Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good. The sun is not shining. All well? Happy New Year’s Eve! Huh it’s Friday. I won’t talk to you guys again until Monday, and by then we’ll be, like, three days into the year. And I gotta do my year-end meme questionnaire thing and I gotta do my end-of-year media consumption thing, so really we won’t talk again till Wednesday, and by then I guess we’ll all be over thinking about 2021, so I guess now is the time to say goodbye to this year.
I finished the layout and edit on the GMHHAY book. I wrote the introuction. I added the dedication and thanks. I am ready to flow the foreward in from Emily and get it sent off to Lisa. It will probably get another hefty cut and I’ll have to re-flow it one more time, but that’s okay.
After that, I started on the personal book I make every year of my personal journals. I exported all 12 months from 750words.com, and I copied them into the master document containing all my journal entries since I was sixteen years old. It now has a word count of just over four million words. Then I copied the whole year into a new Pages.app (Apple’s glorious, superior-for-most-uses and free Microsoft Word replacement), did a bunch of find/replace actions on it, and then started working my way through it, page-by-page, manually formatting it. I got about halfway through. I am in June.
The point of this is to say I have a pretty good memory, right now, of the whole year. The fakeout hope of an end to the pandemic in June, and again in December. The shadow of January 6 looming over the whole year. The continuation of the death cult and fascists trying to take down the country, though this time without, at least, the highest office in the land. The absurdity in Texas, with the power outage, and then the absurdity in Texas, with their abortion law. The Supreme Court confirming all of our fears of being a captured institution. Reading the GMHHAY book, which spans 2020 and 2021, and then the journals from 2021, it’s very clear that 2021 was an improvement over 2020, even if it was mostly a continuation. But I think thats important to acknowledge, as much as we want to slag off 2021. It was not an awesome year. It was, however, better than 2020. And, really, what more do you want from a year.
One thing I’ve realized with the GMHHAY book is that I don’t have a cover yet. No problem to whip one up, but I feel like it needs a photo. If you guys were to think of a photo that most represented GMHHAY, what would it be? I could use a little creative stimulation here.
Did you guys see this crazy Tweet thread from Rep. Eric Swallwell? It is insane. He engaged and was super friendly to one of his infinite Twitter death threat trolls and the guy basically just acknowledged it was Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan who were radicalizing him. It is depressing and so, so real.
Also I had a revelation yesterday that the Cure vs Depeche Mode battle of the 80’s was mostly fake, and that most people just… like Depeche Mode more. Is this right? I mean, to be clear (and this will probably greatly upset people) I am not one of those people, I profoundly love the Cure much, much more, I think of them on a different plane as Depeche Mode. But in the US, at least, it seems that Depeche Mode is infinitely more popular, and even amongst my “alternative” friends, it seems that Depeche Mode is infinitely more popular. I guess I should have realized this from their respective last appearances when I lived in New York. The Cure played the Beacon Theater, Depeche Mode did two nights at the Barclay’s Center.
This makes me sad for some reason. I mean, I like Depeche Mode a lot. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Maybe this is the exact topic that drives me back into therapy. “Doctor, I just don’t understand how so many more people can like Depeche Mode and not the Cure I need to work through this.”
In some thrilling personal news: the hairy vetch has sprung. I was getting Jane out of bed yesterday, and we were doing our morning “say hi to Grammy’s house,” which now overlooks the Birdie’s Beds, and what to my wondering eyes did appear but green where brown once was.
HOW exciting. Man. Autumn and winter gardening rules. I just went out to take that picture and peeked at the rest of the winter garden and it is going just great. And I barely have to do anything to keep it alive. All this compared to summer where I was busting my ass and running around and watering things twice a day and it was all dying from the heat anyway. Yeah, screw that. This works great since Emma and I have dreams — probably not this year, for pandemical reasons — of spending a month each summer in some city where we have a bunch of friends.
Anyway. Jane is at Grammy’s this morning. I am going to go take the recycling to the recycling center, then come home and do my podcast and then spend the rest of the day finishing off the book edit on the journal. If I can get that done, I will have gotten all of the hugely time-pressing year-end tasks done. The ones that it would be impractical to try and squeeze into the workday. The rest of the tests take like five, ten minutes each, so I can chip away at them for the next few weeks in my free time. It’s not as I wanted to get done during this pandemic, but it’s a good dent. That’s all you can do when you are overwhelmed with an endless list of tasks. Put your head down, and make a dent. Preferably the biggest dent first.
Modern synthpop playlist for you today. Lotta good dandy blippy bloopy shit. Puts you in a good mood, I swear. Check it out.
And have a lovely new years eve. Will I stay up till midnight? Who knows. Probably not. But one day, one day, I will be out there in the world once again on New Year’s Eve, drinking and dancing and kissing and singing. And you will too. See you then. Cheers.
Checking out 750 words right now!
I think a good cover for the GMHHAY book would be a still of where you write it every day, taken at the same time you write it. That would make a neat gif, actually - if you had a shot of your desk or wherever every morning for the entire pandemic.