Good morning. Hello. How are you? I’m okay. Last night, as I was going to bed, I thought “welp, this week is going okay, we’re halfway through!” I got through Monday and thought it was half the week. That is not a good sign. I wouldn’t characterize yesterday as hard—and, particularly, Jane deserves a callout for being mostly an angel—but, rather, I would perhaps describe it as “buffeted by outside events.” Stressful things happening around me, not directly to me, or at least not ones I have to deal with in any active way. Lol that was very academic. It was fine. Monday was fine. It was cold. I’m cold.
Oh god I am looking at my topics notes and… I have none? This is always the risk of the “topic roundup” edition, afterwards, you have no topics to use to kick off your writing. Well, fucking great. Just great. Okay, let’s see.
I got a cool book in the mail. It is a book of photography but this punk kid of railroad-hoppping gutter punks. I read about it on someone’s Facebook post. It might have been Larry’s? But anyway, it’s gorgeous. The photographer’s name is Mike Brodie and from, like, 2004 to 2008 he rode the rails and took a bunch of pictures of the kids who were doing the same. He published two books of amazing photographs, then gave up photography, set up a machine shop, learned to work on diesel locomotives and now he works for the Union Pacific Railroad. The first book of photography, A Period of Juvenille Prosperity, is still available for sale, in the fourth edition, autographed. There’s something about these photos, so haunting. They remind me so much of the kids I knew at least ten years earlier, it’s amazing how timeless that look is. I worked on the Alaska Railroad for a while and these photos, yeah, just touch something deep inside me.
I don’t remember anything about my coworkers on the train. I don’t remember their names, where they were from, anything. But we were a team, we were friends, even if we didn’t have much in common. Let us transition now to my less skillful photos of a similar, albeit more law abiding, milleu:
Like a little Breakfast Club of deadbeat dirtbag train workers. The hippie the punk the rocker the redneck the art f*g. The girl I was in love with would come by on our lunch break, around 2 AM, and we’d smoke cigarettes in her car, then the redneck would make fun of me for having a girl, because that’s what they do, they’d make fun of you for needing to breathe.
I’m really glad I have exactly one photo each of that crew.
Needless to say I don’t know what happened to any of that crew.
The one useful thing I learned from that job is how to clean stainless steel. The aerseol cans of stainless steel cleaner they had were amazing. They spryed gallons of the stuff at once. I have tried to find consumer equivalent cans, but no such luck. I can find the same formula, but not in those amazing, power-throw cans. We would stand in the middle of a vestibule and spray that can in 360 degrees, all over every surface, then sit there and wipe everthing down for, like, half an hour or more. But by the end, it was perfect. Perfect. We really should have worn ventilators, but, lol, teenagers in Alaska. We were invincible. Even though we kept dying off.
Omicron is completely ripping through North Carolina, it is out of control. Just breathaking. When I went to New York in early december, the positivity rate in North Carolina was around 7%. Yesterday we were at 31%. We hit a nadir on daily positive tesrts on 12/14 at around 1,900 new cases in the entire state. Last we got over 29,000 new cases in a single day. They say this is more mild, and it’s no big deal, and that is probably true, but the sheer volume of new cases is having an impact on the hospitals nonetheless, where we went from flat at about 1,500 hospitalizations in early December to 3,850 hospitalizations today. The peak number of hospitalizations in the state during the Delta wave was 3,989. I assume we’ll pass that this week. And that the deaths will follow soon. Our county was getting 7-8 new cases in early December. We have been averaging a little over a hundred new cases a day in our county this week.
Part of me is like “oh well, two more months locked down in my house I won’t go anywhere,” and that is fine, but also I am, like, between projects right at the moment, and I can’t work up the energy to start a new one, so I find myself, when I have free time, sort of wondering what to do with myself, and kind of ambling around. And that is a monumentally stressful situation for me to be in, I need to keep busy. Lisa is working on the last edit of the GMHHAY book, and I will have that back in a few weeks hopefully, but until then, nothing, really, and I don’t really have the energy to start a new one. Part of me is like “make an ambient album! work on the ad book!” but… nah. And of course the gardening is done for another… eh, I guess I could start the seeds in the garage in, like, two months? Which is a whole interesting dilemma because I was thinking of just direct sowing the seeds in the spring after the last frost date, rather than getting a head start in the garage. One of the YouTube gardeners I watch, whom is very clearly an expert at this stuff, insists it doesn’t make a difference. It’s kind of, like, heresy in a way, but he’s done years of rigorous studies, A/B tests between seed starting inside and just direct sowing, and direct sowing wins. Which, like, great! Less work. Seemed idea. BUT now I’m thinking “eh, well, that’s four to six weeks I’ll still have nothing to do,” which is maybe not awesome.
It’s a little like Alaskan Cabin Fever. Not as bad in most ways, but worse in one: my chief relief from Alaskan Cabin Fever was to hit a 24-hour restaurant and sit in there in the middle of the night, with my friends working the overnight. No such option anymore. We still have the Taco Bell drivethrough, though. Or do we? I suspect the Wegovy in my veins would rebel. Rightfully so.
I keep thinking how I want a workshop so badly. I am watching a lot of dust collection videos. Really sorting out the shop-vac-vs-dedicated-collector situation and the different tube sizes and stuff that has always just sort of vaguely confused me because I never bothered to learn it because I alawys used other people’s shops. I fantacize about additions onto our house but that is absurd. Maybe a large shed or something. I don’t even really woodwork anyhmore, I haven’t in decades, I was never great at it, but I miss it. Or maybe I just want to make something real, I want to make a Yaz record, as James Murphy says.
Let’s do a mix, moody and quiet mix, lotta oldies, did a lot of this one over the weekend when I was listening to my “all the good” playlist on shuffle. It was in a very mopey mood. “Rain” reminds me of teenage years in Alaska so much, really transports me, which I guess is fitting, given the nostalgia about the train job today. I juast learned abotu Leo Nocentelli yesterday. I mean, I knew about the Meters but I did not know about his lost solo album recorded in the 70’s but not released till last year, and I listened to it yesterday and it was great. Thank you, Light in the Attic, for alerting me to this gem.
Talk tomorrow.