Good morning. Hello. How are you? #415
Modern life is rubbish, as blur says. We need a jobs guarantee. RIP Crooks Corner.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Getting through this week okay? This is a tough one for me. Yesterday wasn’t much better. I have a headache today for the third…. oh wait. I suppose those are related. Hrm. Let me go take some Advil. Hold please. Okay done. Yeah huh. Maybe I haven’t been depressed at all. Maybe I’ve just had a low-grade headache for several days and not noticed. I have been trying to avoid Advil ever since that congresswoman got an ulcer from taking too much. Because I have definitely taken too much Advil in life. Like i was taking, like, 18 pills a day for, like, a decade in there. Six at a time. Yeah. Not good. Please don’t remind me. I know.
Kellianne tells me the moon or whatever has stopped doing whatever it was doing to make everyone miserable, but I didn’t feel much better yesterday. Well, until the evening. Then I watched two great new TV shows and I felt better. Boy it’s nice how comedy can make you laugh.
So, yes. I started two new TV shows last night, and life is better. God. Imagine someone saying that in the 90’s. Remember how in the 90’s it was completely okay to say “oh I don’t watch TV” and not sound completely pretentious. Like now? Who doesn’t watch TV? It’s such a different world. “Oh you don’t watch TV? How interesting? So you missed where a comic book TV show got the sitting president of the US to finally acknowledge the Tulsa massacre? Oh you don’t know what the Tulsa Massacre is? Maybe you should educate yourself and watch some comic book shows.”
I don’t know if I believe that paragraph, but it sounded good when I workshopped it in my head last night. I do recall recently coming across one person who “didn’t watch TV,” but I can’t remember who it was. In any case, sorry, person.
The two new shows were Loki and Hacks, by the way. I enjoyed them both very much. Jean Smart is a national treasure (speaking of that comic book show. No not that one. The other one.)
Twenty-eight Mercury Rev albums on Spotify but no Stillness Breathes. Come on.
God the new Spotify is so bad. They have removed a column in their list for artist (you can see this in the screenshot at the end of this missive). Instead it’s listed in small text underneath the song title. Which makes it impossible to easily sort by artist when you’re searching for a song called, say, something like “Rain” where there are a bajillion songs by different artists called “Rain.”
Actually the search results page is now completely unsortable. They took that away. Awesome. I love it when some product designer with their head up Steve Jobs dead ass decides users don’t need certain features and it’s anything other than act of violence to remove them.
Also when you drag a song over to a playlist now, it is super easy to accidentally drag the song over while clicking on the artists instead — because it’s super small text super close to the song name — but if you do that, it just won’t add it, won’t give you an error, does nothing, and it took me like two weeks to figure out why. So, that’s nice.
After cheering myself up with the glorious funniness of Hacks, I went to bed and started reading my book and it was all blown up. It’s a book about the grocery industry but it took an extended detour into the world of long-haul trucking, its predatory employment practices and environmental devastation. It was — it is — baaaaaad. The part that really got me, though, was that he said, after giving the absolutely insane numbers (350 pounds of products shipped in America, per day, per person. 250 gallons of gas, per day, per truck), he said something like “and there’s absolutely no escaping it. Everything comes to you on a truck. If you decide to leave society behind and live in the woods on a commune, everything you need to start will come on a truck. Your chickens will come on a truck. Your seeds come on a truck.”
It was (is!) absolutely appalling. The industry has a hundred and fifteen percent turnover a year. It completely relies on unwitting newbies to skirt federal drivetime limits by pairing a new “trainee” with a “trainer.” It is as predatory and insane as the for-profit school system is, roping these new drivers — often mentally ill, or ex-cons, or substance abuse addicts — into a system of what is essentially sharecropping. There’s no other way to put it. It is the exact same system: sign a lease on a truck. They take your entire paycheck, every week. It’s just… horrible.
Oh and when they drop off a load, as soon as their trucks stops moving, they’re not getting paid anymore, and they’re at the mercy of the loading crew at that drop-off to load them out, and it could take four, five, six hours, that they don’t get paid, but it is still counting against their drive limits.
And oh god, the sexual assault, harassment and rape for the 5% of the drivers who are women. A woman-friend from high school is a truck driver, and the entire time I was reading this book, I was picturing her as the driver with whom the author is driving and it just made me so upset.
And you know what? A fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage won’t change a thing. They are independent contractors. This is true of so many of these jobs. I’m starting to realize there is absolutely no fixing this system without a jobs guarantee.
If it’s fixable at all.
I had already been thinking in the background these last few days that modern life was a trap. I mean, we know this. It is impossible to live virtuously in the modern world. I take issue with The Good Place for claiming that the middle ages were somehow better, but the premise is still basically true: buy your grandmother a bunch of roses in the modern world, you still lose points.
But oh well what are you gonna do hey you know what a really great brand licensing deal is? Better Homes and Gardens and whoever makes these pots! Just very nice.
They were probably made in China by slave labor and wrought environmental devastation and the ceramic is made from the powder of a mountain that has been exploded to make a dam… but they are really nice.
There really isn’t even any opting out.
We all know this. No one is happy about it. Not the anti-vaxxers, not Stephen Miller, not Bernie Sanders, not the Pope, not the guy in the F-150 next to you on the road. We all know its garbage in one way or another if not most. We all know it is a compromise and an act of evil to participate in it, but no one knows what to do about it.
Of course, plenty of people are, like, “well, it’s impossible to be good in this world so just stop worrying about it,” but I just can’t do it. I strongly suspect they’re no happier and the bulk of them still feel it, deep down, either in the form of guilt or rage.
I just laid there in bed last night, filled with anger and sadness for these truck drivers, immense guilt about my life, wishing there was something to do. How a legal aid society for these people would be great. Class-action lawsuits. We listen to AOC and Stephanie Kelton about the jobs guarantee.
Fun fact: if you google “legal aid for truck drivers,” every link on the first page is a predatory firm! Awesome! A bit more Googling yields a bit better results, but not much. Add it to my list of “things I will do when I am rich” (I’m approaching 50 and the it’s still titled “when,” ignoring both, the diminishing odds and the fact that, well, I probably already am). I guess at least in the short term I can figure out if any of these charities actually help. That’s something.
I will also say that all of this does nothing to dampen my own personal ambition. Another revelation I had last night is that after, like, oh, I don’t know, five, six years of actively trying to dampen my ambition, kill hubris, be humble, learn to live in a more simple way, to stop striving for more and more and more. To give up on great man theory and to viscerally understand, in my soul, that all of that is complete garbage, I have basically failed completely. Actually, it’s even worse. I’ve succeeded in understanding all of that is complete garbage, but made not a whit of a dent in my own personal ambition. I’ve just succeeded in hating myself more for it.
As Jane would say, “Great job!”
One of our favorite restaurants here — which of course we haven’t been to in over a year — is closing. Crooks Corner. (I’m giving you the NY Times link to impress upon you the institutional-ness of the place). It is so good and I am so sad to lose it. They say it’s pandemic-related, but it was sold in 2019, after 40-some years with the same people, so, you know, yeah, it’s pandemic-related, but… not. Probably. What do I know. I am shocked someone wouldn’t seize the moment to buy it as the economy comes out of recession. And seriously bummed. I can’t believe we didn’t even get to go one last time. At least auction off your recipes so I can finally learn that hominy and scallops recipe. God.
On the flip side, apparently Don is ready to re-open Man Ray, in central square, in the old Improv Boston space, which I’ve walked by a bajillion times but have never been inside of. I will be very happy if this happens. I won’t get to go very often, actually, but it’ll be nice to know I can. Fingers crossed.
Hakuna of hospitality matata, I guess.
Maybe Crook’s Corner will come back one day.
But. But. That patio.
Okay let’s do a mix. Synth pop! It says “modern,” not new. Got in a bit of a nostalgia hole on this one for 2000 ish or so. That’s still modern, right? There are some new things on here too, but yeah. Freezepop, Oppenheimer, Ming & Ping, She Wants Revenge. Definitely a vibe, right there. I am excited about the Freezepop show in August. That’ll be a good time.
Have a lovely Thursday. Maybe your plants will get some rain. Your sadness will break. Maybe I’m just projecting here. Maybe your daughter will be super good at bedtime. Maybe you won’t accidentally teach her any swear words today. Good luck!
Reading your message today particularly on the personal ambition paragraph I was reminded of some lines from Faust that I had memorized in high school.
Unfortunately in German and I’m too lazy to go find the translation. But it was a fun circle of life. Then I told my 17 year old daughter about it and she said “why do you read someone’s blog every day” and I said well it’s my friend Rick and I really enjoy experiencing how his mind works and she said oh is that the guy with all the Legos?
Which leads me to wonder, do you still have a room full of Legos in that house, is Jane allowed in there, and aren’t kids amazing because like YEARS ago I must have shown them all a picture of your Lego storage (probably when we were at peak Legos in this house) which you must have posted on the Facebook sometime, and told them how sometimes grownups still Have Legos because they’re so cool (the Legos, not the grownups… or maybe both?)
And they’ll likely never meet you in real life but you will always be the one with Legos.
Even if you’re not. Also, it would be hilarious if that wasn’t even you and we got you mixed up with some other old friend who had a serious Legos commitment.
Sort of like how one time when they were like 6,8, and 10 and had been reading a lot of Archies they asked me home first boyfriend was and I foolishly told them his name and this person is a very old friend who I see sometimes and mention and they always say “oh _____, he was your boyfriend!” Which is technically true but we’ve been friends for like 35 years and he was only my boyfriend for a few months at the beginning of that time. So it annoys me. Moral of the story: don’t ever tell your kids any names.