Good morning. Hello. How are you? #478
Holiday Friday. Four different ways to say "don't worry about it." The love of pharmaceutical supply chains. Peter Hook's auction. Mark Strong's hair. Twitch Streamers. Play Set. Not in that order.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? All is well over here. It’s Friday. Happy Friday, etc etc. It is day 22 of no nicotine, sorry to keep telling you guys but i am confident that the first day I forget to tell you, I will crack and go taste the forbidden fruit of that sweet, sweet, Canadian Habitrol 1mg Nicotine Lozenge. Even though I am not sure where they are anymore. I hid them and I don’t remember where. Not, like, far or anything, but, you know, bum leg. Can’t go far. Speaking of bum leg, I’d say yesterday was the first day I didn’t really feel any improvement. Or, rather, I do think the muscles improved a bit and my range of motion improved, but the bruise is just so big and so tender, that the entire skin surface is starting to hurt. It hurts to get jiggy with it. It hurts to touch. My arnica gel came, though, and that stuff is pretty magical. It doesn’t do a whole lot for the pain, but it cools the whole thing off, tightens it a bit. It is really kind of magical. The skin is so warm, I don’t know what that is. Some sort of exothermic reaction going on just making my thigh a little furnace (and no, I don’t have cellulitis I promise).
ANYWAY. Listening to the new remix of Pink Floyd’s “Learning to Fly.” It is good, but, it’s… I dunno, they stripped away some of the 80’s ness of it, and one of the remarkable things about A Momentary Lapse of Reason is it used a lot of sort of semi-cliched 80’s production techniques but still managed to sound timeless. They stripped some of that away – pulled back the cheesy horn synths, the weird effect on David Gilmour’s voice. I liked that shit. But it’s still a great song. A Momentary Lapse of Reason is my favorite Pink Floyd album, fight me. I’m 49 but I’m like that annoying kid you know who says Load is the best Metallica album. And you know what? Load is awesome too. I’m still gonna buy this new, remixed version of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, though. I’m excited about the alternate cover from the same shoot. I know it’s a Storm Thorgerson design and not a Peter Christopherson one, but it’s still great.
Had an interesting one-on-one (or 1:1 as we say in the biz) yesterday, and something came up that I don’t think I’ve ever encountered in one before. I managed to say “don’t worry about it” in four different ways:
Don’t worry about it: These events are beyond our control and we cannot do anything about them.
Don’t worry about it: This may be a problem theoretically, in the future, but seems extraordinarily unlikely, and expending energy mitigating such an unlikely problem, right at the moment, is probably not the best use of our limited resources.
Don’t worry about it: Yes this is a problem but we already implemented the fixes to this problem, and they are taking a moment to take hold but there is no more to be done to fix this problem at the moment.
Don’t worry about it: Yes this is a problem but it is a minor one, primarily one of money, and the fix is more expensive and time consuming than enduring the problem for a little bit while we fix other more important problems and we can afford to wait.
In my defense, there were other topics in this 1:1 where I said “yes, let’s fix that” or “yes, let’s do that,” but I gotta say wow I felt like a party pooper saying to not worry about so many different things, and it sure seemed funny having completely different motivations for not worrying about a thing.
Number three is one that I see in business all the time. This used to be a huge thing at Barbarian: so many people around who wanted to fix problems, keep the ship right. I would spend so much time reminding people that we already spent a ton of timefixing this, and we can’t expect fixes to happen immediately. It’s like you’ve got a pot on an electric stove, and it starts boiling over, so you turn it down, but it’s an electric stove so it takes, you know, ten, fifteen seconds for the pot to stop boiling over and in that time, someone runs in the room and says “my god that pot is boiling over! we have to do something!”
Still, though. Sometimes I must be an annoying boss, saying “don’t worry” all the time. The person with whom I had that meeting sometimes reads these, so, hey: SORRY!
I can sympathize, because this is how my doctor is to me. I sent him a follow-up email, I had a question about my insurance, but figured also, to be safe, he ought to see this beast of a bruise, so I send him a two-part email, with photo attachment.
He answers the email promptly, addresses my insurance question, and doesn’t even comment on the bruise. That’s how this guy always is. Don’t worry, don’t worry. It’s like… such a dilemma! First off, so far, over five years, he’s been right 100% of the time. I mean, I’m not a hypochondriac, we’re only talking, say, 10 incidents here, tops, but every time: “don’t worry about it.” But of course I’m thinking exactly what my coworker is probably thinking: Does this guy even care, does he pay attention? So, I mean, I guess I gotta just give my doctor the benefit of the doubt! Because I do care, I do pay attention, and so far, doc’s not been wrong.
Speaking of that insurance question, I’m trying to get this Wegovy medicine, he sent in the prescription, but now I gotta work with CVS to figure out if insurance will pay for it. So I look online and it’s vague and weird and not auto-filling, so, you know, not a good sign. I call, stay on hold for 30 minutes, finally talk to a guy, and he’s just so ridiculously unhelpful. Insurance didn’t approve, yes you can buy it anyway, but we don’t have any so it’s moot. When are you going to get some in? Don’t know. Days? Weeks? Months? Don’t know. Kinda weird and frustrating. Then I ask him if it’s possible some other pharmacy might have it in stock, and it’s like I asked the magic words and this guy’s true passion in life is pharmacy supply chains, because he then launches into this long, discursive speech about various pharmaceutical supply houses, and which of the pharmacies around here use each one, but really in this medicine’s case, it’s a supply problem at the manufacturer, so it’s a dilemma, because you might get one month’s dose, somewhere, but you need four, so you might run out mid-regemin. Well fucking great. Now I gotta hoard this stuff like a squirrel or something? Supply chains, man. Seriously. Find the consultant behind just-in-time delivery and prosecute them I swear to god.
Peter Hook — the bass player of New Order and Joy Division — is auctioning off the rest of his stuff. He did a Joy Division auction before, now he’s doing one for his New Order stuff. There’s some good stuff in there — I’ll make a few stocking horse bids on an Anvil (ha) and the statue from Technique, but I’ve no doubt I’ll be radically outbid. The best thing in the auction, though, is that he is auctioning off the paperwork of his lawsuit with the rest of New Order. About eighteen banker’s boxes. This is brilliant. I put in a bid of £500, just because I thought it would be fun to enter into a kafkaesque nightmare of a life where I tried to coordinate with some random UK-based friend of mine to pick the thing up and transport it to some storage unit or something, where it would sit until I figured what to do with it. I mean, I knew I wouldn’t win or anything, but the whole idea seemed hilarious.
But then! Even better! Hooky has set a reserve price on the lawsuit of one million pounds. Fantastic. He says in the commentary he spent £2.5 million on it, so why not? Try and get some of that money back! This seems to be the most Wilsonian, Factory thing anyone associated with Factory Records has done in a long time.
So. Last spring, at, like, basically the beginning of the pandemic, Emma “ordered” a play set from these local contractors who specialize in nothing but children’s playsets. I think I wrote about it at the time. Family-run, local operation, just playsets. Lovely. But, you know. Pandemic. Everyone needs to deal with their kids, these people got seriously backed up. And then the husband died (yes, I am remembering I have written about this before now, bear with me). And the whole family got COVID. And lumber prices went through the roof. Needless to say, these people got backed up. A lot. Like a year.
They finally started working on our play set last Thursday, about sixteen months after Emma ordered it. They had 2nd Amendment stickers and punisher-logo-over-American-flag stickers on their cars, but what can you do? I’ma certainly not gonna say anything to these dudes, they know where I live, and anyway, their poor “boss” is just their Aunt or whatever, ant she said she’s been having a really hard time trying to find workers (god knows what she’s paying him but this thing was not cheap she should be paying them enough) and it’s been more than a year and we just want our playset.
And yesterday, they finished it! It is lovely! We didn’t get it stained, we’ll do that ourselves. Someday, when my leg is healed. But the thing is massive, and Jane loves it. Apparently she climbed right up on it the first time she saw it, but of course I was incapacitated in the house and missed it. I did manage to hobble out there last night, though, and get some pictures of it. Look at this thing! It’s awesome! I would like to congratulate and thank my wife for shepherding this project from conception to completion across eighteen months. I barely thought about it at all.
Two days ago, Twitch Streamers boycotted Twitch for the day to protest their shitty-ass handling of hate raids. I meant to write about it, but got distracted by Texas. You know, only so many fresh hells we can process at once. It is kind of amazing how badly Amazon is managing Twitch. Youtube is picking off many of their most popular streamers, they’re being general dicks about music licensing, they can’t keep their user base safe. It’s almost like Amazon is not the kind of company that has any experience running a UGC site. When even Twitter seems to be outpacing you on safety features, maybe rethink your approach?
It seems obvious but I guess it still needs to be said: the internet is terrifying for some people, predominantly women and minorities. The level of abuse these people experience is insane, like nothing you can (probably) imagine. It’s constant, it’s vitriolic, it’s violent, it’s dehumanizing. And of course not every one of them can handle it, several of them leave the internet or these platforms entirely, and a realm is not a realm of free speech if it’s only safe for certain people to speak. Free speech is as much making it equally safe for everyone to speak as it is about censorship.
Okay okay I’m not gonna rant today. Sorry.
Jane is at Grammy’s this morning, and have the day off, so this is a lovely, lazy Friday morning. Not that I can do anything with it. I’m mildly stressed because somehow this weekend I need to do my gardening, get my broccoli and cauliflower seedlings planted, and a few others, but I don’t know if I have the leg strength to do it? Maybe I’ll get Emma to help? I don’t know. I also think I need a few bags of fresh soil but I’m in no condition to go get it from the store. So, I guess across this four-day weekend, hopefully, somehow, I fill figure that out. That is my one and only goal for the weekend.
Oh fun it’s Friday new music on Spotify day, they updated my Release Radar playlist. God, what have I sunk to that I look forward to the Release Radar playlist as some sort of big event in my life. Also they didn’t even put the new ABBA on it WTF is their problem.
Finally, I leave you with a photo of Mark Strong — one of my favorite actors — with hair. We watched Cruella last night. It was actually pretty good. And my god, some music licensor got to live the dream with that soundtrack.
But look at Mark Strong with hair! Hubba hubba.
Let’s do a mix. Just a mix. Almost all new stuff. Except Billy Squier. I’ve been listening to a lot of Billy Squier lately. God, I bet he’s problematic. I don’t want to know. Don’t take Billy away from me. God now I’m going to go have to go and read Billy Squier’s Wikipedia page aren’t I? Other than Billy, I think most everything on here is new? Oh Sparks, right. Well, yeah, basically every playlist for the next couple weeks is going to have at least one Sparks song on it. But other than that. New! NEW ABBA. It’s good! I like this track more than the other one, but they’re both solid and I am absurdly excited about new ABBA. There’s a thing I didn’t think that was going to happen in my lifetime.
Have a lovely Friday. Then have a lovely weekend. I think I’ll write on Labor Day, so you’ll get a special weekend edition from me. Not sure what time. Probably a little later in the day. Ima gonna sleep in a bit. But I’m lonely. Miss you guys. Drop a line. Here. Have a button to remind you. Or just hit reply!
Oh man do I love MOMENTARY LAPSE, too. Bought it the day it came out (same day as Hold Your Fire by Rush, I was very excited) - took the bus down to the late, great Cutler's Records and Tapes on Broadway in New Haven. Had no idea this release was coming, and agreed, love the artwork for this. BTW I saw this tour, Oct 87 Hartford.