Good morning. Hello! How are you? I’m okay. It is Monday. It is grey. I’m listening to the new Modest Mouse and it is doing curious things to me, thinking about time, depression, drugs, art. This may lead you to believe that I am still feeling super down, but it’s actually not too bad at the moment and, furthermore, this is a shockingly pretty good album. I’ll definitely give it a second listen. Maybe there’s hope in the world.
I did some gardening this weekend, but not much. I harvested a ton of peppers. The pepper situation is actually pretty good. The deer eat the leaves, but they don’t eat the peppers, and there are a ton of peppers. I think I’ll manage to replenish my Thai pepper supply for the next year after all, which is the original base purpose of this garden and me being a gardener, and for a while there I was worried it wouldn’t succeed. But it should be fine. I’ve been really down about the garden devastation, but I have to say, the onions are good — I had never successfully grown onions before. The Luffa look great. Watermelon are okay. Fennel are good. Basils are amazing. It’s not all bad. I took this Friday off and this weekend I am going to start planting some of the new fall crops, and using all my new deer/birds/squirrel shielding to hopefully, you know, actually get to eat my crops instead of just feeding them to the wildlife. I did spray the squirrel spray again this weekend, twice. The problem is it’s raining so much that I have to keep re-applying it (I’ll have to go out and do it again right after these words). But it does work, for the squirrels, at least, who are otherwise completely relentless with the tomatoes. I went up to spray the tomatoes with the squirrel spray and there was literally a squirrel sitting there, just sitting there, with a whole green tomato in his little hands, eating it like it was a giant apple. Bastard. I ran him off — I didn’t spray him with the squirrel spray I still feel bad about doing that last time.
One other good thing is that my compost looks awesome. I mean, just fantastic. Feeling pretty good about that.
I’ve definitely gotten a bit down about the pests, but I am mostly psyched up for another effort. Let’s get back into it. No fear.
Other than that, didn’t do too much this weekend? I spent a lot of time catalogging records, dealing with my record collection. I had gotten a lot of new vinyl in the mail and I wanted to listen to it all and to catalog it. I had one order where I ordered like ten records from this guy. Like they were all a buck or two or three, and you save so much money when you combine shipping, so it makes sense when you order records from Discogs to buy as many as you can from an individual owner. But in this order, the very first record from the order that I put on the record player was invisibly warped in a real bad way and the record wouldn’t play at all. I was super bummed, because it was the record I wanted the most, the record that made me place the order at all. And then the second record I put on, it was suuuper crackly and poppy. But I busted out my record vacuum, which I hadn’t set up since the studio rearranging. I love that thing. It literally sucks all the dust off a record. Makes an unholy noise - as loud as a vacuum cleaner. Anyway, after that, the order was mostly good, I listened to them all one by one, cleaned them, everything else was fine. Except one record was missing. It was the only 7” I ordered, so I thought maybe I missed it in the package, maybe it was taped onto one of the cardboard spacers, so I went and dug out the packaging, and nope.
So now I am just…. bummed. Like… I obviously have to write to this guy, but I hate doing that, because its just fraught. People lie. There’s a ratings system to buyers and sellers so the minute you raise an issue, you’re entering a world of mutually assured destruction where at any minute one of you can give the other a negative rating. Plus, like, what was this guy supposed to do? The warped record looked fine. He probably had no idea. And now this thing that was work $10 is suddenly worth nothing, someone has to take the loss, and this formerly precious artifact is now just so much plastic meant for the landfill, which also sucks. I hate it when records go to the landfill. And, for all this guy knows, I could have screwed him. I could have already had a copy of this record, and am using him to get myself a new copy, foisting my warped copy off on him. I was prepared to let it go, but after the 7” was missing too I started to feel like a schmuck not doing anything, so I wrote him a polite email, asking him to double-check that he didn’t still have the 7” and asking him for half off on the 12”. But, of course, for all I know, this guy could be ripping me off. I have waaaaay more seller and buyer ratings than he does.
The mutual trust systems that the internet has made, that eBay pioneered, are basically tyranny when the rubber hits the road.
Of all of these records, the one I got that stuck with me the most this weekend was Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine’s album 1992: The Love Album. “The Only Living Boy in New Cross” is a perfect song. My college girlfriend and I really liked this band, we got into them on the album before this one, 30 Something. We saw them a two or three times across both albums. They were super fun and ridiculous live. It was just the two of them — Jim Bob and Fruit Bat — freaking out, wailing on guitars in a sort of punk metal style, alone on stage, with all the rest of the music coming out of backing tracks. It was kind of absurdist but if you just rolled with it, they put on a good show.
So then I started watching Youtube videos of them, because I knew there was a video for “The Only Living Boy in New Cross,” but I couldn’t remember it, but then I watched it, and it was fine, the Top of the Pops Performance was better. But then I found fan footage of their last show, or reunion show, or whatever, six years ago at London Brixton Academy and it was just… amazing. Like this is a thing I love about England. Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine or Ned’s Atomic Dustbin or Pop Will Eat Itself can do a reunion show and it is on par there like Phish doing a reunion show here. I mean, look at this. Look at these grown people, in the year 2015, losing their shit to Carter USM:
I don’t know why (because I am a wuss) but this video made me cry. I miss live music so much. It reminded me a lot of when I flew to England for the PWEI reunion. I remember this Carter reunion and I thought about going. I was sorta wrapped up in walking out of my job and house hunting — not a time to easily justify a spontaneous one-day trip to England. But look at the catharsis this crowd is feeling, watching two dudes wail on guitars to backing tracks. I know today weird English drunks are not exactly in the Good Place, but the way those hooligans will also go see a synth pop band and bawl their eyes out while drinking a pint and singing along really is something.
They say “The Only Living Boy in New Cross” was about AIDS. Now I imagine it to be about COVID.
I had a second order of five records by the band Swell. I love Swell so much, I always have, since I first saw them in 1992 at TT The Bears with His Name is Alive and Difference Engine, the amazing goth/shoegaze band featuring future Barbarian CTO Aubrey. Swell weirdly never came back to Boston (that I know of) but they put out eight amazing albums. I already had three of them on vinyl, but the band has just released beautiful limited-edition, lathe-cut, 180 gram vinyl re-releases of every album, so I spent an absurd amount of money buying the other five directly from the band on bandcamp. Two of them weren’t in Discogs yet, so I did the whole ringomorale of taking photos of the artwork, and making a new release in Discogs, and filling it out, then combining it to the master release for that album. I hate doing that, but that’s what a user-generated-content site is all about, right? Gotta participate.
Other than that, I spent an absurd amount of time — seriously, like two, three hours — digging into online gossip about Mythbusters. Emma and I are watching the whole show in order — it’ll probably take more than a year at our current rate. It’s quite pleasant, educational, I won’t be too upset if Jane ever joins us. But I am constantly having project management, production, practical questions. And I really liked Scottie and was sad she left. And Emma was a giant fan when she was young and so she remembers bits and pieces of the gossip but her memories are, like, twenty years old, so sometimes I have follow-up questions she can’t answer. So I plowed through, literally, five years of posts in the Mythbusters Reddit, reading entire threads of anything production related. Two nights ago I started reading Kari Byron’s book, Crash Test Girl, which is sorta a self-help book but also an autobiography.
Between the two I’ve pieced together answers to most of my questions. I kinda knew the contours of this already. There was a sociopathic, sadistic producer on the show in the early years. He was the creator. He had a lot of power over all of these people. Even Adam and Jamie were just talking heads, really, didn’t have any contact with the network bosses yet. This is the guy who hired them. And this producer was tyrannizing everyone. It took them a couple years to get the guy off of the show. And now, whenever an ex-Mythbuster talked about this guy in interviews and stuff, they were careful not to disparage, careful not to use his name.
But then this genius guy shows up in the Reddit comments, uses his real name, which they never did, then accuses them of slander, even though they never named him, and then offers his “defense” of one incident — pretending it was all just about this one incident — and his own defense of the incident is so bad, just a complete indictment of him and his own sociopathic nature. After a year or two he seems to realize this and stops arguing in the Reddit comments but it goes on for ages. Then, last night, I go and read some more of Kari’s book and she talks about some more awful, just truly fucking awful things this dude did.
I don’t know where I was going with this, but wow did it take up a lot of my weekend. I really bond with Kari, she’s close to my age, drank too much when she was younger, suffers from depression, has one daughter, randomly got a fantastic job that for more than a decade defined her and lead to wild success, and now navigates working and living in a world after that. I can relate.
Jane keeps saying “do something different.” It is rough. She’s been throwing fits every day at lunch, just whining, complaining about doing things the same way. And we’re like “well, sorry. We are working and we only have X amount of time to do this lunch we can’t really mix it up too much.” We are, obviously, trying, offering different options, trying to mix it up where we can, don’t @ me. She does it other times of day, too, where we’re more able to mix it up. Saturday morning, I brought her into the library and we looked at my various toys and tchotchkes until she found something she wanted to play with, and she found this set of Russian nesting dolls I have that feature the various founders and CEO of Twitter. They were made by Yiying Lu, the woman who designed the Twitter Fail Whale (whom I met a couple times and just seemed like the nicest person in the wold), and Thor Muller, and old friend of mine. I had forgotten completely about them. But it was super fun watching Jane play with them, oblivious of the Twitter content but fascinated by Matroyshka dolls in general.
And it kinda made me a bit nostalgic for old internet. Or middle aged internet, I guess. God.
Last week, we passed the horrific “milestone” of four million people dead worldwide of covid. I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere in the news. So I guess this Delta variant is gonna be a thing? It’s amazing. It really does seem pretty clear it’s going to be a thing. But no one wants to believe it. Or we all kinda know it’s gonna be a thing, and are just running around freaking out doing whatever we can while there is still plausible deniability. Emma and I keep wondering if we’re being overly cautious. If we can’t just, like, bring Jane to Home Depot or some shit. It is definitely getting to be a thing for Jane. She wants to do different stuff every day now. She’s getting bored. She’s had the same routine for sixteen months. But she’s not vaccinated, so, like, I could take her to some parks, I guess, but there’s not much we can do outside, really. Ha. Yes, there is, I know. But we’re both still working, can’t send her to day care or get help, so our weekends have special value. Sixteen months is a long time, maaaan. They need to get this vaccine show on the road for kids under 12 soon. We can do a few more months, but I really do want to start bringing her out into the world again. Right now I’ve figured out that we can talk about it. Things we’re going to do “when she’s four” or “when she’s five” (we don’t talk about the pandemic with her). That seems to help a bit. She seems happy to know that this routine isn’t going to be forever.
God. Imagine if we had just all stayed home for two weeks back sixteen months ago. I mean, I get it wasn’t possible then, but what about the future? Isn’t it weird how we’re not figuring out how to do that in the future? Wouldn’t it have made sense if someone (ahem the president) did an executive order that said something like “every workplace should have a plan for two full weeks of no one coming in or out and every American had a plan for where they would spend two weeks in one place if they had to”? Like on top of essential workers we had, like, designated two-weekers? I don’t know, it seems obvious. But also probably impossible? But maybe not? Maybe we should — gasp — run a study figuring out if it is or not! It doesn’t seem any more impossible than all the crazy bomb shelters and drills we did during the cold war. But we’re just like “naaaah. It’s cool. We rather let some people die.”
Oh wow after two days of not writing I really could go on and on. But I think we’ll stop here. Keep some dry powder in the keg.
Let’s do a mix. Just a mix. But it has that carter song on it, and this hilarious new Chilly Gonzales song that is just fantastic about music being back. Great song, hard to decide when to release that one, Chilly. I empathize. New Sault, new Son Volt — was never a huge fan, enjoyed them live, like this song. New Sturgill, new Amen Dunes, new Strand of Oaks. I’m excited about that one I was just wondering the other day when they’re going to put out something new. New Modest mouse, a new discovery named Faye Webster, and then some oldies – Supertramp and Kool and the Gang, two huge influences on my childhood. Swell, because of the records this weekend. Calla, thanks to my friend Ryan. And the song by the Flaming Lips that first really got me into them.
Okay! Big Monday over here. Emma and Janet will both be gone from 9:15 to who knows when so it’s me and Jane together, alone, all morning, and maybe into lunch and maybe even into the afternoon when my calls start. But I am ready. My depression has lifted enough that I’m actually kind of into facing this dumb Monday. No fear. “No fear” isn’t so much a statement of bravado as either an aspirational statement or a current weather situation, liable to change.
I’ve only read the first half so far but
1. Be nice to squirrels
2. Didn’t we see Swell at Bills Bar? And you were really mad at me, possibly everyone. That’s all I remember. Maybe it wasn’t Swell.