Good morning. Hello. How are you? #441
Rough Walmart morning, missing friends, day care dilemma, Ram Vans and Gepetto
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Oh, it’s episode #441 oh crap I missed an opportunity to make an obscure Apollo 440 joke yesterday. Oh well. No love for the Sonic Stealth Orchestra. Anyway. Just back from the Walmart. It sucked. First off, I am hung over from my two whole tiny wines I had last night, thus giving lie to all the dreams I have of ever sitting in a bar and drinking a bunch of beers with a friend and surviving (even though I’m going to do it anyway. Someday). So I feel kind of like ass. Next, the recycling center didn’t have its magical big, mechanical compacting dumpster that I love, love, love like a five year old loves his tractor. Instead I had to just dump my recycling into a normal, inert, non-mechanical dumpster, which, okay, fine, except the thing was full, so you’re dumping, like, medical bills or some shit onto the top of the dumpster where anyone can look at them. That’s not true I shred that shit but I don’t shred everything with my name and address on it, and there right on top of my recycling was an AARP direct mailer with my name and address on it. I mean. First off, how dare you, and secondly, what if someone sees that and, like, now knows my name and address, which is easily discoverable online. Except for that asshole who tried to extort me and threaten my family for my Twitter handle one time. He couldn’t get it right.
So, that was a bummer. Then I got to Walmart and they didn’t have any baby corn, surprise, Walmart has really let itself go this pandemic. It has been months since they’ve managed to have my “big four” Asian cans — bean sprouts, baby corn, water chestnuts, bamboo — all at once, and this week was no exception. Lots of water chestnuts and bamboo, no baby corn and sprouts. You can’t win.
Some enterprising employee did finally give the LP record area a sprucing up, spreading the records across the alphabetical dividers, so it looks like there are a bunch of records to flip through. Except there aren’t, there are still the same 20 or so records, no refreshes. Like seriously. What is even the point of having that section? Ten solid feet of shelf space in your electronics section. I’m flattered you’re giving that to vinyl but, like, shit or get off the pot, you know?
Then I was further attacked with the indignity of the flossing section having no flossers with tape instead of string. Bullshit. This is total bullshit. I know I shouldn’t buy flossers from Walmart I need to get more of those environmentally correct ones made out of corn starch but I was having a flossing emergency here. It’s the sort of product you feel smug about, thinking you have a decade’s supply and you’ll never run out, and you leave little collections of them all around your house wherever you think you might need them. I also do this with Carmex, eye drops, nicotine lozenges, hair ties, glasses wipes, etc. I feel like Mary Taylor should have a name for these. One or two little hidden stashes on each floor of the house. But then one day, boom. You’re completely out everywhere and you are fucked.
Then the checkout machine got mad at me and told me I made a mistake because I committed the cardinal sin of buying three of the same product. It put up a big NOPE sign and made me get the person monitoring the section, who was of course nowhere to be found, because that job is boring AF and you may as well wander off to talk to another cashier at 7 in the morning on a Wednesday when there’s barely anyone around. She’s great, though, I love her. And she fixed it quick. Best part is she forgot to click the “no action” button, thus not logging her out of her admin panel, and for a brief moment I felt like I was in Hackers and I had full access to Walmart’s inner network and I could, like, order more vinyl from Secretly Canadian or WEA or whomever they use and get that vinyl section beefed up. But I was a good Cub Scout and I just clicked the “no action” button.
But then the final indignity: I bought a bottle of diet coke, like I do, to treat myself, since we don’t keep that evil stuff in the house. So I’m so looking forward to this illicit treat like I used to look forward to actual illicit treats. I’m pushing my cart to the car and there’s this drop on my foot and I look down and the Diet Coke bottle has fallen from the little kid basket in the front of the cart into the main cart. Which, fine, maybe it’s a little shaken up, but why’s it dripping? I check the cap, it’s fine. I can find no leak on the bottle. “That’s weird,” I think, but, I mean, newly-opened bottle, been refrigerated this whole time, no reason not to drink it anyway just because of a recent fluke puncture. So I open it up and take a swig.
BIG NOPE.
YUCK.
Thing is totally flat, tastes like it’s years old, the second-worst Diet Coke I’ve ever had, second only to the years-old can of Diet Coke that had been sitting in the sun outside the whole time that I bought from a roadside stand outside Ksar Hdada Tunisia. Just so disgusting.
OH. And I had forgotten to bring any of my “daddy vitamins,” aka Habitrol 1mg nicotine lozenges that I am still hooked on, over a decade after I quit smoking. So there’s nothing to get this disgusting, vile taste out of my mouth till I get home.
So gross. And now it has probably ruined me for this one little harmless vice I still try and enjoy without guilt. Crap.
I had a dream about Andy Shea last night. It was so sad and so real. The gang was having a party at some vacation rental. Sean and I had set up a weird mattress-based shrine in the driveway, and now everyone was inside watching Ivelisse and Abby do Karaoke, except Emma and I, who were watching the Karaoke from outside, through a window. Andy pulls up in an Uber, all Eyore-like and not psyched to be there, and Emma and I are so excited, and we try and steal him and run him over to the mattress shrine and get some alone time with him and see how he’s doing, but everyone notices Andy’s there, and they all come running, and everyone’s so happy to see him but none of this improves his mood even a small amount. Well, maybe a little. He cracks the smallest smile at all the love.
I miss that guy so much.
I’m sure I had this dream because I was talking to a sort-of stranger internet friend. We’re FB friends from “the biz,” and one mutual friend but never really knew each other, but through the pandemic we’ve gotten to chatting once or twice and yesterday we discovered we both knew this guy who passed away, from the drugs, about a decade ago. He knew him from high school, I knew him from the Boston rock. And I forgot how sad it made me when that guy passed, how sad I am whenever a guy my age just… goes. And of course it made me think of Andy.
I don’t want you guys thinking from my smug bit about watching Jane alll day on Monday that I don’t do my part. I don’t think I do half the Jane work, but I would say I do… 40%? Emma would probably go a bit lower, but it’s in that range. I read somewhere that the average dude in America does something like 10-20% of the work. I really do try to do half, but Jane has her preferences, and some things just never occur to me. Like clothes. Jane’s clothes just magically appear. But, then, so does her food. Because I go buy it. But I do every morning, every breakfast. I do half the bedtimes. Emma does all the afternoons and half the bedtimes. But Emma’s bedtimes include the bath, which is work, and the afternoons are longer.
Which is kind of where we’re wondering if we cant’ fix some things. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about day care? Or pre-school? But we’re completely ignorant on these topics. First off, I know theoretically there’s a difference, but.. is there? Also what about hours? It feels like pre-school is, like, specific hours, right? Like you gotta get the kid there at 7 or 8 or whatever. But I don’t know how that would work, since she doesn’t get up till 9? Would we have to adjust her entire life and bedtime earlier? Can’t I just drop her off at 9:45? Or do all parents just bend their life to the will of the Pre-School schedule?
Then, it feels like the obvious solution would be a half day, in the afternoons. That’s a thing, right? You can do that? Take your kid after lunch at, like, 1 and pick em up at, like, 5? That seems great.
We keep thinking about this but neither one of us motivates to actually, like, do something about it because it’s not that big of a deal, plus pandemic. But now that, on top of everything else, Jane keeps talking about being bored, maybe it’s time.
Ugh.
I used to own this 1985 (I think) blue Dodge Ram 3500 van with the butt extension The butt extension — er, excuse me, “extended cab” — was the best part. Love butt extensions. Annie came up with that term. Anyway, I bought it off some firefighter in Boston in, like, 1998. I loved it. It was gonna be “the band van,” though we didn’t use it much because it kept breaking. It was the only automobile I ever registered in Boston, it was pre-internet, you had to go to City Hall to deal with this shit, it was a giant pain, the excise tax sucked, and I very quickly gave up on the whole dream of the van even though to this day I desperately want a a Ram 3500 van with a butt extension. Eventually I gave up and sold it off for nothing to my friend Tony. End of story. Except, every time I have to do one of those annoying KYC (“know your customers”) identity checks on the web where they make you prove your identity by answering questions off of your credit report, like old jobs you had, streets you lived on, or past automobiles you owned, they ask me about this fucking 1985 Ram Van, except I’m not sure if it was 1985 or 1986 or 1987 and I always get questions like “which of these automobiles have you owned in the past: a) 1987 Dodge Ram, b) 1985 Dodge Ram, c) 1985 Suzuki Samural, d) none” and I’m like I DON’T KNOW!
It will haunt me for the rest of my life, reminding me of my failure to fulfill my dream of owning a Dodge Ram Van 3500 with the butt extension. I was applying for PPP forgiveness at work the other day, and, boom. Ram van question. Sweet.
Speaking of registrations, I have to get my current little Mazda car inspected and registered and I don’t really know how to do that. I mean, I know how to do the registered part. And I know how to do the inspection part. But I don’t really know how to combine them. Emma says she’s not sure but she thinks the inspection place just tells the state you passed and the little AI chatbot on the NC DOT site will then know it passed, but when I asked the AI chatbot about registering, it said I had to have my inpection certificate, implying something in my posession. So. I don’t know. I guess I should just take the car in and find out. But that is one of those domestic tasks that I have unilaterally decided is Emma’s job — dealing with the car place. But I’m not sure we ever actually negotiated that one or I just acted like a baby and she dealt with it, so if I’m going to be a grown up we’re going to have to have, like, a marital conversation about the whole thing.
But, as John Cusak said in Grosse Pointe Blank, I don’t want to get into a semantic argument over it, I just want the protein.
Let’s do a mix. Moody and depressing one, because I have, like, a backlog of four. To you Substack subscribers, sorry I forgot to put the link to the playlist in for you. Forgive me. Let’s see… this mix has some old Mary Chain and Swell because of some vinyl I bought recently, and it has an old Belly song because Emma and I were talking about Belly the other day and she hadn’t heard of them they were just before her time, which seemed crazy but then we started doing the math. Gepetto’s not really a moody and quiet song, but I remember I had this one particularly bad night when I lived on South Noble in the slums of Fairbanks, Alaska in ‘93 or so, and I woke up the next morning in my depressing AF room with tinfoil over the windows (best blocker of sunlight) and I had one of those clock radios that is also an alarm clock, and it went off but it was silence, and the first thing that came on was “Gepetto,” like perfectly, from the start, even though it was on the radio and that sort of thing never happened back then, except in movies (imagine if in Groundhog Day the clock radio came on midway through a song — realistic yet weird). And there was a small scratch on the tinfoil of my window from the previous evening’s not-at-all-good antics, and through it was one little streaming ray of light that came in and hit the wall right in front of where my blind eyes opened when Gepetto came on and it was just the most beautiful moment in the world ever and I think about it every time I hear that song and it should be happy memory but it is tainted by the very vivid memory of morning guilt for the bad things that happened the night before, and it will probably stick with me till I die. SO that’s why it’s on a moody mix. Picture that when listening to it.
(I did go drive by that house for the first time ever on this last trip. Usually I just pretend it doesn’t exist when doing the obligatory “drive past every one of your old houses” routines).
Rest of the songs on this mix are new!
OK have a lovely day. Oh it’s Bastille day, right? Yes. Let us celebrate radicals storming a place of government that sounds like a healthy thing to celebrate this year. I’m sure there will be robust nuanced conversations about the difference between the French royalty and a democratically elected, non-unitarian governing body. Yes, we seem capable of that right now.
Wikipedia says that Mario Bros was first released on this day. That sounds better. We can all get behind that.
In California, the inspection place does just transmit your info to the state, so I'd be willing to bet NC does too.