Good morning. Hello. How are you? #597
Morning Ukrain doomscrolling and catastrophizing, but with a teeeeny silver lining. Walmart hangers.
Good morning! Hello. How are you? I am discombobulated. Overslept and then spent too much time on my Wordle. The chief skill of Wordle is patience. I swear, I took like thirty minutes on this one. I kinda think they were cheating witht that one. Man talking about Wordle is hard.
Important update: Good Morning. Hello. How Are You? is now available on Kindle. Seems there was a mix-up with the print version on Amazon, that’ll be another couple days, but if you are looking for the Kindle version, it’s available on Amazon. A digital version will be available on Rickwebb.net hopefully today, thursday latest, if you can wait, though. And of course you can buy the print version directly from me. Including signed copies!
It’s even worse to oversleep and be discombobulated when there’s a war going on since, you know, the first thing you want to do when you wake up is catch up on the war. Which, like I said yesterday, is very hard to do on social media, so I just check the news sites. One thing that is totally not useful on Twitter right now are journalists that make threads that span, like, hours and even days, so some old tweet from two days ago pops up in my timeline as “recent” when it’s not recent at all. I suppose people are just writing tweets with the understanding that most people have their timeline set to algorithmic instead of, erm, time. Actually is it even a timeline if it is not in timeline order? But anyway, PSA: You can click that little star logo in the top right in Twitter and it will turn your timeline back into a pure chronological feed, latest Tweets first. Except people who make two-day long twitter threads.
A fun thing bad people are doing now is willfuly conflating defending Putin and explaining him. I enjoy “understanding” Putin’s mindset as much as anyone, and Emma and I watched a pretty good explainer video about some of his defense, energy, and Crimean water concerns that helped me “get into the mindset” of Putin. I mean, a little bit, but not really, because even though now I understand these concerns, it’s still along fucking way from “oh my country is harder to defend after the Carpathians” to “hrm I think I’ll invade a sovereign nation and kill a bunch of civilians.” But there are people on the internet who have cottoned to the fact that it is not super cool right now in the world public opinion to stick up for Putin. So now they just “explain” him, as if anything could defend this. Also fun are the people who seem to be under the illusion that previous bad acts mean this act is… not bad.
I mean I would have fucking loved it if the world stuck up for every horrific invasion of a sovereign democracy, regardless of who perpetuated the invasion. That would have been great. But the fact that it didn’t stick up then does not negate the correctness or impressiveness of the world sticking up now. How is that hard to understand.
One thing I was thinking about this last night is just how remarkable this whole thing has been, the world’s reaction. I can’t think of a time in my entire life where the entire world has come together so quickly, so concretely, and the conventional wisdom has changed so utterly in such a short period of time. I wonder if there are even historical parallels comprable in both speed and strength. It’s certainly quicker than 9/11 and more concrete. I guess we declared war the next day after Pearl Harbor, and most of the world was already in the war, but the thing about that is it was… bipolar. The world split into two groups, not quite equal in size but certainly comprable. This feels more like a world unified against one. We can grumble about China and India but they’re hardly sending troops here.
But anyway, I… I have intensely disliked Putin for a long, long time. It has been clear to me that he’s a thug, and a liability to, you know, continued existence of humans on the planet (Fiona Hill: Would Putin use nukes? Yes he would.) I am not saying that to brag or anything. I’m saying it like we all say millions of things that are completely obviously bad about humanity and reality, and many of us know it, and nothing ever happens. Famine. The climate. Prison reform, drug legislation. You know. The stuff that sucks about the world. Putin’s authoritarianism isn’t the absolute worst thing plaguing humanity—Trump would definitely be worse. He’s more unhinged, the US is more powerful, more populated, more wealthy, and more important to enduring freedom (lol) on the planet. But he’s clearly been a potential existential risk to humanity for a long time. And no one was ever doing anything about it.
And suddenly, a thing that was a giant problem for humanity is… getting dealt with. Or, rather, we are attempting to. It might not (god, let’s face it, probably won’t) work, but within a few days, the majority of humanity stood up and said “hrm let’s do something about one of those huge problems facing us.”
There’s a silver lining in that. It means it is, at least, possible. Imagine if we did that with climate. Imagine, within the span of a week, humanity saying “oh fuck, okay, let’s do something about that.” It still seems absurdly unlikely, but at least after this week, one teeny weeny silver lining in all of this is it doesn’t seem completely impossible to me anymore.
Of coure, we assume something completely horrible would have to happen first to get everyone on board, and that is not fun to contemplate. But hey. At least for one-to-five seconds, yesterday, I found one little smidge of optimism about what’s going on here. It faded fast but it’s worth noting.
It is not super fun waking up and immediately thinking all of these thoughts. Writing a morning newsletter is hard. Super jealous of people that get to spend the whole day writing their newsletter and then sending it out after lunch or in the evening. That sounds somewhat more emotionally health. I would prefer to not think about civilian deaths until after breakfast. Waaaah.
In other news, I forgot to mention that last Friday, when I went to Walmart on my weekly run, I did the routine walk by the hanger section. I have been looking for their cheap, white, coated metal wire hangers. I’ve needed more hangers for, like, a year? A year and a half? It was a product of no longer needing to go the dry cleaners when WFH and the pandemic started, and the pointless buying of more comfy home clothes and a t-shirt to support every closed bar and live venue in America (yes, I hang my t-shirts. It is the best do not listen to Marie Kondo). At the very beginning of the pandemic, Walmart had these hangers in stock routinely, until, imagonnasay December 2020 or so. And since then, they have been out. I have been walking by the hanger aisle at Walmer for a year, every week, looking to see if the metal hangers were back in stock, and not those garbage, fat, breakable plastic ones that take up too much space in your closet, pollute the environment, and generall suck. A year I have been doing this.
And this week, finally, they were back in stock.
So I guess the hangers being back is proof that pandemic really is over and the CDC is right and my kid doesn’t need a vaccine and the deaily deaths in the US falling from 3,400 a day to the completely-insignificant 2,300 a day means this whole thing is over. I suppose this has nothing to do with the fact that the CDC said that, oh, by the way, all the numbers have been a lie and it turns out 43% of Americans, and over half of all kids have had COVID. So, come on in, the water’s fine, if you haven’t had it yet, just dooooo it.
But at least we have hangers again!
Shoehgaze playlist. Added the Drop Nineteens for Gareth. I was friends with them back in college. I remember after one summer I saw Steve again and he was like “how was your summer?” And I said “good, you know, got my old job back, saw some old friends, chilled. How was yours?” And he said “Awesome. I played Reading.” Was very jealous. But also I was young and assumed, you know, my time would come. And I’d know a bunch of other people who played Reading. Thirty years later and I don’t think I know anyone else who played Reading.
Okay! Gotta go do my country flashcards before Jane wakes up! She very much wants to be a part of that if I do it in her presence, and she just has not figured out where Malawi is I can’t be having her harsh my streak. Till tomorrow.