Good morning. Hello. How are you? #639
A perhaps-too-death-fixated, slightly morose but more-or-less normal edition, a return to form, if you will.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good. Back to our regularly scheduled programming, I guess. World is falling apart, that utter snake JD Vance won his primary, and boy I sure could use a piece of good news in the world. Maybe a set of reclusive monks, perhaps the same ones who took Leonard Cohen in for a decade or so, convince Elon to stop his antics and focus on fixing his joke of a solar company. Maybe he can get something of use out of all that grovelling to China. Solar roofs still impossible to get, about five years after he promised they’ve be widely available, the price doubled, just a complete shitshow.
A reminder that because I am not talking about a thing today does not mean that I am not seething in anger about the thing. I am still seething in anger, believe you me.
Anyway.
Topic roundup.
My Google alert on Sydney West, our missing former babysitter, yielded an interesting story about a man in Sydney who murdered a gay American in 1988 by picking him up in a gay bar, taking him to a known gay rendezvous point, which happened to be cliffside, and then pushing the man off the cliff. It was initially ruled a suicide. His wife turned him in in 2019. Maybe she was an ex-wife. Yes, sorry, ex-wife. Anyway, the victim had three sibling—two sisters and a brother— and they have all come to Sydney to witness the trial and, I hope, find closure. The man got eight years in prison. Interestingly, the judge decided to use the much-more-lenient 1988 sentancing guidelines than the current ones, where he would have gotten a much more harsh sentence. And she couldn’t find enough evidence to definitively say it was a hate crime, which, okay sure, his ex-wife said that he “bragged about beating gay men and had said the only good gay man was a dead gay man.” But I do find it interesting that in Australia they use the earlier, more lienient sentencing guidelines. Can you imagine a judge doing that in America? Even in this era where a ton of people want less imprisonment, that judge would get run out on a rail so fast.
Another interesting story this week (today’s episiode is like that C&C Music Factory song “Things that Make you go Hmm”): A gaming industry association is trying to redeem itself and reorganize after a history of not ignoring claims of sexual misconduct within its ranks. The Independent Game Developers Association has a new interim director, has revised its code of conduct, and established an ethics review committee. Seems on the mend. What was interesting to me, though, was that the reporter did an interview with the new interim director in a hotel room. The interview was conducted “a hotel suite with a bed 5 feet from the interview spot, rather than at the nearby Game Developers Conference convention center,” which is a bad thing. This is so interesting to me. Like… the reporter specifically says it’s a suite? So if you have a suite, why would you do the interview in the room of the suite with the bed, and not the room of the suite without the bed? I used to have to do meetings with rich and famous and reclusive people in hotel rooms all the time and, invariably, they got suites, and I don’t think I ever saw a bed once. I mean, I am a man, etc., I’m not saying it’s not a problem, I’m saying what’s with this weird amateur move of getting the suite but then not using it properly for interviews? Very curious. Anyway, hadn’t ever explicitly thought about this but it seems a good rule of thumb: If you’re gonna do interviews in hotel rooms, make it a suite, and no beds in the room.
But then! Another weird line from the same article: “During an audio summit talk at GDC 2022, Vox Point casting director Khris Brown touched on the practice of companies using hotel rooms for meetings and auditions: ‘If there’s a bed in the same building that an audition takes place, it risks sending an immature message at best and a creepy one at worst.’”
“If there’s a bed in the same building?” [emphasis added.] That has to be a mis-speak, right? That is lunacy! Aren’t, like, 90% of all conference centers in hotels? I am very confused.
It occurred to me yesterday that these great footnotes that work splendiferously in substack don’t copy and paste very well to Facebook. So, like, I might end an issue of GMHHAY on a ringing high note, and then it’ll appear as if there’s, like, three rambling, disconnected paragraphs at the bottom. So, that’s just great. Dear Facebook readers: They were footnotes. You are missing out. Subscribe to substack.
Speaking of footnotes, this book I’m reading, Origin: A Genetic History of America by Jennifer Raff is a rare book that has footnotes and endnotes and I am here for it. I did this in the fifth anniversary edition of my Economics of Star Trek (buy a copy today!). I’m a sucker for it. It is very hard to do this on the Kindle, but it’s possible. The endnotes go to the end of the chapter (in her case) or book (in mine), and the footnotes get clicked on and they pop up in the kind reader app right where you’re reading. I did this in the Trek book, and Jennifer Raff did it in Origin with the paradigm that citations get end notes and interjections get footnotes. It’s a good system. But then! In Chapter 5, she throws all this out and starts using the footnotes for interjections, and then halfway through the chapter, she switches back to using endnotes for the interjections and it is all VERY CONFUSING.
Gotta stick to your system, man.
Apologies to the hundred or so new subscribers I’ve gotten in the last week thanks to the new recommendation system at Substack, and them signing up and thinking they’re gonna get a weird email about nothign and then they get 2,000 words about Roe v Wade. Well, no, no apologies. It happens sometime. The old readers had to get one of those about app tracking attribution and another one about crypto, you were lucky.
(oh speaking of which I am thinking of charging a dollar or something to access the back issues of GMHHAY to keep em from spammers and search bots. Any objections? If you care let me know and I’d just give em to you, dear human friend, for free.)
Thank you to Meghan who pointed out this contraindication between one of my four allergy medicastions, Azelastine, and alchohol. For the last two nights I have imbibed in an alcoholic beverage for reasons of apocolyptic political situation tolerance. I have also woken up feeling much much better than normal because both nights I elected to forgo the Azelastine and rely on my other three allergy medications. Not to say I don’t still have a light hangover but I am 90% sure that these hangovers are much, much more mild than I have been used to of late, and thus 90% sure that all this “my hangovers are getting so much worse because I am old/I don’t drink a much/my tolerance is going down” lines of thinking were total bunk and it was, in fact, the Azelastine. This is kind of stunning to me. This has been going on, for, like, a decade. What if I have a second wind on my tolerance? Look out world, drunk Rick is back. I KID. Probably.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the mental impact of the political situation when you die. I was thinking a lot about this during the Trump administration of course, and during the pandemic. And that my life doesn’t feel infinite anymore. When I was a kid, I would read all these utopian sci fi authors, Arthur C Clarke and Asimov and such, and I would just assume the world was always going to get better. That we all knew it was on the road to improvement and by the time I was old things would be so much better. Of course this is a gross misinterpretation of the role of sci-fi in our lifes, which is there, in these cases, to inspire less so to predict. But also when it does predict, it is predicting on the time horizon of centuries, because this shit takes time. This was a fairly devestating realization of mine in the early Trump years. In hindsight it’s shocking how long it took me to realize this, and it’s shocking how many setbacks, how much pain and misery I had to witness before it clicked that yes, things are always getting better in the long term, but in the short term, things can get worse, and our lives exist in the short term. It can be true that things are always getting better, I still believe that, academically, but it can also be true that it doesn’t make any difference at all, because in the short term you’re living in a setback period, and your whole life might be in that setback period.
And of course the periods change. And we, being human, die. And there’s no real correlation between the two. You could live your whole life in a period of things getting better, and then six months before you die, the state of the world could get much, much worse. So bad you question whether it’ll ever be good again. So bad you might start to think that the good period you lived through was a lie, or a blip. How will that impact your final days I wonder.
I know it’s all luck, and in a way its meaningless, but I want to die with the world appearing to be getting better. I want to die with the climate finally under control, with fascism on retreat, with income inequality tamed, which human rights ascendant.
But it’ll all be luck, and I need to mentally prepare myself that that might not be the case.
Samuel Alito is 72 years old. It is, of course, insanity that we let any 72 year-olds make long-term decisions about the fate of humanity, but we certainly seem to keep doing that. Do you think he’s thinking now “wow, yeah, I sure got America on the right track now. My entire adult life America was going to hell in a handbasket with all this right-to-privacy nonsense. I’m glad I fixed that. I can die happy.”
Janet told Emma yesterday that when she was in college in Massachusetts, in the early 1970’s, when her friends got pregnant, you went to New York to take care of it. That’s just whast you did. Because abortion was illegal in puritanical Massachusetts (I wonder how long Mass will stand as a bastian of liberalism don’t you get the sense that it’s trying real hard to return to the puritanical mean?). And then she lived the next almost 50 years under Roe V Wade. And now it’s gone. What a peculiar sensation that must be. Like I understand those of us who have always lived under it, and the fear and confusion we will feel losing it. But think, too, of the people who remember. Who thought we had fixed this. And now see that we haven’t. That’s a strange one for me.
A squirrel got stuck in one of my hoop houses built over a Birdies Bed, covered in netting. I didn’t clamp the edges tight enough. I hadn’t thought those bastards would be so brazen, I thought the mere illusion of security would be enough, I didn’t know they were actually going to methodically test the perimeter. Emma found the squirrel trapped in the bed, unable to get out. She battened down the hatches. I have to go survey the damage to the cucumbers and beats, and then soon I am going to add, like, 10 more clamps to every bed. This assault on our vegetables will not stand.
Moody and quiet one for you today. My new “automatically play music in the morning” system worked great this morning and played A Storm in Heaven by Verve and it was freakin awesome I love that record so much even though it reminds me of one of the worst nights in my life, which took place in 1993 in St. Louis. There was a lot of music I couldn’t listen to for a long time because of that night. But time and years and tears and apologies have mended it and damn, A Storm in Heaven is such a good record. Bunch of new stuff on here, the new Girlpool is great, listened to it thrice yesterday. Really enjoying Julie Doiron more and more these days she has a real solid work ethic I deeply admire. And the new tunes on the 25th anniversary edition of I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One are great. That’s how I discovered Yo La Tengo, actually. I was late to the party. They opened up for Sonic Youth on the (vastly) underrasted A Thousand Leaves tour and me and Jill and Jon and Kris went to Providence to see that tour because Kris knew Sonic Youth’s sound guy and got us on the list and it was just awesome. I knew about Yo La Tengo already because Nick used to sing “Julie Christie” around the house years earlier but I’d never seen them.
Two other things stick out from that day: There was a man behind me with a toddler girl, about Jane’s age, and she was on his shoulders and she was bored and he said “You know how you love Britney Spears?” And she said “yes.” And he said “This is like Daddy’s Britney Spears” and she said “ohhh, okay.” And man, I wanted a kid before that, but witnessing that exhange kicked it into overdrive and when I finally got to live it myself at a Spinanes outdoor show just before the pandemic, well, yeah, I shed a tear.
Also, after the show, we went and found a bar and it was just the greatest, most divey old man dive bar. And Jon said “oh yeah. I know this bar.” And like an idiot I was like “what? You’ve been here before?” And he just sort of rolled his eyes at me and I got it and I thought wow Jon is so cool. Miss that guy.
Until tomorrow.
Regarding the age of Alito, various Senators, the President, etc. . . . Randolph Bourne: "Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same. Youth is the drastic antiseptic. It will not let the elders cry peace, where there is no peace."