Good morning. Hello. How are you? #552
Running late, Jane fits, Eagle run, copy editing, Mazdas, the nostalgia of frozen electronics, Garbage, friends who worked on movies, Tutu on optimism.
Good morning! Hello! How are you this fine Tuesday? I am good. Sorry I’m late, my whole day is already shot but hey whatever, it’s a holiday. I overslept by two hours, which was terrible and fantastic, but I woke up just in time to get Jane out of bed on time. Then we had to do waffles and dishes and cans at breakfast, and then I messed up when Jane handed me a waffle to share. I was supposed to feed her a square first, then take a square for myself, but I did this in the reverse order, and the retribution was swift, immediate. A curdled scream of “nooooooo!” and an immediate hysterical fit. We spent fifteen minutes, mid-breakfast, downstairs, tryign to help her calm down. I tried to teach her about taking a deep breath but she was not having it, every time I’d try to explain deep breaths, she’d say no, and grab my lips and try and keep them shut. Eventually I got out of her that she was scared of deep breaths. Not that she has ever heard about them or tried one. Very weird. Will try again sometime when she’s not having a fit.
Eventually we got calmed down, went back upstairs, and finished breakfast. By then we were running a half-hour behind. So, you know, permanently late, but who cares! It’s vacation!
Parenting, man. Hell of a thing.
As an added bonus, Janet just showed up to watch her. Wasn’t sure if that was happening today or not. Excellent. I will now run to the post-office-slash-gas-station-slash-convenience-store-slach-taco-stand and drop off a package I need to mail out: a copy of Coil’s Musick to Play in the Dark. For some reason I own three copies. Two now.
BRB.
All right, errand completed. The Eagle still stands, my favorite employee is working, hadven’t seen her in a while. A corpulent, grey-bearded old man in overalls ambled out maskless, indifferent to the “mask required” sign mere inches from him, looking like Uncle Jesse from the Dukes of Hazzard. Life in the country.
Also, look at my odometer:
Mazda’s man. My friend just went to the nearby Mazda dealership, and they said they’d have no new cars till February. No wonder they’re trying to buy our cars back. Well, if my electric truck ever comes in, they can have it back. Man, has any company whiffed the transition to electric as much as Mazda? They were all in on speedy engines, and it worked for them until… it did not anymore. Hard to imagine that company’s not doomed. Which is sad. My dad had a little blue Mazda truck when I was a kid, I would love, love, love an electric version of that truck right now.
Speaking of cars, I was thinking yesterday about the sky blue 1985 Honda Accord I had in college, up in Alaska, and how I put an aftermarket CD player in it, and how that thing wouldn’t work in the cold in the morning. I would get in my car, and all the LCDs would be frozen in the display, the CD spindle wouldn’t rotate. I’d have to warm the car up a bit before the thing started working. But the CD player would always work before the cassette deck did. I used to spend an extraordinary amount of time thinking about the cold weather performance of various electronics. That is not a thing I think about much anymore. And of course, most Alaskans probably don’t either, since they just plug their phones in when they get into their cars. But yeah, it hit a very specific note of nostalgia with that one. I loved that little blue Honda, and the adventures I had in it.
And I don’t even have a single picture of it.
I spent yesterday on year-end tasks. Finished the photo and “to sort” folder sorting. That is definitely the most tedious of the year-end tasks, aside from all the copy-editing, which is what I’m working on now. I have twice as much this year, thanks to the GMHHAY book. Furthermore, the GMHHAY book as a (rough) deadline, I promised Lisa I’d get her the next round by the beginning of the year (I said this yesterday didn’t I?) so I focused on that. I was on page 230 or so when I started, and I’m on, let’s see… 407 now. It is about 730 pages, which is, of course, absurd, but also a lot shorter than it was. I am suffering the affliction I always suffer when doing this task, which is to actually read the work while I am copy editing. Which is kind of problematic, since, you know, I’m not supposed to be doing too too much editing since, you know, it is supposedly a historical document. And I don’t do too much editing, I am good, mainly just copy stuff and a few clarifying words here and there. Also I feel like I should, you know, have recently read my most recent book before people get it, especially in this case, where over half the original manuscript has been excised.
One interesting copy editing problem I have is a situation around The Mandalorian, where it had aired the night before, and I said something like “last night a television show cleared up mysteries I’ve had since a child,” and I was writing it in a very specific “if you know, you know” kind of way (IYKYK in internet parlance), where other people who watched The Mandalorian would know what I was talking about, but those who did not would a) probably just skip over that part and b) not think “neeeerrrd.” And I like it that way, you know? It’s like a piece of opt-in writing.
And Lisa made a not-unreasonable comment, along the lines of “well this sounds interesting but you need to explain it more,” which of course at the time was part of the point, but also at the time, those who did care, knew what was on the air the night before, and that won’t be the case when they read this in, say, 2030, so the passage now works on no levels, which is a dilemma. Emma suggested I footnote the thing, but I have a serious footnote problem, all my books have too many footnotes, and they have been increasing in length and frequency over the course of all my books, and I made a promise to, you know, cut back this time.
So maybe I’ll just cut the entire passage, I guess. Which is sad.
Also The Book of Boba Fett airs tomorrow.
She also made a sick burn to me where I was bragging about how my daugher knew the difference between hyphen, en, and em dashes, and Lisa said “unlike her father,” because I’m very bad with these in early GMHHAY posts. It was a good one. I deserved it.
Anyway, if I plow through I should finish the GMHHAY book edit by today, except i won’t, which means tomorrow, except I’m going to see Spiderman tomorrow, so Thursday, I guess. And then I have to do it all over again with this year’s 750 Words entries.
“How did you spend your vacation, Rick?”
“Well, I spent it copy editing.”
One thing that is surprising is that, so far, the politics in the book have aged fine, I generally seem more clever about politics than I realized. There’s a passage about the Dems wasting thier time on Rahm Emmanuel’s appointment which is a bit cringey now, because Rahm Emmanuel is awful, but also, who cares, bigger fish to fry, which is the main point of that passage. It would withstand a generous reading, maybe not a critical one. Who knows how much this will change in, say, a decade though.
Emma bought me the 20th anniversary 2x45 pink vinyl edition of Garbage’s first album, and I am listening to it right now and I’ve really come around on “Only Happy When it Rains.” I mean, it was always a great song but I always thought it was a bit much to name a song such, when The Jesus and Mary Chain had “Happy When it Rains,” and Shirley Mansion and the Chain are all Scottish, but hey, Shirleys from Edinburgh, the Chain’s from East Kilbride, they’re an hour and a decade apart, and it’s probably an hommage anyway, and in any case, Garbage are awesome. My god this record has a lot of hit singles on it. Like at least three more than you remember.
We’ve watched two movies in two days where a friend was in the credits. First we watched Don’t Look Up, and caught my friend Adam Bouchard’s name in the credits. I knew he worked on films, didn’t know he worked on that one, didn’t know he used his middle initial in his credits name, texted him and sure enough, it was him. Then we watched Encanto last night, and I knew that an old coworker had worked on it, and there she was, Laura Han, in the list of animators. Very cool. So if any of you worked on a film this year, let me know, maybe we can do a hat trick here.
Finally, my friend Jess sent me a quote by the recently departed Bishop Desmond Tutu, RIP, whom my mother once got to see speak at a World Council of Churches gathering in Bellingham, WA.
Hope is quite different from optimism, which is more superficial and liable to become pessimism when circumstances change. Hope is something much deeper, based not in ephemerality of feelings but on thd firm ground of conviction, very, very close to unshakeable.
Many of you will remember that a few days ago I had to give Nick Cave some credit for introducing me to the concept of hope and optimism being two distinct things, though I took umbrage with the rest of the quote. I see now he was essentially just butchering Tutu, who says something much more comprehensible: that optimism can be good, but it can leave you, it can change. Not that optimism itself is nefarious.
I like that.
Let’s do a mix. Justa mix. Another of my year-end tasks is to clean out the “To Investigate” playlist on Spotify, so it is empty and clean for a new year of music. It means a lot of re-listening to things I didn’t give enough attention to earlier in the year. I have about 20 hours left to get through. So we’re getting a lot of recent-ish albums and songs, along with some old classics. The Aaron + The Lord album is so good. Really hit right this week. BLACKSTARKIDS still one of the best albums of the year. The new Rosey album is fantastic. Rosey is amazing. She’s an old friend, was there for me during one of the hardest weeks of my life, took my stray-ass in in Venice and kept me entertained and distracted. I’m forever in her debt.
Talk soon. 2022 here we come.