. I am happy you’re expanding the Star Wars universe by giving us the name and the backstory of the Rancor monster, but.. come on. Come on.
Joe Manchin is up to his shit again saying that he is not going to support the Democrat’s voter bill. There is an ounce to nuance to this — there are two Democrat voter bills, the John Lewis Voter’s Rights bill and HR1. Roughly put, the John Lewis bill restores the parts of the Voter’s Right act of 1964 that the Supreme Court overturned, and HR1 expands the rights with significant protections against the type of malevolent chicanery that is going on at the state level by Republicans right now. The two are not interchangeable, and Joe Manchin knows this. He does not care. He is an awful, awful person.
People keep saying that we should just let him become a Republican (not that we can let him) and I don’t think that’s right. All Turtle Mitch wants is his 50 senators so he can confirm judges, or block our confirmation of judges and filibuster any progressive legislation. Literally nothing else is as important to republicans than holding the senate. It is vital to keep it from them.
I think the better paradigm for Joe Manchin — and I have been saying this for a while now — is that he is an abusive spouse, whom we have to coddle and say he is so big and so strong and so important because if we don’t he’ll throw a childish fit and throw democracy into the toilet.
It may not be this cycle, but I am reasonably confident that in the next two, three cycles, we will once again take the senate, and it will be with a 52, 53 vote margin, and my god I cannot wait to spend significant amounts of time endlessly hectoring Manchin, and taking pleasure in his absolute irrelevance. And don’t worry, I’ll remind you of it for years.
Also, just as a heads up, so you can start planning for it now, Roe V Wade is going to fall next summer, right before the mid-terms. God knows what that will do to the mid-terms. It’s stunning to me people don’t talk about this more. It feels like everyone is crossing their fingers that Brett Fucking Kavanaugh or the woman from The Handmaid’s Tale is going to vote to uphold Roe. That is the sort of magical realism going on right now. I suppose I’m probably committing a progressive sin thinking about a post-Roe world. But it feels like it needs to be done? Talking about the specifics feels like a big no-no so far, though. We should at least start talking about how it’s gonna happen.
(usual internet disclaimers apply, obviously some people are talking about it, I’m not some trailblazer here, I just get the strong sense a lot of people don’t realize how imminent it is).
Okay okay I will stop.
I feel I should clarify my news consumption “moderation.” When I say I am in a phase where I am “not looking at much news,” this is, strictly speaking, a lie. On the weekends, I definitely don’t look at much news — I don’t look at Twitter or my beloved Nuzzel replacement Tweet Shelf. But on weekdays? When I say I am not looking at much news, I still check out the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Politico and the Wall Street Journal. I still read about ten news-related newsletters, and check Twitter and Tweet Shelf a good ten or so times throughout the day. All I really don’t do is watch MSNBC in the evening. I feel bad about this because, criticism aside, Rachel and Chris do a fantastic job of giving mainstream attention to less visible progressive issues that don’t get a lot of play on television. But it just gives me too much anxiety these days, and I think I need to accept that. I just don’t want you to think I am actually, you know, newsless. It probably says something about me that I consider that level of news consumption “moderation.” That something is maybe not good.
Anyway.
I think we want to get a PS 5. How does one do this? It’s still basically impossible, right? There are these weird queing systems? Is there anywhere you can order one and just say “send it to me when it’s my turn even if it’s like four months?” I don’t understand why these things are so hard. The internet is so bad ad this.
I spent this weekend selling off a bunch of old electronics of mine and Emma’s. Wiping computers to donate to the ex-inmate education charity that I work with to donate old computers and phones. Sold two Sonos devices in a matter of minutes, which is nice. I’m glad people are still committed to the Sonos system. Also, hats off to my wife on her methodical archiving skills. She gave me a giant stack of old hard drives to sell and I’ve been through a few so far, zeroing ‘em out pre-sale, but so far not a single errant file that she forgot to archive.
She also still had her Motorola Razr and classic Nokia 6310 and I could not sell those. I put them on the shelf in the library next to my old Razr and 6310. I feel like we need to hang on to those. All her old slabs of glass that are the various Nexus and Galaxies can be donated off to Exodus, though. Once I figure out how to wipe them. Half the battle with this hobby is Googling the various manners in which one performs a factory reset on a device.
I also drilled a hole in the wall to run a cable to the Speaker in the bathroom. It looks very nice, don’t you think?
And my final task for the weekend failed. I was moving an Apple TV to the old built-in archaic home audio system. But alas, the $10 HDMI-to-eighth-inch-audio adaptor I ordered completely didn’t work. This feels like a fairly common event these days with adaptors ordered on Amazon. The first one you buy — always the cheapest — doesn’t work, and you have to buy another one, sometimes a third. In finding the correct power supply for my Casio SK-5, I had to order four different ones before one worked correctly. And it wasn’t a matter of me mixing up the polarity or the voltage: they were either completely incorrectly labeled, or just didn’t function. There is so much junk on Amazon. It’s just amazing. So I moved up to the next level and ordered the $20 HDMI-to-eighth-inch-audio adaptor and it will be here today. Will it be any better? Or will I have to move up to the $30 range? Who knows!
All right. Playlist! Moody and quiet one. I did not do a lot of work on the playlists this weekend — I spent my music time listening to new vinyl arrivals from Taylor Swift and the New Year and Becoming Animal and Goldfrapp. But I got a good, moody, quiet one for you on this rainy Monday. New stuff from a lot of people, a couple oldies but goodies. Particularly excited that amiina has some new stuff. And I am very excited, as I have already told you, about Holly Macve. And the new Wolf Alice sounds fantastic. Very excited about that album.
OK! Let’s tackle this Monday god Mondays suck but at least mine doesn’t seem to be too bad in the way of meetings. I can do it! You can do it! We can do it! WOOOOO.