Good morning! Hello there, how are you this fine, fine Wednesday? Everything all right? Gotten over your Omicron COVID yet? I hope so. Man, what a shitshow. I am doing all right. I have a company presentation at 10 AM, and Jane gets up at 9, and she has been taking a little too long with breakfast lately, so it will be tight to get down to my computer by 10, and then I’ll have to actually do the presentation with Jane, so hopefully she won’t be too much of a pill. Emma would help but she’s got her own giant work crunch this week, so I’m on my own, unless things are terrible, in which case I’m supposed to call her, and she’ll come down, but of course I’m not gonna do that. So fingers crossed!
Thank you all for your shoegaze recomendations I had, like, three hours of new shoegaze to listen to yesterday and it was really awesome.
I dreampt last night that Me, Danielle Strle and Ben Palmer pitched a western to Netflix and we sold it, and now the three of us were going to have to make a TV show together. It was simultaneously very exciting and very stressful because I have zero idea how to make a television show and I was gonna be the showrunner (Danielle wrote the pilot script, in comic book form, as an obvious Station Eleven reference, and was going to be the lead writer and Ben was gonna direct).
Speaking of which, finished Station Eleven last night and they really did wrap it up quite nicely. It wasn’t quite as grimdark as I feared, but I think the constant, pervasive threat of violence looming over every scene in the entire show really stressed me out and detracted from my ability to enjoy the show, even if in the end it wasn’t too, too violent? Is that a spoiler? I feel like things can’t be spoilers if they show up in its ratings. The warnings for Episode one are: Mature. Language. So, yeah. Anyway I definitely cried at the end, even if it was definitely a bit too much “the play’s the thing.” Also they never explained really how Mathesar from Galaxy Quest came back. I mean, not really. Just like they didn’t explain how they escaped the Red Bandannas. Which was weird. But I guess sometimes you just gotta trim stuff to keep moving. In the end all was forgiven because I am a sucker for a strong father-daughter plot.
I also watched that two-hour Youtube video about queing at Disneyland, and it was pretty great. I mean, I’m already a sucker for in-depth YouTube documentaries, so this was right up my alley. Emma and I haven’t been to Disneyland in, like, a decade or so, so we’ve missed the FastPass+/MagicBand era completely, and I gotta say, the whole thing looks so absurdly complex now that I don’t think I could manage to pull off a trip to Disneyland unless someone else planned the whole thing for me. Though it does seem the whole mathematical model is build around trying to see six or so rides in a single day, and when we do finally go to these places, I feel like we go for more than one day? Or maybe not. I can’t remember. I don’t feel any burning desire to go again, and now that JK Rowling is cancelled, no point going to Universal Studios either. And Jane knows nothing about Disney so no imminent worries there. I wonder how old she’ll be before she grasps that Disneyland exists and I wonder if she will care at all, if she’ll be appalled we kept such a thing from her. Or our nefarious plan will have succeeded and she’ll, be, like, the only six year old who DNGAF about Disneyland. That would be amazing.
She’s taken to insisting that Daddy not come on the evening walk. It’s been going on for, like, a week now. Each day I have to think of some new method of convincing her to let me put on my coat and shoes without throwing a fit. Sometimes I have to take out the trash, or get the mail, so she consents to letting me start the walk. At first, she would forget the whole thing by the time we got to the mailbox, but every day she remembers a little bit longer, so it’s gotten to the point we are about halfway up the street and she’s still insisting I am not there. Yesterday I spent some time trying to learn why she didn’t want Daddy on the walk, and she said it was because Daddy was “not fun,” and Mommy and Jane were fun. So I asked if it was all right that Mommy and Jane went on a fun walk and Daddy walked far behind them being not fun. She said that was fine, and then policed it. Every time I tried to walk alongside them, she was like “no, Daddy get back behind Mommy.” She really was committed to the bit.
We got our grocery delivery yesterday and wow there were a lot of things not in stock we really are experiencing a bunch of supply shortages again, we learned nothing from two years, huh. Also they mis-delivered my groceries and were giving me groceries that belonged to someone else. Luckily, I noticed before they could drive away, so I sent them back. They came back thirty minutes later with my actual groceries. The groceries they were trying to deliver to me were meant for a Michelle Williams, so apparently Michelle Williams has moved to rural North Carolina somewhere nearby, so that’s exciting. I’ll keep an eye out for her. She’s been through a lot maybe she needs some friends.
Finished Several Short Sentences about Writing, and I am sorry to say it did not magically get better in the last third, except for all the examples of writing from other people, that was kind of nice. Made me want to re-read Joan Didion so I think I will be doing that soon. Now I gotta find another short book because I only have a few days until We Are But Your Children--An Oral History of the Club ManRay arrives in the mail and I definitely want to start on that right away. Very excited about that one, that’ll be a fun trip down memory lane, I suppose it is too much to hope that it is a meticulously chronicled list of all the petty feuds we all had to endure through the years. But I mean, even if that’s all it was, it would be fantastic. I am very excited. I looked through my Kindle and the shortest unread book was Patrick Radden Keefe’s Snakehead, clocking in at 400+ pages, and that might be a bit too long. So I will turn to the giant print pile next to my bed that I never look at. That’ll be exciting. Lord knows what’s in there.
I ordered one of those chuh-chunk stamps for the back of your checks, for our HOA. I have an old one but the bank has been merged like four times since that stamp, and also the current bank is a total dick and makes you write “For mobile deposit only” on the back of every check you deposit via the mobile app: “For deposit only” won’t cut it. So annoying, but also a blessing in disguise because let me tell you, ordering a new stamp is what passes as so exciting in this day and age. It’s gonna come in the mail one day and it will be thrilling. Then I get to stamp a bunch of small pieces of paper and take pictures of them and my god, my life is so exciting, it’s gonna fucking rule. Fifteen of the twenty-two houses have paid their HOA dues so far. It’s been a week. That’s pretty impressive!
And, finally, I would like to wish a happy birthday to my good friend of over thirty years, my former bandmate and recently turned Salemite Annie Smidt. I hope you have a lovely birthday. And are deep into your preparations for the upcoming most important holiday of the year, Groundhog Day.
Club mix. Ooontz oontz oontz. Honestly I don’t remember most of these songs, I have been working on this mix for, like, three months, so who knows what’s on there. Crap Shoot Club Mix. I would listen to that. I’m going to right now, in fact.