Good morning. Hello. How are you? #432
Maker dreams, Greer tanks, Doing nothing with your life, Walmart record selection, Liverpudlian kids, flaunting the feds, normal life, perfect pens, Steve Jobs was wrong, NYC election, Mike Posner
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Doing okay? You over this pandemic? Forgotten all about it? Thinking of quitting your job? Thinking of getting a job? Everyone I know in the service biz tells me there’s not a jobs shortage there’s just a bunch of people sick of working for assholes and want to go work for good bosses. I like this theory, seems pro-labor. I wonder if it’s true.
Woke up from a dream where I was doing a bunch of “making,” aka “building shit.” It was pretty cool. Something with a large oil tank, cut in half, with some sort of liquid in it, some tubes, wires, it was all very Goldbergian. I liked it. Woke up feeling productive and proud. One of the benefits of going to sleep right after watching an episode of Mythbusters, I guess. Of course I didn’t actually build anything, I just sat on my ass watching other people build stuff, so I don’t know why I’m feeling so chuffed.
(Long aside here about GREER, which is a tank fabrication company in Alaska. You see a lot of oil tanks in Alaska, heating oil is a big thing. And when I was growing up, all those tanks said GREER on them. They had a near monopoly. I literally thought oil tanks were called GREER tanks. I saw one the other day while driving down the steese towards Salcha. Took me back. I’m sure that’s why it was in my dream. But GREER wasn’t some KLEENEX type word. It was just another Alaskan family. Probably with a nice timber house on a lake somewhere. The timber was probably imported from Idaho because Alaskan timber LOL).
Then I made the mistake of looking at Instagram. It was 6:30 in the morning and I did not want to get up and looking at your phone in the morning wakes you up. But looking at Instagram is a terrible fucking idea. It was filled with people going on lunch runs and running into personal idols of mine, or people making amazing shit, and I’m just laying in bed doing nothing. It made me think I am wasting my life, which is not a super-awesome thing to wake up to.)
If ever you think the kids are not all right, behold the brilliance of these Liverpudlian kids who figured out how to cheat COVID tests to get false positives and skip school. Impressive.
Went to Walmart this morning. Barely needed anything, but it’s my routine, you know. Some people make movies or albums or run into glamorous people, I go to Walmart. Can’t slack now. The Fairbanks Walmart blows my Walmart away for 4k Blu Rays and for vinyl. What is up with that? Like the vinyl section in the Fairbanks Walmart is robust, maybe 100-150 records. Mine is sad and limp, maybe 10 unchanging records. Why is this? Is the Fairbanks Walmart busier than the Chapel Hill one? Actually, it probably is, huh? Fairbanks and Chapel Hill are about the same population, but the Fairbanks Walmart is the only one for, like, 300 miles, whereas there’s another one 20 miles away here in NC. Or is it because we have actual record stores? Or is it the opposite? We have way more vinyl hounds and they have picked over this Walmart? I wonder. Are Jon Wuster and Linda Ballance popping into my Walmart and getting the good vinyl Walmart exclusives before I can get them? Would make sense.
I keep thinking of that guy I saw at the Walmart when I first moved here who had a 4AD records shirt on and I was so excited and I said hi and he just ignored me.
Ashley was right, by the way. The new Lou Barlow record is great. God, that guy rules.
I haven’t taken a single picture since I got home it is making it very hard to pepper these missives with imagery to break up the wall of text. Here’s a picture of Eielson Air Force Base, complete with the signs facing the highway that say “don’t take any pictures of these awesome fighter planes or you’ll get arrested.” Come at me, Uncle Sam. Oh god, they probably will. I’ll enter into some byzantine, kafkaesque legal nightmare that’ll take five years to resolve, all because I needed a dumb joke in my daily email. I take it back I just want my life to go back to normal.
Actually I’ve been thinking about “normal life” a lot this week. It’s Wednesday. I think I’m almost back to my regular routine. There were lots of little things that needed to normalize after my trip. Abby was here, of course. But also Emma was exhausted and had a ton of work so I’ve done three solo Jane bedtimes in a row now, to help equalize that. And of course the groceries were a whole thing: there was no point before I left buying a bunch of Rick-only groceries that no one was going to eat while I’m gone. And with this morning, I’ve finished the replenishing grocery acquisition situation so, like, I have my lethal deli turkey again (god it is such bullshit that deli meat is lethal I am still so pissed about it. The NYT reminded me of it yesterday after I had successfully managed to forget about it. Bastards. Yesterday was my first day back at work, only apparently I messed up and told Justworks that I wanted to take yesterday off, instead of it being my first day back — I always seem to mess that up. So, yeah, I was at work but no one knew it until I made my first appearance in a meeting, so it was only kinda a half day. I had to make more chicken for lunches and waffles for Jane’s breakfast. Shit like that.
And it’s weird because I enjoyed my trip — I mean, don’t get me wrong, that trip was work but I also enjoyed it, or, perhaps more accurately, I needed it — but the whole time I missed my boring-ass COVID routine and wanted to desperately get back to it. And even now, it feels really good to be back in my boring-ass COVID routine. Of course a giant part of that is that I am reunited with my wife and child and I suppose if we were all trapeze artists or Instagram influencers or some shit I’d still be really happy to be back with them and back in my “routine.”
It makes me think about, mmm, I’m gonna say, 2004 or so, where I remember vividly one Friday night I was like “oh there’s not much to do tonight” and I thought about staying in that night and realized it had been something like six months since the last time I had stayed home. And I remember thinking how I kinda liked that, and I was never going to have a “normal” life and how there was just, like, zero risk of accidentally slipping into one. Never did I foresee that I would not accidentally slip into one, I would chase it down, actively, eagerly. Yeah. I did not see that coming.
In other news let me introduce you to a product I’ve been looking for for years. I discovered it at Lemongrass Thai in Fairbanks so, you know, it’s probably not a secret to you or anything. But for the longest time I’ve wanted three things: 1) a pencil for my iPad that isn’t so god damned hard and tappy and bouncy and was something more like a sharpie, and 2) a stylus for my iphone, and 3) a pen that I could flip over and use as a stylus on my phone or iPad. Well, good news, everyone, such a product exists, the Papermate Inkjoy Stylus 2-in-1 and man I am so excited about it:
It’s the best and I am going to keep one on my person at all times. Using a stylus on your iPhone is awesome. Steve Jobs was totally wrong, Palm was right, and styluses on phones rule.
Now I would just like a keyboard on my iPhone. Because Steve Jobs was wrong about that too.
And AIM, please.
God, I miss AIM so much.
I was thinking about a certain person in my life that I miss. And how we’re FB friends but they are a normal, rational human being with a life and not an internet loser like me and they don’t really use FB. And how back when we were friends, 100% of our voluminous communication was on AIM, and how I don’t think I even know their phone number. I might have an old email address but that is too formal and weird and also it’s probably an old one from school or something. So, like, I will just never get in touch with them ever again. Because there’s no AIM anymore. Yeah. That’s why.
Do you guys know Mike Posner? He is amazing. I mean, on paper he’s kinda a middlingly successful songwriter for Avicii and Bieber and the like. But he’s so, so much more. I discovered him randomly, sitting in the back of a car after a lost weekend in Marin, when “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” came out, which was a great song, but was also a remix and his solo folk version was better. But since then, man, that guy. He is on an artistic vision quest like no other. He walked across the country. It took two tries, because he got bit by a rattlesnake in Arizona or something (don’t make me look it up) and had to recuperate for a few months but then he was like “okay Ima gonna finish that walk” and he did. At the height of his fame he did a live spoken word poetry album called I Was Born in Detroit on a Very Very Very Very Very Very Very Cold Day that is just bonkers in its raw, personal emotion.
And then there’s the song “Drip,” which is on his album A Real Good Kid which is about his friend Avicii dying and the intense emotional void that lives within Mike as he watches his friends and loved ones die and/or become estranged from him. It is just so, so painful to listen to. You’re like “oh wow Mike Posner is not okay he needs emotional help,” but if you listen to his entire corpus, you realize he doesn’t need help, he does, in fact, have his shit together and if there was a trophy for “famous person using his fame and wealth in the best, most personally fulfilling way,” despite his repeated protestations to the contrary, Mike Posner would most certainly be in the running for that award.
So it seems today we will get our second try at official election results in New York city and I am so here for it. They have ranked choice voting, and for the last week or so this dude has been in the lead, but everyone’s known he might not really be in the lead, because of ranked choice. And then yesterday they published the rest of the count of the votes with everyone’s second, third, fourth, fifth choices, etc. And the dude was still ahead, but only barely. There were still absentee ballots, and enough that he might actually lose to the woman. But then! Everyone noticed that the ballot tally added up to more than 100% and it turned out that, whoops, they left like 170,000 test ballots in the system when they started counting so who knows! He might not be ahead at all! Or he might be ahead even more! It is just a great mess of a situation and I am into it. It’s keeping me happy the way a giant shitshow of a tech merger would — like Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo. Man, We need another one of those. My vote is Microsoft, because Google and FB are too chicken to do a big merger these days – they’re not out the other end of their antitrust fire like Microsoft is. And Apple lacks vision. Anyway, we should get new results today. Maybe he was never ahead! Wouldn’t that be hilarious? Or more likely everything will be exactly the same.
Hrm well anyway this came out more easily than I thought it would today. I will close by saying there needs to be a movie about Joan Robinson’s love life, or a TV series about the Bloomsbury/Cambridge Circle set, but with an entire season about Joan.
If I could make that shorter and pithier, it could be my “Carthage Must Be Destroyed.” Say it at the end of every one of these GMHHAY’s. A bookend to the phrase GMHHAY.
Joan Robinson needs a biopic.
Let’s do a mix! I am working on a great “most depressing” mix that includes the aforementioned Mike Posner song but it is, alas, not ready yet. Truly, memorably, soul-crushingly depressing songs are rare and I feel like I kinda half-assed the last one. So today we get Justa Mix, which is the first Justa Mix since we were at Justa Store, so that’s nice. I put the new Lou Barlow song back-to-back with the new Dinosaur Jr song because, wow, Lou really had a productive pandemic. Good for him. Also I am super into how Sanada Maitreya, fka Terence Trent D’Arby has changed his name in Spotify, but did not change the name of the album Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby, which is now an album by Sanada Maitreya. Fantastic. God I loved that record as a kid. And there are sorta two Now, Now songs on here because “AZ” came on the other day and I love that song and I thought “oh man it’s been a while what is up with Now, Now, do they have a new record?” And they do not have a new record but they have a pretty solid Muna remix, so it doesn’t really count as the same artist twice. Also John Stewart became a republican but his older stuff is so great. I am sorry.
Okay! Routine! Let’s go get Jane! Breakfast! Woooooo!