Good morning. Hello. How are you? #548

A busy weekend in an apocalytpic nightmare world

Good morning. Hello. How are you? Have a lovely weekend? I hope so. Mine was great, albeit way too short. Two-day weekends are bullshit. I’m listening to a 2014 album by Hunger Games and Contact actress Jena Malone, with her band “The Shoe,” which is named after a suitcase of synthesizers and electronics she apparently used to lug around, so, you know. You learn something every day.

Got my podcast done this weekend. One person told me that it is broken, but a couple others have texted me commenting on it, and not mentioning that, so, I don’t know. Maybe broken on one podcast platform? I will try and find time to check it today, but I inexplicably have a bunch of meetings, rare for a Monday. But if it breaks, try listening to it straight from my website.

Topics include: Day 648, New York trip, Yo La Tengo at Bowery Ballroom, Genesis at MSG, Wet Leg at Mercury Lounge, LCD Soundsystem at Brooklyn Steel, five trips to Tom and Jerry’s quarantine in a NC hotel, Jane, NFTs, Work, NFTs, collecting vax cards, gardening, GMHHAY book, big crypo essay, When We Were Kings, Soul Power, Long Day’s Journey into the Night, Let it Be, George Harrison Living in the Material World, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Waitress, Zang Tumnb Tuum ZTT Box Set, Incredible String Band, Primal Scream Live at Levitation, Mary Lattimore, Idles, Roberta Flack, Peakes, WH Lunch, June of 44, Hen Ogledd, AKG7 / Ak Dan Gwqng Chi, Flaming Lips of Nell Smith, Dummy, Geese, Allison Russell, George Harrison, Monkees, MNDR, Brandi Carlisle, Fleeting Joys, Circuit Des Yeux, SNL, Mythbusters, What we Do in the Shadows, The Great, Hawkeye, Get Back, so much about Get Back, Only Murders in the Building, Wheel of Time, Logan’s Run, Eternals, Adrienne, The Dawn of Everything by Davids Wengrow and Graeber

Managed to get a lot done this weekend, even though it was too short and I did not feel super awesome because my body is decaying and I have already lived half my life and it’s all downhill from here. I added a bunch of stuff to the compost gave it a good stir, watered it. That compost is doing just great. Man, I really am a stellar compost farmer. Wish I could make that a full time career. Except for the aching body thing and the turning of the compost with the pitchfork. But then again maybe that’s exactly what the aging body needs.

Then I seeded my five newly-placed Birdies Beds. They’re all about 2/3 full of older dirt, with a bunch of amendments, but what they could really use before next year, when they start their growing life in earnest, is a nice, nitrogen-providing cover crop. I had a five pound pack of Jonny’s Seeds winter cover crop laying around for the occasion, but I just hadn’t gotten around to actually planting it. It consists of winter rye, field peas, ryegrass, crimson clover, and hairy vetch. HAIRY VETCH. Good stuff. Anyway, I got that planted, got it covered with the soil, and then added a layer of mulch consisting of the five buckets of shredded cardboard I had laying around, which is really exciting, because now I’m out of shredded cardboard which means that Jane and I get to shred more cardboard, shit yeah, could anything be more exciting in the world.

The best part about this whole thing is that the five Birdies beds are right outside Jane’s bedroom window, between our house and Janet’s house, so every morning, when Jane and I open her curtains and her window, look outside to check the weather and “say hi to Grammy’s house,” I can check on the growth progress. I am very excited about this.

Also checked in on the fall garden, which I have neglected for weeks — haven’t watered it or anything. And it was doing awesome. The cauliflower and broccoli are starting to head, all the lettuce is doing great, the beets look good, the snow peas are growing quite nicely! Screw this summer gardening, man, fall and winter gardening is where it’s at. I was busting my ass all summer trying to save things, maintain things, and it was a constant battle to keep everything watered, sometimes i had to do it twice a day, and I still didn’t produce tons until the heat tapered off and things started to cool down. Meanwhile here it is December and my garden basically grows itself. Maybe it’s the natural Alaskan in me. Or maybe gardening in 100°F weather is bullshit. Alberta, Siberia on up is gonna be the new breadbasket of the world, huh? Too bad we’re completely tearing it up for oil shale. We’re gonna need that land when the midwest craps out because we killed the soil with fertilizer and used up the entire Ogallala aquifer and the midwest turns dry (fun fact: not a hypothetical! Inevitable! Happening soon!) (NB if you’re reading this on facebook there is a good apocalyptic link there you’re missing out on).

I really wanted to do one more pass on the lawn vacuuming the leaves, but everything was wet, and it was intermittently raining all weekend. Good for the hairy vetch, but not good for vacuuming leaves up off the grass. I will hopefully do this next weekend, Christmas not withstanding. The weather looks promising. Fingers crossed.

I also made bagels this weekend and they are delicious, honestly better than any bagel I got in New York earlier this month. I mean, I am not dissing New York bagels at all, they are the best, but their presence in SoHo seems to be severely curtailed thanks to the pandemic. I have only had a little bite of one so far: Jane and I finished up the two-day cooking process after breakfast on Sunday, and I really wanted my stir fry for lunch, so I get my first full bagel this morning and I am so excited. I did have a bite of Emma’s yesterday. I made them a little more brown, a smidge more cooked than previous occasions, so they’re a tad more chewy, with a nice hard exterior and my god they are so good. It was fun cooking with Jane, mostly. She is a master of timers, and there are a lot of timers with bagles, when you gotta boil them for a minute or two on each side, and cook them for five minutes, then rotate them, then cook them for five minutes again. She ran all of the timers and she did great. She only had one meltdown, when I first explained to her that she can’t keep her face two inches from the oven door when I open a 500°F oven. But she calmed herself down real quick because she was not going to miss a single minute of bagel making. It was like a goddamn ABC family movie up in this joint.

Other weekend items:

I sold a Death in June double CD to some dude in Illinois and it really bummed me out. It bummed me out that I had this CD, bummed me out that it turned out that band actually was racist, bummed me out that someone wanted their CD now that that racism is known and explicit. I probably shouldn’t have sold it. I forgot I had any more of their albums. I should have cancelled the order and thrown it away, but then I got sent into a bit of a tizzy about throwing CDs away, and, god. I regret how I handled this affair, but the CD got sent off. I am an imperfect human being and feel guilt about this.

On somewhat more pleasant musical things:

John O’Leary posted a Chameleons video the other day, and it set me off listening to the Chameleons for most of the weekend, and, man, that band was so good. I am very excited for their tour next year. Sadly the tour’s not coming to the Triangle. I’ll have to go to Boston, natch. This pandemic will be over by October of next year, right? Lol lol it will never be over. Todd Demma is playing drums on that tour, it is going to be awesome. Actually I should probably go to the Atlanta show, too, huh, so I can talk to Todd: too many friends in Boston, that guy has.

I also made the possible mistake of listening to my old band this weekend, I don’t know why, something came over me. I always like listening to Rockets Burst from the Streetlamps, I don’t do it often, but, when I do, I am still pretty satisfied with it. I can hear a few mistakes that bug me, especially on the first album, since we recorded that thing to tape, with a manual mix, and did no digital editing. There’s a lip smack in Kryzstof that bugs me. But all in all, it’s a great record, and I am still proud of it.

And then, at dunner, Emma and I were listening to XM First Wave and they were playing “Dancing with Myself” and one of us said “I wonder which version this is” and I was sure it was the Billy Idol solo version, but Emma’s Android-Shazaam-equivalent said it was the Generation X version, and I was like “noooo” and then I used my Shazaam and it, too, said it was the Generation X version, and then I walked over and looked at the XM Radio wall panel and it said it was the Billy Idol version, and I said “I thought so,” but then we were both very confused how Shazaam and fake-Shazaam both fucked that up, so we read the Wikipedia page and it turns out that the solo version, which was a bit hit in the US, was just a remix of the Generation X version, used the same bass and drum tracks? I did not know this! And that Generation X broke up because “Dancing with Myself” only reached number 60 on the charts and I guess Tony James had to go write “Love Missile F-111” with Sigue Sigue Sputnik, so Billy went solo and took the song to America and the rest is history. But the weird thing is that the label, in both the US, and the UK, was Chrysalis. So, yeah. Don’t blame the label for that one.

Watched SNL last night, and it was weird and dark and wonderful and sad. There was a COVID outbreak amongst the cast, which, honestly, I’ve been kind of thinking was gonna happen all year, but I guess they were saving it for the season finale and the rise of the Big Bad. So the host, Paul Rudd, did the show with only two cast members (Michael Che made a great joke about the only two cast members showing up being the black ones), along with Tom Hanks and Tina Fey, who were apparently already planned to be there to welcome Paul Rudd into the Five Times Club. It was a mix of pre-recorded and old skits, but the new ones were… great. Pete Davidson’s skit about Pete doing standup in 2035 was dark and amazing. There was an old skit from nineteen ninety one about global warming and climate change and how fucked we all are, that seems… pretty horrifying and damning in 2021. We’ve known forever, we’ve done nothing. God.

And, most depressingly this weekend, Pfizer announced that the results of their trials for the vaccine with children six months to four years old failed. Which means there is no vaccine imminent for Jane, which means I will be doing this shit for at least another six months, which means all my hopes and plans are fucked and… yeah. I mean, thank god I took that trip to New York, because right now, I am convinced I can handle another six months no problem, that my home is lovely, and it’ll be okay I won’t go crazy. Maybe Omicron will burn itself out and I really can go to those shows in March and April.

But. Yeah. That makes me so, so sad.

As does fucking Joe Manchin, who, in a shocking plot twist no one saw coming, has given up on negotiating with the Dems to, you know, be an actual Dem and pass their actual platform, because, LOL, reasons. And of course, like any abusive parent, we can’t stand up to him, because we still need his vote to, you know, pass voting reform, and save democracy, but, like any abusive parent, it’s not at all clear that he will do that either. Especially if we hurt is leetle feewings.

The one good thing is that Schumer seems to be planning to still bring the BBB act to the floor for a vote, even if it fails. Manchin probably isn’t bluffing, but a) one does need to make sure, and b) one needs to make that fucker put that vote into the record, in public.

Oh, also, he said parents in poverty are spending their child tax credit on drugs, so, yeah. Fuck that guy.

I keep trying to decide if we’re gonna have a nice, big Christmas dinner or say fuck it and, you know, leftovers. I am on the fence. It’s a lot of work and takes up, like, a day and a half of my precious vacation, and Emma and Janet don’t really care, Jane doesn’t know any better yet. Plus I gotta, like, find time to go to the grocery store, because I need to actually pick out the Turkey and not trust the delivery people, and this week is super busy with people cramming meetings in before the holiday. But I am leaning toward doing it. I feel like it’s building nice, cheesy-ass, domestic memories for Jane that she will cherish when she’s living in a COVID Climate bunker underground and/or is a political prisoner. I mean, either she, like every toddler on the planet, is going to resent us all for our inaction, we are the new boomers, etc. etc. But I suppose maybe that harsh judgement can be softened with corn bread. She loves corn bread.

OK I’ll do it.

All right let’s do a playlist. W Hotel Lobby playlist. In a better, alternate universe where the boomers didn’t kill the planet and leave us with the blame, where Joe Manchin is a good man (LOL) and we actually, you know, beat this pandemic. And the W Hotel Lobby plays better music.

Talk tomorrow. Sorry for all the morbid asides! It’s Monday! garfield.gif.