Good morning. Hello. How are you? #456
There are so many topics in here I tried to fit them all in this subhead as a list but I couldn't. It's really chock-full of goodies. Really makes up for yesterday's issue, I promise.
Good morning, there, fair and weary traveler. How farest thou? I’m good I just got back from Walmart, where they did, in fact, have the new Fruit Cereal Kit Kats that have been sweeping the nation and of which faithful readers have been sending me photos. Very excited to try them this morning. They did not have the new pale yellow colored vinyl Walmart exclusive of the new Billie Eilish album. Nor did they have, weirdly, garden shears. That’s on my big todo list this week: learn to de-rust and clean up my garden shears. I have a terrible habit of letting them rust and decay and then just buying another pair. Maybe Walmart’s done me a favor.
While I was out I listened to my 2019 Defective Frequency solo album. I still really like it, even if no one else does. Pasture Cropping Drinking Song will, I am confident, one day be rightfully hailed as the pioneer in Climate Mitigation Rock that it is. Show Up is the perfect 60’s protest song. I mean, come on.
Ahh well. Art is made for the artist not the audience, right? Right?
Now I’m listening to that masterpiece of apathy rock, “It Makes no Difference” by the Darling Buds off of their fantastic 1992 LP Crawdaddy. Man, I’m sure glad I saw that tour. My girlfriend got me into them at the time. Come to think of it, maybe I should have seen the lyrics as a warning:
How many times?
Do I have to say this is not for you
I push and I shove
Without a hint of love
This is not for you
It...makes...no...difference
Oh it...makes...
It makes no difference to me
Eh, she was fine. Great girlfriend. I’m the one that fucked that up. It was so stupid. I beat myself up for it for… two decades? Probably deserved longer. Jesus.
I read Dan Primack’s newsletter on venture investing every morning — to get supremely jealous of the absurd valuations of companies that I don’t work at, natch. Super healthy habit. Some of them are just fantastic and it occurs to me that I need to occasionally share some of them with you, without editorial comment.
After all, I do not know anything about this company. I’m sure it’s completely fine.
I wonder what the total valuation of all barber shops in America is.
Yesterday was Taco Tuesday and for a change on Taco Tuesday I decided to have tacos. We have been getting Taco Tuesday delivered, of late, and usually I’ve been getting enchiladas. But I really wanted tacos. So I got them. And this fucking place. It’s so delicious, but they’re one of those places that don’t let you mix and match your tacos. What is this fascism? Why can’t I have one pollo, one carnitas, and one chorizo taco? Why do I have to get three of the same. There oughtta be a low. A week or two ago I was trying to think for my friend Ben about what religious beliefs I would have in order to not waste the get out of jail free card our illustrious supreme court is so busy trying to make for us. And that’s it: it is against my religion to have three tacos of the same type. You have to provide me with a variety of tacos.
After that I watched a bunch of YouTube videos about fonts. I haven’t really thought much about fonts in the 21st century but boy howdy I sure was obsessed with them in the 20th. I was wondering what was up with Chank Diesel, the famed bad boy alphebetician of the 90’s. Seems to be still making fonts. And then I was wondering what was up with Fontographer, which seems to have been usurped in the marketplace by an app called Glyphs, which… fair enough. You update your software once a decade, eventually someone’s gonna surpass you. Been kinda toying with the idea of making a font of Jane’s handwriting, or even one for each year of her life or something. But I’m not sure anyone cares about fonts anymore. In any case, I have some time, since the only letters she can write right now are J, A, N and E.
Last night was daddy bedtime and Jane was just fantastic not one tantrum. She’s started the journey from coloring in her coloring books to making her own art, and we are both very excited about it. Some of them are very recognizeable, like this image of a person. I asked her if it was Daddy because of the big belly, but she was too polite to say so. Emma tells me that she draws all of her people that way. Which means she is either only drawing daddy, which would mitigate the big belly reminder, or I am being paranoid. That seems super unlikely though. Me? Paranoid?
The other side of the chalkboard had a cool geometric abstract drawing on it. It’s really nice. Jane has a way these days of coaching you, telling you the question she wants you to ask so she can tell you the answer. She kept saying “What’s that a drawing of?” So I would ask her back: “What’s that a drawing of?” Because I really wanted to know! But we both just sat there saying “what’s that a drawing of?” over and over and I missed an opportunity to teach her about abstract expressionism and if you have'n’t taught your three year-old about abstract expressionism yet you are clearly a bad parent. Ashley says so so it must be true.
At bedtime, Jane and I did our routine, which, as you may recall, ends with one-kiss-two-kiss, then a lullabye — “Everything Stays” from Adventure Time. Some nights I sing it to her while she is wrapped in my arms with her head on my shoulder, which is just the best. But of late, we’ve been signing it while dancing around the room. I was a little sad at first to not get the hug, but as the evenings go by, I am enjoying the dancing more and more. We sort of wander around the room spinning and waving our hands in the air very slowly. And last night it occurred to me how much I am enjoying it, and how when I finally get to New York, I’ll probably miss it and get a little too drunk with some friends and end up spinning in circles singing “Everything Stays” outside of the Magician or the Whiskey Ward or something. That seems like a very fun thing I want to do someday.
After Jane went to bed, Emma and I did our nightly watching of Mythbusters, and one of the two episodes we watched was their snow episode, and they did a segment on sticking your tongue to a frozen pole and it was so monumentally triggering to me I could barely watch it. When I was eight or so, despite the warnings of every single adult in my life, I stuck my tongue on a tetherball pole on the playground of Joy Elementary. I had stuck my tongue on a lot of frozen poles — they taste good! — but I got careless and stuck too much of the tongue on there, and it got stuck. And I’m sitting there, with my tongue stuck to the pole, so embarrassed, thinking “jesus H this is exactly what they warned me about.” It was so mortifying and horrible and I was stuck. I eventually got it partially off by using a lot of saliva and a succession of warm fingers to slowly melt/pry it off, but I panicked at the end and ripped the last bit off, ripped a ton of skin off my tongue and it took a couple months to heal and I didn’t tell anyone, because it was super embarrassing.
I did not need to relive that memory. I suppose neither did you. I’m sorry.
Now that I’ve written this down, it’ll probably turn out that I didn’t in fact, get myself free, and everyone knew about it, and I concocted a complete alternative ending to that story to spare myself the misery and embarrassment. I suppose I best just mentally prepare myself for that eventuality now.
Cuomo, man. I gotta say. It is just… amazing and fantastic that this man responded to multiple findings of sexual harassment by thinking I’m gonna PowerPoint my way out of this. Brilliant. I mean, I gotta say. In a way I kind of respect it? I definitely know the urge of PowerPointing your way out of some a tough situation. I have definitely PowerPointed my way out of a tough situation.
The problem is — well, the problem other than a lifetime of abuse of power and sexual misconduct — is that Cuomo tried to delegate the PowerPointing of his way out of it to an underling. This is the one and only rule of trying to PowerPoint your way out of something: you have to make the PowerPoint presentation yourself.
Secretly I judge every single person in business who can’t make their own PowerPoint presentations, especially in the C Suite. I’m sure this is unrelated to the fact that i got my start in the field making PowerPoint presentations for business executives. But I stand by this rule: Make your own powerpoint presentations. I suppose you can, in a pinch or extremely high-pressure situations, employ a graphic designer to prettify the thing, but even this is frowned upon. And I suppose the one other rule is that if you have your company produce a viable PowerPoint competitor, you get a free pass. I’m looking at you, Steve. But not you, Tim Cook. You should be making your own PowerPoint presentations.
Speaking of business applications, there ought to be a law, an actual, honest-to-goodness law of the land passed by our federal government, mandating interoperability and export of financial transaction data from your various financial institutions into accounting software like Quickbooks, Quicken and Mint. It is fucking ridiculous how some institutions can’t be bothered to do this. I’m specifically looking at you, Apple: The Apple Card does not let you sync your data with Quicken or anyone else, it is complete bullshit. The only way you can export your financial data is by downloading files to your phone — can’t do it on your Mac — one month at a time, and then importing them, one month at a time, into Quicken. It’s a total pain, and it should be fucking illegal. Also, this is why I don’t bother using my Apple Card.
My 401k is almost as bad. Once a month I have to go log into their archaic, c. 1999 website, check my balance, and manually import it into Quicken. It is maddening, and it should be illegal.
Did you hear that Lindsey Graham got Covid? I wish him… well. Really I do. Breakthrough case, no less. Lotta breakthrough cases out there. CDC is all like ‘don’t worry it’s only like 0000.00004%” or some shit and I’m thinking “wow that is so weird because I think I must personally know every single one of them.”
This isn’t a political statement. It’s a joke. Get vaccinated, people.
Oh and John Lewis is postumously putting out another graphic novel — entitled Run. I mean, this is very exciting, I totally did not know about John Lewis’ previous three graphic novels - the March trilogy. I bought all of these this week. Gonna read them. They are definitely physical items I want in my house.
It occurred to me yesterday that there is routine and there’s routine. Like we all brush our teeth every night (right? RIGHT?). I don’t sit there, when I’m brushing my teeth, “goddamn it, another night where I have to brush my teeth this is such a waste of time, such bullshit.” I don’t think that when I’m peeing or washing my hands or putting on my underwear. But then there is the more pernicious version of routine that can sometimes feel reassuring and comforting but can also feel stifling and miserable. And here in pandemic life, the latter type of routine has been a big thing. SO MUCH of my life is routinized now. We can’t mix up restaurants, we don’t go out, see friends. Each day of the week is different, some individual work or housekeeping tasks are different, but the routine structure of large swaths of the week is fixed in stone.
And I was thinking maybe there’s a trick to be done here. Maybe I can stop thinking of these activities as the latter type of routine but the more comfortable former type; Stop thinking of them as stultifying soul destroyers and more as hygenic and good healthy habits, like brushing and flossing. Maybe somehow I can trick my brain to think they’re good, or at least neutral.
That’s as far as I got, I don’t have a solution as to how.
Thank you for your kind words yesterday about the one good paragraph in yesterday’s GMHHAY. All your kind words offset the profound sadness of the conceit put forth in the paragraph, so thank you for that. Had some good conversations about it with Megan and Liz and I feel like I need to expand a bit upon it. There’s a whole whirlwind of thinking that I think most of us twist around in when we think something along the lines of “maybe the world is toast. Maybe it’s all over.” One thing we usually think is “well, maybe it’s always been this way and I’m just more aware.” This happens to me, and then I think of the angry hippies in the 80’s who were like “this is not the way things should be going this is fucked up” and those party-poopers in the dot com era who were like “actually Bill Clinton has some problematic policies.” And there’s a temptation to think “oh this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, then. I’m just becoming more aware, more active, more willing to help.” And this may be true, though sometimes it is not true. It may also be true of specific issues — you may have been up to speed on climate change but not racial justice, for example.
I feel like, broadly speaking, I was mostly up to speed on most liberal causes in the 90’s. I think I was somewhat misguided on reparations and progressive macroeconomic policies. But by and large, if I am striving to be fair to myself, I was pretty good about these things.
So then, of course, even if you were decently aware, the next whole mental ringmorale is to think “well why wasn’t I doing anything?” And here I find myself trapped in another hangup I think many of us have: big vs small, global vs local. When you look at your past and think “I wasn’t doing anything,” you are typically discounting the small things, the local things. Or your priorities have changed between different progressive topics. I maybe care less now about the plight of the starving artist or local Boston transportation policy or music censorship — all areas where I strove to act locally in the old days. But when you look back, you think “too little, too misguided, not the right priorities,” and maybe that’s fair but also maybe it’s not.
And then another whole complicating factor is the viewpoint that many things are getting better. It seems so absurd, it feels so hard to even write that sentence now, but a) it is still true, and b) it was a huge part of my thinking back then and c) it was true back then too. Gay rights, the environment, even race and gender. It’s hard to believe it sometimes now. But back then, I think I had a very bad tendency to take the long view, to remind myself a little bit too often that things were, generally speaking, always getting better.
One thing I think the Trump era did to me is completely upend that notion, or, rather, introduce the element of time. It seems so obvious: things have gotten better over the course of humanity, but the Dark Ages lasted centuries. One thing I totally did not fully grasp in my youth, because I was egotistical and self-centered in the same way that sociopaths are egotistical and think they have some right to see in person the end of humanity, was that historical trends don’t care about my lifespan. Keynes: In the long run, we’re dead. I had never really considered that before: that it could be true that things will always get better and also true that I will not live to see it, that I will live out the rest of my days in a dark age.
This, I think, is the biggest revelation I’ve had in the Trump era. Not “oh I see the problems now,” and not “oh now I realize I need to do something.” Those are both true, and we definitely need to do things, but we need to understand we may never see the fruits of this labor. John Lewis knew this, the Civil Rights heroes knew this. I dimly, academically knew it, but my ego completely overwhelmed my sub-conscience, logic be damed, to believe I’d be around to see the utopia.
Okay well that was cheery. Let’s do a mix. Justa mix. All new stuff except Neptune — who I’ve been writing about here for a couple days — and the aforementioned Darling Buds, but not that song, a different song. This is real-time people I just listened to that one. Anyway. Lotta good new music out. Check it out. Keep up with the kids. Kids who like moody alternative music. Shit there are two Goon Sax songs on here. Oh well. Too late. Running outta time here gotta go get Jane.
I’m kinda into the custom button maker on Substack now so here’s a custom button for you. Ta.