Good morning. Hello. How are you? #609
A lovely weekend of friends and gardening. Book royalties. A poem from Jane. Phoenix Rising.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Boy, taking a day off from GMHHAY for a three-day GMHHAY weekend break was the right move. I feel so refreshed. I have so much to tell you! It is a lovely Monday morning, and, man, when is the last time I said that? I probably shouldn’t dwell too much on the ramifications of this rechargedness, because I profoundly love GMHHAY and believe to my core that it helps with my mental stability, so I probably shouldn’t be getting any cockamamie ideas about doing it less or anything.
I am sitting here this morning filling orders — sold a book and four CDs this weekend. If those were CDs of my music, that would sound like a proper artistic career, but nope, they are just Discogs sales of used CDs. Since I started this project six years ago, I have sold about 1,300 CDs, and I have 819 left to sell. This is like a superfund site of the Kon Marie method here, responsibly disposing of my excess possessions, thanking each one for its service, sending each one to a good new home. Today I sold The Cure’s Faith, Leonard Cohen’s The Future, The Sundays’ Blind and Ladytron’s Gravity the Seducer. That is a good batch of albums right there. That guy in Charlottesville is going to be happy.
Speaking of book sales, got my Agency royalty check and it was eight hundred whole dollars, which means that at this point, Trek is officially outselling Agency as my best-selling book. Well, technically, this quarter, of course, GMHHAY is my best-selling book since, well, know, hot new title. I’m a little confused because my Agency royalty notification didn’t come with a sales breakdown and doesn’t match what I can see in Author Central, where it says I have sold a lot more, but whatever. At this rate, if I wrote ten more books I could eke out a minimum-wage life. That is not nothing! I might be able to do that before I die, and then a life’s goal will be achieved. That would be kind of amazing.
Last night Emma had to go over to Grammy’s for a while after dinner so I was watching Jane solo at a non-normal time of the day. So I tried to distract her from Emma’s absence with a fortune cookie. She used to love them pre-pandemic when we went out to Chinese restaurants, but since the pandemic when we get delivery she has shunned them. But with some cajoling I convinced her to try one and… the very first fortune cookie she got had no fortune in it! WTF!
Then she caught me sending a note to myself in the app Captio, the greatst app in the world. Captio is an app I use that sits on the home screen of my phone and all it does is let you send notes to yourself. As in, you open the app, it’s a blank screen in which to type, and it has one button: “send.” It is so much faster than actually composing an email to yourself or starting a note in Evernote or Apple Notes or whatever. It is great. Can’t reccommend it enough. Anyway, Jane loves the app, and since we were now in unstructured time, I figured I’d distract her with it while I cleaned the kitchen. So, without further ado, here are all the notes Jane emailed to me while I was cleaning the kitchen and getting her ready for bedtime:
I have a little kitty!
I’m so happy, Daddy!
I love you. ❤️
Hi Daddy
Oh hi kitty & brown bear!
Kitty is sitting on brown bear’s lap!
Look at those two dollhouses!
I was working on one of my dollhouses!
It’s good to see ya!
It’s 6:21!
What are you doing?
You are watching the video!
Rubinstein exciting incentive buying Higgins administrators evening:
Isn’t that a nice little note? That last one was a little confusing. Jane is great. She had some friends over this weekend. Well, we had some friends over, and those friends just happen to have two kids, aged 5 and 7 (ish?) I think it’s Jane’s first time playing with two siblings, who, of course, have played together quite intently through the pandemic, so they had their own little codes and ways and stuff. And Jane was the young one, usually the kids are closer to her age. So at one point she got a little overwhelmed and had to go take a break in the house. But she didn’t have a fit or anything she just went and took a break, and then later she came back out and they all kept playing. It went very well. It is always a huge relief to see her essentially being a normal kid with other kids, given, you know, nearly two full years of isolation. It was also lovely to see the adults, our only friends when we first moved down here, and we hadn’t seen them all since the pandemic started. So it was lovely to catch up. I won’t go around posting pictures of other people’s kids on the internet, but there is a very cute photo of the three of them hugging.
I got a bunch of gardening infrastructure stuff done. Well, I got one big thing done, which is that I am done filling all the birdies beds with soil! Done! Done! Done! All seven beds! I hauled eighteen loads of dirt on Friday it was so exhausting. Fun fact: I am out of shape! I mean, diet going well and all, but still. God. Eighteen loads. That took a lot out of me. One good thing I noticed though is I was mostly fully recovered by the next day. Earlier in the season it would take two full days for me to recover. And my back? Not that bad! No long-term ill effects. That is nice. Anyway, here is a video of the whole endeavor, along with an update on my seedlings, which are doing very well, which is very nice, since I did not waste an exhorbitant amount of energy and money keeping the whole garage heated for them this year:
After that I attached the new vice to the new workbench, finally. The thing came with an actually physically deformed bolt, and also all four bolts were too short to go through a 3/4 inch workbench top, which I feel is, like, minimum for a workbench top? What did they think you were going to be bolting a 30-pound vice to? So I had to go to to the hardware store to buy more bolts, which was like $20, and the whole vice was like $50 so, yeah, I guess I can see why they shafted me (pun intended) on bolts.
That was my third of four trips to the hardware store this weekend. I went first thing Friday morning to buy a long PVC pipe for next weekend’s project, and I also bought some utility knives and stuff. Only I left the bag at checkout. It was like $50 worth of stuff, so I decided I wanted it back. I called them they said come on by and get the stuff again, so that was trip number two. I brought Jane on the one, it was like a 10-mile trip each way, in the evening friday. She loved it. Figured since she’s gonna be getting in the car for, oh, twelve hours when we go to Boston she should have a little practice. Also I am slowly teaching Jane all of the parts of a car and she loves it so much. She is very into tachometers right now and windows. And mirror controls. Anyway, then the trip for the bolts was number three and then Sunday morning Jane and I went again to pick up one of those cases where you organize screws and stuff.
Because I have started installing my drip irrigation! I didn’t get very far at all, but I started, and that was impressive because the drip is next weekend’s project. But I got everything sorted and organized and got a line run from the spigot to the first raised bed. Not that far, but a start! I am excited. Drip irrigation is going to improve my life so much. Plus it will keep my plants from dying when we’re in Boston.
I think that’s about it for weekend activities? Anyway, lovely weekend.
Now onto something more depressing. I watched Phoenix Rising the two-part series on HBO Now about Evan Rachel Wood, the abuse she suffered at the hand of Marilyn Manson, and her activist work getting the statute of limitatations on domestic abuse extended in the state of California and nationwide. It was pretty harrowing. I have known about this situation for a very long time — I first wrote about it in GMHHAY back in year one. But even then, there was stuff that shocked and apalled me. I felt it was my duty to watch this since “back in the day” Manson was a sort-of client of Barbarian, we did some work for him, anyway, I don’t think he ever paid, surprise surprise. It was before he met Evan, in his Dida Von Teese days, and he was out of my life before Manson and Evan ever met. We were never friends, I only met him once or twice, though completely separately I was also hanging with Twiggy Ramierez for a while in the 90’s and he has his own history of rape accusations. I’m well past the phase where I say something like “I had no idea” or “who could have ever imagined” or something like that. I’ve known for a long time to pay attention to your intuition about potential male friends, and I’ve learned long ago that the dudes who “aren’t that bad” my well actually be that bad. Watching something like this is part of a penance. A small part.
On top of everything, and not to trivilize this very real harm he’s caused, I’m so angry at Manson for, like, living up to the world’s sterotypes. He had done major work in the realm of normalizing alternative and goth dress, fashion, style, getting people to understand that it didn’t necessarily mean someone was a satanist or something but whoops, yes, turned out the standard barer was, like, actually the devil. Every goth in America potentially suffers for his sins in small ways.
Anyway, Evan is amazing, but we already knew that, and I’m very excited for Westworld season 4. So many people are pissed that Westworld has left Westworld but I liked season 3 better, I liked Westworld leaving Westworld I hate it when shows trap themselves. I’m thinking of Severance, which is amazing and has been picked up for a second season, but, god, I hope it expands and moves on and it’s not just more of the same. It’s always risky, but that’s what makes it exciting. Tony Soprano should have gone international. Tony Soprano doing deals with the Yakuza at a steakhouse. Give it to me.
Thank you to those who supported the 1k Ukraine project. I would also just like to point out that you don’t need to donate $1k. If you can afford less, do it, and the project volunteers will combine up your donation with others to get a total of $1k to a family. Please consider helping if you can.
Okay I think we’re about done here. Her’s a mix for you, mix of old and new, but man, it starts off strong with four old amazing guitar tracks that are just gonna rock your Monday world, I tell you.
Talk tomorrow!