Good morning! Hello there. How are you? What’s new? Did you have a lovely holiday weekend? Did you do fireworks? Did you do “calm the dog down?” Did you wear red, white and blue? Did you go to a barbecue? Did you get some sleep? I got some sleep. It was… Well, I guess it was nice. But it didn’t feel like enough. My sleep has been real messed up since Alaska. I THINK it might be okay now? I just woke up at my usual 7 AM and it wasn’t too too hard. But all week it’s been a mess, and all weekend I’ve been sleeping in, slacking off, not writing my GMHHAY you posts. Insomnia was limited only to that one night (Thursday, I think?) but it has been so hard to wake up. god. I used to zip back and forth across the country two, three times a week no problem no jetlag but these days? I’m a hack.
I did get a lot of stuff done, though. I should back up and say that I had an insanely productive Friday at work. All week I’d been procrastinating on my tasks. Not, like, procrastinating, because I was thinking about them. They were hard tasks, required advance thought and mental prep. But I wasn’t getting them done. And then my Friday morning was all kinda messed up and I was worried the whole day would get derailed. But in the end, I pulled it through. I got all three tasks done and even added a fourth task, and got that done. I’m very proud of myself. I barely remember any of it now, since it’s been four days, but that’s the point: get that stuff done before the holiday so you don’t have to think about it. Fantastic.
The big thing is I finally took the plunge and re-arranged my studio which is very exciting. I think it’s been two years since I last re-arranged? And last time I really focused the re-arranging on the window-side of the room, the other half was more or less neglected. This time it was the opposite: I left the window-side of the room — with my computer, TV, instruments, etc — more or less the same but completely re-worked the other side: the records, the couch, the coffee table, etc. I like it! The best thing about it is all my records are back out at counter height so I can just flip through the record bins like I’m in a record store again. It’s so great. It is amazing how much more I listen to records when they’re easily accessible. It takes up a ton of room, but I think I like it right now. The other weird thing I did was I took all the furniture on that side of the room and I clumped it together around the annoying pole in the middle of the room, but also at an angle. It works! I like it! It is not super photogenic, because it looks so cluttered, but that cluttered clump of furniture makes the rest of the room very spacious.
I still need to do some furniture swapping out, and right now I am missing a workbench/work surface. I have a plan for that but that will cost money and this was free-only work this weekend. Also I need to sit with the layout for a bit to make sure I like it. But so far so good!
In order to re-arrange the studio I had to first clean off my big work table, which was filled with a bunch of shit that needed to be listed on eBay — hard drives, a laptop, three phones, two Kindles, a kitty litter box, four laptop fans. I got most of it listed: not the phones or Kindles yet because they needed to be charged first, but all of the big stuff. Sold a few things already too. That’s one of the most disorienting things about batch-listing stuff on eBay. You’ll be three, four items in, plowing through your pile, and before you’re even done, some of the stuff is selling. Which is both awesome and stressful.
It took all of Friday to get that stuff listed. Who would have thought it would take a whole day to clean off a table.
We went to some neighbor events this weekend. One set of neighbors was having a barbecue to celebrate that the husband had just gotten American citizenship after 15 years or so of trying. They were wearing a lot of red, white and blue, which made me vaguely uncomfortable, but also I totally sympathize with people still wanting to be American citizens. It’s a paradox. America does lots of bad things but still has some good things about it that are still relatively rare and unique in the world.
Really, to me, holidays are just weird. I mean, I’m definitely pro-days off from a labor standpoint. And yeah, I do think it’s kind of useful to pause and say “well, this thing is not all bad, let’s take a moment and think of some of the good things” on some special day. But I do think there oughtta be a companion holiday where we take a moment to think about all the bad things that need fixing in the country or something like that. Some of my friends are, like, “America’s the worst” — I had a friend on Instagram say explicitly yesterday “I hate this country.” And I don’t think that’s particularly representative of my point of view. America is hardly alone being founded upon an evil framework. I mean, shit, 90% of the countries in the world are ex-monarchies and they were hardly gloriously formed. Any modicum of international travel very rapidly shows you how much more racist most countries are than America. I would characterize my feelings about my country as mostly indifference. America did a few good things through history — it popularized the notion of Democracy, which is a good thing. It spent a gajillion dollars fighting off fascism in a moment where it may well have literally swept the earth without America being around. Props for those things. But, like, lots of people and things have done good things. We don’t have a holiday for the scientific method or sanitation or kindness or bodegas.
Anyway, the first barbecue was fun but we had made a dinner plan at another neighbor’s so we left and headed over to our neighbor’s Ricardo and Selin’s for dinner with them and our neighbors Levi and his son Zach. Ricardo and Selin have a very long driveway and their house is hidden back in the woods and I was very jealous of their driveway on the walk down (our house is very visible from the road) but on the walk home, in the dark, uphill, accompanied with a warning to “watch out for spiders” I was far less jealous of the driveway. Ricardo made pulled pork and it was delicious and he gave me all the extra and I’ve been — heresy — eating it in my Szechuan-Thai fusion stir fries and oh my god pulled pork in an Asian stir fry is so good. So now I am eating a Carolina bbq–Szechuan-Thai fusion stir fry. Delicious.
Levi has three teenage kids and my god he made me so terrified for Jane’s teenage years I’m not sure if I can handle it I want my money back. The phrases “a couple of tiny broken hearts” and “I thought I was going to have to lawyer up” were used (about two different kids and situations). I keep thinking “I’m not ready” and then I think “well, you got time, get ready” then I think how? Can’t see much of a way to mentally prepare for that stuff.
Oh I also ripped the Blu Ray of the Swans documentary Where Does a Body End? Which I talked about a bunch a few months back. The blu ray had a ton of outtakes and live footage, and really, for me, it had all the parts of Swans that I love. They all hit the cutting room floor. But at least they were filmed and created. There was a segment on “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and there was a segment on World of Skin and there was an extended segment, including a full live performance of the song “Her” from Love of Life and, my god. Wow. Also, Gira cleared up the source of the recording in that song. I always kinda thought it was Jarboe because it sounded so much like her, but it didn’t seem very Swans-like to, like, theatrically stage a field recording? Turns out they didn’t. Turns out that Jarboe’s father recorded it when she was younger. Seems he had a pretty weird, colorful past.
Anyway, all those extras are now up in my Plex if you want it.
Oh and I watched that new sci-fi time travel movie on Amazon, The Tomorrow War because I pretty much watch every sci-fi time travel film. It was… okay. It was exactly the sort of film that I would go see on Sunday morning at the theater in the old days and no one else would bother seeing it and no one would talk about. Like Passengers or Replicas or Captive State. Sometimes these movies are good! Captive State was pretty good. And this one was… not terrible? Had some moments? I am biased, though, because the main emotional story through the film was about a man and his daughter, with the secondary emotional story being about a man and his father so, you know. There was a point in the movie where his daughter finally meets his dad and, you know. I might have cried. At a scene I would have been annoyed with in “the old days.”
Oh I got my podcast done too if you are into that sort of thing:
And I did some gardening. The tomatoes are doing great they are about to imminently explode into a mass of tomato production. They are already doing some decent prodcuction. The basils have exploded into huge bushes. The watermelons seem to be doing okay and we have a few watermelons being produced. The potatoes seem fine. The Luffa are thriving. The blueberry and grapes are putting on a few inches and don’t seem to be getting eaten anymore. The onions are doing great which is very exciting since I’ve never successfully grown onions before. The brassicas are all done – no more cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, bok choi. The beets, radishes and spinach all got eaten by deer. The celery is okay. The peppers are… okay. The deer are eating them, and I didn’t grow the right mix of peppers due to some seed shortages and a failure at successfully overwintering last year’s peppers. But they’re producing a lot nonetheless, even if they look a little ugly. The cucumbers aren’t doing anything, and it’s a complete mystery. I’ve never failed at cucumbers before. Of my, like, eight plants, only two are producing any fruit. It is a mystery and I am bummed.
In a week or two I will kick in the autumn garden by replanting the fall crops — snow peas, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, radishes. I will cover everything in bird netting and/or get a deer fence. I’m not.. I’m not, like, stopping or giving up but I am definitely a little beaten down by the deer. Psyching myself up for the coming round two.
OH. And finally. I got in touch with Lisa and she agreed to help me out turning these posts into a book. It’ll be a ton of work but we have a rough plan. It will probably end with the Alaska trip. Seems a good stopping point. I wouldn’t say the pandemic is over but whatever we’re in now is very different than last year, I think. The total amount of words I’ve written to you guys through the pandemic is absurd — over 500,000. So there will be a lot of chopping. Relentless chopping. Should be a somewhat more…. focused read? Not sure how it’s going to work. Lisa isn’t either yet. But we are going to figure it out. And I am excited.
Let’s do a mix. Moody and Quiet mix, because that’s what was mostly done. I swear I worked on these a bit this weekend. But mostly I was listening to vinyl because of my sweet new layout. I was trying to, like, find a good song, then check what track it was on the record then go over to the computer and add it to the appropriate playlist, but it was a bit of a laborious process to be doing while you’re also rearranging furniture. You know, you do what you can. This is a good mix, though. I hope you enjoy it. Lts of new stuff. Lots of ladies. Lots of mellow goodness.
Okay! Let’s dig deep within and find that part of our brain that thinks about work and turn it on and use it. Monday is usually my ramp-up day so today we dive right into a ton of meetings. No fear. I can do it.
Talk soon!
Joan Robinson needs a biopic.