Good morning. Hello. How are you? #446
Air Train, Space billionaires, one minute's thoughts, Baker's The Mezzanine, anti-vax covid long-haulers in 2030 are gonna be fantastic.
Good morning. Hello there. Sorry about the “Hell” typo in the subject line yesterday. On many days of the last sixteen months, that typo would have been fitting. But yesterday was an okay day. Except Emma got a migraine. We were on our evening walk and Emma got a migraine, and Sony had a batch of PS5s for sale that I had to sit in a queue for, while recovering my old PSN account from back in the PS3 days, and Jane was very upset that we were turning around early and not doing our whole walk. Things were a little dicey there for a second. But I wouldn’t say they reached the “hell” stage. Not for me, anyway. Can’t speak for Emma and the migraine, though she is better now. Or she was when I went to bed, anyway.
I, however, did not get the PS5. Again.
Went to the grocery store this morning. Didn’t go to Walmart. Didn’t need any non-grocery items. Went to Lowe’s Foods, the local grocery store nearest my house. It did the trick. Quite a pleasant experience. They did a big remodel during the early pandemic and the place is really nice now. Might make it a thing.
In a move making no one happy, the train that no one wants, being built by a guy that nobody likes, just got approved by the Feds, so it looks like construction on the Laguardia Air Train will begin this summer. Only 30 minutes! From Penn station! Fucking fantastic. The short-term concerns of the neighbors win out over, like, the eternal concerns of everyone else. Ain’t that America, something to see, little pink houses for you and me. Remember when MTV gave away that Pink house? Remember when Mellencamp was Johnny Cougar? He did a really good job slowly changing his name. I think about that a lot. I wonder if Mellencamp and Combs have ever sat down and had a long conversation about it. Maybe they should publish a “how-to” book. Maybe they have a secret, on-the-DL celebrity name change consultancy. Maybe I should pitch it. I could be one of those celebrity business hangerss-on types who want to start a business but inexplicably do it with a celebrity so their ad agency or pasta sauce is owned by a celebrity instead. I mean why not I guess. Jessica Alba made $120 million off of Honest.
Today’s countdown to finishing cleaning out the “To Investigate” Spotify playlist: Twenty-Nine hours, two minutes left.
And good news! I got the Bloomberg.com thing fixed in Safari. It was, not surprisingly in Hindsight, a conflict with the Evernote plug-in. Because that company has just sort of completely lost the plot and crashes constantly and generally makes life so miserable they had to release a “legacy” version of their product so people could have one that actually works on their computers. I should have thought of that sooner, I am embarrassed. One thing I really love about Evernote on the phone is when you have a thought or inspiration or need to look up a note and you launch Evernote, you have to wait a minute, a full minute, before you can do a single thing. Every time. It’s super productive. I would totally switch to something else but all those people into their weird new notes apps freak me out. I’ve started just using Apple Notes for new stuff, but I have so much shit in Evernote from a full decade of living I don’t think I’ll ever be able to be completely free of it. It used to be such good software.
There is a new Low single and it is fantastic, insane, moving, beautiful, and the video is great too and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.
Billionaires pretending to go to space but not really going to space is just such a fantastic thing, whitey on the moon vibes aside. It’s just such a perfect metaphor for our times: they spend ungodly piles of money doing nothing, going nowhere, the press writes it up like they did something amazing. Apparently Bezos actually made it to space because he crossed some arbitrary line, but, you know, just for a second. It reminds me of this road trip my parents took me on in 1987 and we were driving California State Route 1 and really wanted to see Big Sur because we’d heard so much about it but, you know, we just drove on through, didn’t really stop, didn’t even really stop at the little roadside “town” of Big Sur (not to be confused with the larger region). Just kept driving. I’ve never been back, but now I can say I’ve been to Big Sur. Only I was “in” Big Sur for a good couple hours longer than these dudes were in “space.”
Paul Ford is a very wise man:
I had a nice, good, long, random train of thought yesterday. Janet was over watching Jane and I had to pee, and I thought, you know, like the good old days, I’d go pee outside. When Jane was very young, once Janet was watching her in the room outside my office, I couldn’t really go out there, because Jane was so easily distracted, just me opening the door would ruin whatever activity Janet had going. So I got into the habit of sneaking out the back door of my office and peeing outside. I don’t need to do that anymore — Jane don’t give a single f**k if I leave my office these days. But I figured for old times’ sake, why not. So I went out, peed, then checked my garden. The bees weren’t too obsessed with the genovese basil so i took the opportunity to pick off a few flowers (a hotly debated topic amongst gardeners, but I am pro-flower-trimming, though not neurotically so. Like to leave some for bees. A mix.), and I also checked on my recently-trimmed (ly-hyphenation 4LYFE) pepper plant. Came back into my office, sat down to do some work, realized my hands reeked so utterly from the garden. Just the most absurd, over-the-top GREEN smell. I tried to embrace it, but it was a lot. Also peeing outside always kinda sucked cuz I couldn’t wash my hands, so I figured, okay, screw it. It’s not like Jane cares anyway, I’m gonna go wash my hands. So I left the room and I went to the bathroom to wash my hands. And as I went out there, Janet was in all black, listening to “Hot Hot Hot” by the Cure with Jane, and as I was washing my hands I thought “wow this is kind of amazing that your Mother-In-Law is basically kinda a goth that listens to the Cure.” Which isn’t really true but also is. And then I started thinking of my old roommate Jussi and how when she was first dating Sean, and Sean and I were just getting to know each other and, you know, sniffing around the butts of each other’s musical tastes, we’d discover we both liked Simple Minds or something and Jussi would be, like, “eww no. That’s parent music.” Because she had parents that were pretty cool and liked decent music, but of course as a kid, she would rebel against that and only listen to things that her parents didn’t like, which is cool. Then I wondered if Jane was going to do that to me. That would be sad. Then I remembered seeing Simple Minds at Avalon in Boston in, imagonnasay 2002 or so. Then I remembered the girl I went to with it, this amazing, beautiful woman I barely knew, whom I met through my friend Minessa. How my memory is blurry but I think Minessa was supposed to come to, but didn’t, so then it felt kind of like a date and I was so into that girl and I don’t even know her last name. I don’t think I ever really saw her again. We were Friendster friends, but that doesn’t do much good. Then I started thinking about that apartment, I really loved that apartment, it was special and amazing and I still miss it, and I loved it’s back deck, with its patio overlooking the Blanchard’s parking lot and all the crazy stuff I’d see there. Mister Butch was sleeping behind the hardware store at that time, and we had known each other for, oh, over a decade at that point, and he’d often look up and wave. And I saw a totally normal frat boy do heroin back there once. And two drunk girls, chattering and talking to each other, face each other, kneel down in the middle of the parking lot, pull down their underwear and pee, all while facing each other and continually chatting, then look up and wave at me while still peeing. And speaking of peeing this other guy who used to pee in the back stepwell of his van, and then open the door and let the pee out, which is kind of clever actually. And vinho verde. How much vinho verde we drank at that apartment. It was the house drink. Three dollars a bottle at Marty’s.
So, yeah. That’s how that one minute of the day went. I think maybe my dream is to be able to adequately replicate, in the written word, a single day’s thoughts. Catch them all, all the fleeting nostalgic wisps, all the mundane nothings, all the brilliant flashes. Of course Heisenberg is strongly in effect here, it’ll never happen, but I think, deep down, that is probably my life’s strongest ambition. Sort of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (I used to go up and down that exact Mezzanine when I worked at Ernst & Young, and I had already read the Mezzanine, and I’d try and remember all my thoughts on the Mezzanine like the book. A meta Mezzanine) and that video by Orbital that I love love love so much.
After enlightenment, the laundry.
Here’s a note from a thought from yesterday, verbatim: “God, the amount of whining we’re gonna hear from anti-vax covid long-haulers in the next decade is going to be insufferable.” They’re gonna whine about their health care, they’re gonna act like their Vietnam vet Agent Orange survivors, they’re gonna bitch and moan about how someone did this to them and someone needs to compensate them and they’ll all stay resolutely anti-government while they all seek to qualify for long-term-disability Medicare. It’s going to rule. They’re gonna band together and act like they’re a legitimate interest, and the much smaller group of long-haulers who got vaxed will have no option but to band together with them to get their long-term-disability Medicare because we still won’t have Medicare for all, and they’re going to hate hanging out with them so much. And then when someone has the temerity to say something like “maybe you shouldn’t government disability for your long haul covid if you didn’t get vaxxed” they’ll say something like “I couldn’t get vaxxed I had a pre-existing yoga condition.”
It’s gonna be so great. That’s a thing in our future.
All right let’s do a mix. Moody and Quiet, because I have like three of these done in backlog now, which is a thing that happens when I start going through the “To Investigate” queue again. Mostly new(ish), couple old — discovered a great demo of “Happy When it Rains” by the Chain that I think I have owned somewhere forever but never really listened to. Minnie Ripperton and the Czars are old but new to me. Logan and Isabel are a YouTube thing I’ve been into over the course of the pandemic. Jane loves Isabel’s YouTube channel she makes very good videos. I wish I could eat half as well as her. And Raquel is her best friend who comes and visits her in her remote cabin in the woods and they make music and then this summer Logan showed up and now they seem a very happy couple so that is nice good for Isabel. Murder of Crows is one of Alan from Low’s side projects. Loamlands is a local country act that I love love love. The woman behind it also owns Pinhook which I love love love not that I’ve been there in forever. “It’s Getting Late in the Evening” is a Talk Talk B-Side I recently acquired on 12”, wanted to put on a playlist for you, found out it’s not on Spotify, but found this great, faithful cover of it by Nils Frahm and some peeps I don’t really know but it is very good.
Okay! Wednesday. Let’s do this. Four meetings and one of them is in the morning and I have to present to the whole company, which is fine, but I have to do it when Jane is around, which is… dicey. Hopefully it works out.
Talk tomorrow!