Good morning. Hello. How are you? #596
Ukraine and the media and weekend chores, which mostly means garden prep.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am… okay. The absolutely gorgeous sunlight streaming into my office offsets the sadness that it is a Monday. I’m listening to The Misadventures of Saint Etienne and it is just right for this very cold Monday morning.
This war is weird. I mean… I’m sort of developing something like a boomerang theory of war media. My friend Rex noticed it too. It is feeling very, very hard to get up-to-the-minute, accurate information about this war. Contrast that with the first and second gulf war, where we marveled at the technology of the media, beaming the war straight into our living room. Quoth a favorite band of mine: “Another day, another world war / Find out walking through the grocery store / Watching bombs through the TV eye / Light it up like the Fourth of July.” We used to talk about all the citizen journalists on Twitter. I remember when Sully landed on the Hudson, Twitter journalists were so far ahead of the traditional news media. It seemed like a new world.
But now? I mean, I have no doubt that good citizen journalism is happening, probably on Twitter, probably on Tik Tok. But there’s no way in hell to find it, to be sure that who you’re reading is who they say they are. And that is doubly true whenever they’re saying something new, saying something that you might not have heard somewhere else. I’m finding the internet to be a monumentally untrustworthy source of information. It’s like a complete failing of one of the central promises of the internet, it is kind of fascinating. I’m still reading it, I have two or three good doomscroll seshes throughout the day. But mostly, I find myself checking out the Times of the FT or something to get a sense of what is actually happening. It is.. frustrating.
Theres some sort of media theory critique in there, I’m sure.
Anyhow, it’s pretty crazy to see such vast swaths of the world suddenly all agree about something. That is… heartening. Of course you have the Chinese government, and a diminishing number of wackjobs on the right who are acting like my four year-old daughter, shouting “no!” to any suggestion before actually thinking about it. And we have very-smart-people who want so desperately to stake out some sort of unique, interesting look-at-me-I’m-smart position that it’s just… god. Man. Sometimes an immoral invasion is just an immoral invasion.
The secret trick of being a maverick, the secret trick to thinking for yourself is that every once in a while, you have to agree with other people, otherwise youre just an opposite machine and we already have those in the form of our kids.
Anyway. Very productive weekend, just insanely productive. I was so worried I wasn’t going to get everything done, and then I got it all done by Sunday morning. I got everything so done that on Sunday afternoon I just kicked back and played three hours of the new No Man’s Sky release, and it was awesome.
I went to the garden center and got a bunch of seed potatoes. I also bought some more grapes, because I’m paranoid mine aren’t going to bounce back from the winter, some more strawberries, cuz the deer ate all of mine, and two raspberry bushes, because I had raspberries as a kid and I loved it so much. I didn’t think they could grow here, but apparently they can, who knew.
Then I went to the cool independent lumber yard in Carrboro and bought a three foot by eight foot, three-quarters inch of posh, smooth birch plywood to make a new workbench top, so it can a) be smoother (the current one is MDF), b) overlap the frame more so we can better apply clamps to thinkgs on the front, which has been a frustration for both of us and c) better be able to accept the mount for the hot new vice I got. They sawed wood there, so they sawed a 4x8 piece down to 4x3 and I just got it to fit into our CX-5, with the plywood, going right up to my neck as I drove the car, I am glad I didn’t get decapitated. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized they didn’t give me my 1 foot by 8 foot scrap piece, and I am super annoyed about that.
I’m very, very excited about this workbench project, but I gotta let the plywood adapt to the garage for a week. So.. next week!
The next morning I went to Lowe’s hardware, because the local place did not have super-thin fiber board that Emma needed for her dollhouse crafting. Lowe’s had a decent proxy for it in the form of whiteboard, so that’ll be fun.
And I brought Emma back a bunch of Bojangles biscuits.
Outside in the garden, I got the third hoop house built, and then once it was built, Emma and I put the netting over one of them. The netting is designed specifically for these hoop houses, so they say, but it was literally two-and-a-half times longer than the hoop house. So this caused us to re-evaluate our plan and instead of three individual hoop houses in a sort-of hoop house village, we went with a single, long hoop house, and it is awesome. This will necessitate the reconstruction of one of the Birdie’s Beds into a different shape, but I’m okay with that, this is gonna be just great I am very excited.
I got my seed starts started. I am doing about one-quarter the amount of seed starts that I did last year, because I’m planning on sowing most of my seeds in-ground. But I wanted to do a few. I also got a couple heating mats for seed trays at Lowe’s, so I am A/B testing those, because last year I kept the whole garage heated and it was ridiculously expensive. It’s pretty cold out, but the garage isn’t freezing, and they have their heat mats, so hopefully this will work. It’s only been two days, and no sprouts yet, though. We shall see.
Anyway, very productive garden times. I made a video of it, which was also a productive thing to do, so here it is:
I also got all of the Good Morning Hello How are You books shipped out. So if you ordered the book, it is now in the mail. You can still order the print version directly from me today, at this link right here. Buy my book pleeaaasse! Tomorrow the print and Kindle versions will be available on Amazon, and the digital version (and a bundle) will be available from me as well. Gotta get on that today.
That was super fun, because it was something I did with Jane. She got a little frustrated a few times, but by the end, she could open up Squarespace’s order list, copy an address, switch tabs, paste it into Stamps.com, go back to Squarespace, copy the email, go back to Stamps.com, paste in the email, then click print, print, print (you gotta do it three times in three places) to print the mailing label, copy the tracking number, then go back to Squarespace, click “mark fulfilled,” paste in the tracking number, select “USPS” from the dropdown, and click “Confirm.” It was very impressive.
I also wrote my monthly letter to Jane, for the future Jane book. Talked about the war, talked about her nasty fall, talked about life in general, talked about the pandemic. Jane sat right next to me as I was writing it, she could tell I was writing to her. I don’t think it fully clicked. I had in my head that this book would be a surprise on her 18th, or 20th, or 21st birthday (TBD) so I really shouldn’t let her be watching me write it. She is now at an age she will remember things. But it was just so cute. She was reminding me about things to say in it.
And I got my podcast done. So much media creation I am a media creation machine for a cumulative audience across three mediums of a couple hundred. It is great I have zero regrets about this it is exactly all I ever wanted. No publishers no marketing, put that into a cool seal and make it a tattoo.
Topics for the podcast include: Day 719, Ukraine, Good Morning Hello How Are You Book now available fo order, Garden Center, Lumber Yard, Lowe’s, Jane’s fall, Jane’s playdate, diet, Jane, gardening, hoop houses, four cubic yards of soil, workbench, soil amendments, Jane doing mailing labels and book fulfillment, seeds, rose bushes, Birdies Beds, Eternals, Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Nobody, Ghostbusters Afterlife, Fast 9, Jale, Afternoon Delight Sub Pop Comp, Fontaines DC, Basement Jaxx, Verve Pipe, Loretta Lynn, Brightblack, Slint ATP, Mercury Rev, Third Eye Foundation, Saint Etienne, Hayden, Swans, Supreme Dicks, Pale Saints, Psychic TV, Thrill Kill Kult, Khun Narin Electric Phin Band, Alan Vega, Dischord First 6 Records box set, Queenadreena, Lalleshware, Andy Bell, Black Country New Road, Beatles, Valerie June, Eddie Vedder, Mark Lanegan, Big Thief, Grivo, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Good Morning, yeule, Shamir, Raveena, Hikaru Utada, Boris, The Jazz Buthcer, David Soul Sea Power, Trentemøller, Blankenberge, White Flowers, Alice Glass, Tears for Fears, Star Trek Discovery, Peacemaker, Inventing Anna, Raised by Wolves, Super Bowl, Olympics, Resident Alien, Violet and Gene Coghlan Biography Draft by Skip Coglan, True North in Alaska by Dick and Jack Webb, Red Carpet by Erich Schwartzel
I made zero progress on moving off of Spotify, because Apple Music is still beachballing, one week later, saying “Loading iCloud Music Library,” even though the whole point is that I am trying to make my iCloud Music Library empty, the whole thing really is massively frustrating.
But all in all, a very productive weekend and I am happy. I briefly debated on Sunday the idea of cleaning out my closet(s). There’s way too much stupid shit in there and I need to donate a bunch of old clothes to the Chatham PTA Thrift and whatnot. But I spent about 3 minutes in there and started getting dust allergies, so I think the whole thing is probably a much bigger deep cleaning endeavor than anticipated, and I’m gonna need my wife for moral support and decisionmaking. I read an article in the New Yorker about stuff, and getting rid of stuff, and how we have too much stuff and consumerism and whatnot. I have waaaay more stuff than the average American, but I mostly like my stuff and do not feel those things apply to me. But the reason I don’t think those things apply to me is because I am dilligent about keeping my stuff organized, and getting rid of stuff I don’t actually want or need. And I haven’t been doing that to this closet, so it is time.
You can see Jane’s wound from her fall on the pavement on this picture. I told her three days ago that it would be gone in three days. I should have said five. She’s been counting down since. The scab is still not gone. This morning might be a little rough if she looks in the mirror.
Today’s mix is a moody and quiet one, even though I am in a pretty good mood. But winter is hanging on, there is an invasion going on, plenty to be moody and quiet about out there. Mostly new stuff, except Tangerine Dream and two others. Alpha Centauri was one of the first CDs I ever bought, and it’s been in the background of my head for decades, but I hadn’t listened to it in, gosh 30 years. I remember there being sounds on it I couldn’t imagine how they made. And this time I’m like “oh that is a Farfisa through a Big Muff,” and whatnot. This time I was much more struck with the compositional daring. Good record.
Take care of yourself, let’s find ways to help Ukraine, and don’t let those bastards get to you.
thanks for mentioning that new yorker article. i desperately need to size down, so i hope it'll help.
that is a very cute photo of jane despite her busted face—tell her i think she looks badass.