Good morning. Hello. How are you? #431
Medical disappointment, and an urge to crawl up into a video game K Hole and ignore the world.
Good morning. Hello! How are you? I am okay. First day back to work. LET’S DO THIS.
Actually, yesterday I came up with a new career. Here is my plan: Emma and I are going to buy the new XBox and Playstation. I don’t actually know how to do this, it seems like it’s impossible and/or requires actual magic. But I will figure it out. Then, we will set up a room with two matching giant TVs mounted on the walls. Then we will each pick a game and just play it forever. Jane will raise herself. I am thinking I’ll choose No Man’s Sky. Or maybe Red Dead Redemption 2. Just play it and lose myself in it for, like, two months and forget about all reality. That sounds so fun. I want to be one of those people.
More practically, if anyone has any idea how to actually obtain one of these consoles, please let me know. It’s kind of amazing and ridiculous how hard to get they still are.
Abby goes home today. In about an hour. That is very sad. I like having her around. She should just move in. She’s a good house guest.
Yesterday I went to the doctor to get a shot into my trigger finger. It was supposed to provide some pain relief in six hours or so. It has now been about 20 hours and it still hurts. It actually hurts worse than it did prior to the shot. This is extremely dispiriting. It’s so frustrating when you finally motivate to go have the medical community do its thing and fix some problem and then they don’t actually fix it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. I guess I’ll email my doctor and say “yo, it’s actually worse now, I would like to be able to type since, you know, that’s what I do for a living.” And maybe he’ll… what? Go “oh I forgot to put the right drugs in the shot!” and fix it? And that’s, like, the best-case scenario? I realize this is somewhat a willfully anti-science take, but it’s the feeling we all get when this stuff doesn’t work. And this is exactly why I have no desire to ever get surgery on my neck. It’s bad enough experimenting like this with a finger? In my core? NOPE NOPE NOPE.
Oh also, special alert: Remember when I was all gung-ho about how I finally found the switch in Facebook settings to turn off those abusive, ridiculous alerts for “new videos” that NO ONE WANTS? Well, they magically turned back on. Only took a week or two. What a sociopathic app. It really is maddening.
I do have to say, though, a trip to Alaska has done wonders for my news feed. Seeing all of those old friends and everyone talking to each other in FB messenger (since, despite the court’s completely bogus ruling yesterday, it is manifestly obvious that Facebook is a monopoly in social networking services), and us all tagging each other in posts and photos, Facebook has been like “oh wow he really is friends with these people I will give him their content after witholding it for several years.” Because why would we want Facebook to give us the content of people we haven’t seen in person in a long time. That would make no sense.
I am not super surprised by the court ruling yesterday. First off, the FTC did, in fact, do a kinda crappy job defining “social media services” and all they really did was claim “Facebook has a monopoly and 60% of the market” without really defending it. I don’t really blame them, because it is manifestly, obviously, very clearly true, and this judge was being picky. But, then, also, that is judges’ jobs, to be picky, and the FTC should have known better. The whole concept of a monopoly of a free service is very challenging to anti-trust theory and we’ve all known for a really long time it was going to be really hard to adapt a body of law that didn’t consider free services to our current needs. I suspect the FTC was like “fuck it, let’s just give it a shot and see if we can’t sneak it by,” but, honestly, they should have known better. And in any case, there is a giant body of literature they could have drawn from had they been “on it.”
The good news is the courts are giving them a second chance, and hopefully they have learned their lesson. It’s still an uphill climb, absent new regulation, but I do think the judge let the door open a bit. It’s not over yet.
So I’m thinking everyone who is trying to make this “hot girl summer” or “deep tissue massage” summer or whatever else should probably give up. The whole thing just rings hollow. There is no chaotic, amazing rebound that’s going to happen this summer. People will go out, it will be tepid, and more to the point, it won’t be everyone, everywhere. It won’t be universal enough to brand the summer with a single, coherent moniker. Lots of people are going to stay home, and lots of people are going to go out, but with enough anxiety that they’re not, like, having a Coolio summer or whatever the heck. We’re nearing July now and none of these monikers have stuck, so maybe we should just give up. Maybe “anxiety summer” or “climate disaster summer” at best.
I have received a lot of records in the mail while I was off to Alaska. I haven’t gotten around to listening to them yet, but I have been unpacking them from their packaging. There is a tendancy amongst some discogs sellers where they pack up your record using a few record sleeves of older, ruined records as padding. It’s quirky, it’s fun. Except what invariably happens is that I end up wanting that record more than the one I’m ordering. For instance, I ordered a $5 copy of My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s Cuz it’s Hot 12” single, but it was padded in the packaging with a sleeve to an Air Supply 12” single for All Out of Love, and, I mean, “Cuz it’s Hot” is a great song, but you know what’s a better song? “All out of Love” by Air Supply. What a fantastic song.
A friend told me a story years ago. I can’t remember who, but I think it was Frank maybe, since in my head the story takes place in Minnesota and he went to college there. Anyway, the story is that they rode an elevator with Air Supply. That’s the whole story. But I am so jealous about it because Air Supply are so cool. Really one of the all time great bands. Go ahead, argue that they’re not.
Here’s a picture of a piece of public art in Fairbanks, out by the airport. I’m gonna say they installed this in, oh, 1987 or so. It seemed so majestic when they first installed it — really one of the first big new works of public art in Fairbanks when I was a kid. You can only sort of tell in this photo, but it’s prismatic. It shows rainbows. It is supposed to represent the northern lights. I have a real soft spot for this thing, but I gotta say, on this trip it was looking a little shabby. I think it could use a refresh. Maybe some subtle LEDs. Or just make the whole thing bigger. Or maybe it’s because I’m bigger. Who knows. But it’s just not as wowing as it used to be.
I went out and checked the garden yesterday and it was a sad sight. A lot of stuff is just decimated by the deer. SOME stuff is growing well — the basil, the tomatos, the luffa. The watermelons are doing… okay. The cucumbers.. same. But those two should be doing a lot better. Same with the peppers. It is very frustrating. Then, of course, the beets, the beans, all the brassicas, just gone. I also have, like, three determinate, bushing tomatoes that are just decimated and I’m not sure why. Probably squirrels crawling around in them, but they really fucked them up. It is very sad. I put so much work into this thing. I know I can start on the fall stuff in a couple weeks, and I have plenty of new bird and squirrel netting and deer protection for round two, but it is really disspiriting. I won’t give up, but, man, I kinda want to.
Plus, even now, with all of those tomatoes on the verge of giving me tons of great tomatoes, I know that I will have to battle squirrels and birds just to get them. Bastards. BASTARDS.
The compost is doing well, though. That’s something.
Let’s do a playlist. Moody and quiet. Too many dudes. I shoulda balanced it better but I am still crawling out of the playlist deficit hole, bear with me. It turned out pretty good, though. And it’s not every day you get to put a Dinosaur Jr song on a moody and quiet playlist.
OK I slept too late, I gotta turn my attention to work because I haven’t thought about it in a week, and I gotta get my baby for breakfast. Say goodbye to Abby. Man I wish I coulda been here for her whole visit. Maybe look at the bank balance at work for the first time in a week. FUN. Have a lovely Tuesday!
Last time I looked (like two days ago) Bestbuy.com has bundles available for the playstation 5. They're double what just the console costs and don't include anything I want, so that sucks.
It could be that the doctor missed getting the cortisone into your joint. I used to get those shots in my hip and there was one doctor at the practice who could just not get it in the right place. He'd dig around in my hip with the needle for 20 minutes and then just say fuck it, I guess, and it never worked. This other guy could do it in 30 seconds and get it in the right place. I hope the guy can redo it properly for you.