Good morning. Hello. How are you? #660
The drive home, the trick of admitting you want to do something unethical, a bit of Elon grumbling, unexepected Ezra Klein grumbling, the comforts of home, overgrown gardens, and ex libris cards
Good morning! Happy Wednesday. Is it Wednesday? I think so. I am a bit dazed still. I drove all night, as that awesome song by Roy Orbison, expertly covered by Cyndi Lauper sang. Cyndi Lauper. There’s an American icon. Real biopic material there. I eagerly await.
I am writing this on my iPhone, while sitting at my desk, because when I got down to my office this morning, both my computer and phone were nagging me to update their OS, so I did. The phone updates much, much faster than the computer, which tells me it has six minutes remaining. Still.
We left Boston Monday night. Seven PM. We had one last park hang and saw Ashley, Ivelisse, Abby, Sean, Jussi, Nick, Meghan, Henry, Jared, Abigail and Trav and said our goodbyes. Abigail and Trav were a special treat, as I wasn’t sure I was gonna be able to see them on this trip. Meghan noticed from her Timehop that a bunch of us had been in that exact park that day seven years earlier, doing the same thing, when Henry was just three. Playground hangs to see friends. So adult.
We went back to the Airbnb one last time, I packed the car while Emma prepped Jane for “bedtime,” and away we went, exactly on time.
Drive was (mostly) uneventful, it didnt rain this time thank god. Emma did the first nine hours or so, till just after DC, while I tried to sleep and mostly failed but got three hours or so. Then I drove from just before Richmond on home, about three hours through the overnight and watched the sun rise. It was easy in Virginia, when they had mileposts every zero-point-two miles, so I could do a little counting game. Those went away when I hit North Carolina, which only have mile posts every zero-point-five miles, which is not nearly as fun. This is going to be my platform if I ever run for state office: more mile markers per mile on our highways.
I love America’s Interstate system so much. Emma and I both love night driving. We both feel bad for all the truck drivers, since there’s never enough space for them to park and get sleep at night. It feels deeply strange that America relies on Interstate transport so much but feels no particular obligation to give these people a place to sleep or even to park. Being a truck driver has to be the worst job in America. Just insane. But of course, driving at night means that most truckers are asleep, the roads are so much emptier. It is two hours less drive time to get between Chapel Hill and Boston overnight than during the day. You miss rush hour in NYC and DC along with some minor cities, and my god, DC’s rush hour is just the worst, says naive east-Coast guy. I also suspect east-coast-west-coast exacerbates the “where do truckers sleep” issue. Out west they have so many more truck stops. On the east coast? They just cram into every rest stop they can. All signs designating cars to the left and trucks to the right, at rest stops, go out the window when it comes to the deep night.
(Okay I am back on my computer now, the update is done, it only took fifteen minutes or so, not bad Apple, and thank you for remembering where my monitors were this time).
I suffered a road rage incident just before Durham. Okay, if I am being honest, I perpetuated one. Or maybe not a full-blown incident, but a near-incident. I had my sweet adaptive cruise control turned on. Not some modern fancy Autopilot or BlueCruise or anything, just the run-of-the-mill “cruise control that slows down when a car’s in front of you” that I just learned how to use because it’s in Emma’s fancy Mazda but not my 2010 Mazda 3. And I was in the left lane, passing slower trucks, but then a truck got in the left lane to pass another truck, which, you know, “no trucks left lane” is really a guideline not a law. But whatever, he was moving at a decent clip, my cruise control adjusted, and I was going to just follow him along until he moved back to the right. But cruise control is, you know, a safe-driver, so it likes to leave a bit of space between you and the car in front of you.
And this asshole comes zooming up behind me, gets right on my ass, like just a couple feet, as if I’m the holdup here in the left lane, not the giant truck in front of me, and then zooms around me, because he has decided that the safe gap between me and the truck that my cruise control has left is just enough room for him to butt in.
This really got my goat, and I decided to floor it, and close the gap to piss him off, which I’m sure it did, since, you know, he was going for that gap. But he just cut me off just the same, and moved into the now-even-smaller gap anyway. And then I flipped him off. Which he probably didn’t see, because assholes like that don’t look back. But who knows.
All of this was dumb, Emma was like “we can’t do road rage anymore, people will shoot you,” which is one-hundred percent tru and there have been multiple road-rage shootings by our house in the last couple years. It was dumb.
But at the time, I was 100% convinced it was the right thing to do.
But I was wrong.
Here is a thing: people spend extraordinary amounts of effort making up BS arguments to justify things they want to do anyway, and it is a super power to not do that.
Emma correctly informed me that my road rage was wrong, and I knew it was wrong and I managed to not make up a bunch of BS arguments why it was right. I just said nothing. Now, saying nothing is maybe not the best marital communications strategy, but it is almost always better than making shit up.
Making shit up like Ezra Klein making up an entire BS article about how it’s okay to have kids when the planet is going to shit. Spoiler alert: It’s not. We do it anyway. because we are selfish. That’s it. You don’t need to make a bunch of excuses. Just admit we’re imperfect.
Making shit up like increasingly-elaborate charades about bots when you just don’t want to buy Twitter anymore because you struck a bad deal, it’s overpriced, and you can’t afford it. Do you know what would make the world’s richest man seem somewhat human? To admit you overspent and can’t afford something. Do you know what makes the world’s richest man a sociopath? To keep insisting that black is white when everyone knows you’re bullshitting. Yes, the bullshitting might, in the end, get you out of the hole entirely of your own making, but so would saying “I regret this I don’t want to pay this much money anymore, I made a mistake, let’s talk.”
Elon’s self-made Twitter debacle is going a long way towards potentially being the inflection moment where people are officially sick of his shit, but I suspect it won’t be enough. One thing that might do it though — and it is admittedly a little thing — is this stupid-ass restaurant drive-through/drive-in movie theater that he’s building in LA. It is so dumb. I mean, it is kind of fine in that 1980’s “this is a new entertainment experience” kind of way. We had this place in Fairbanks called The Center of Entertainment and it was so rad it had a skating rink and arcade and movie theater and it was so much fun for, like… I don’t know. A year? I mean, we lived in the middle of nowhere, in the Arctic, and after a year, maybe two, we all decided The Center was boring and stopped going. It is a closed Sears now. And this was in Fairbanks. I am willing to do one of those long-term bets with Rex or Harry or someone that I always do and usually lose and predict that Elon’s dumb restaurant will fail. It will fail because a lot of people are sick of Elon’s shit, and most of his online trolls live in crypts and online and don’t have enough friends to go to Elon’s restaurant, and those that do will rapidly learn that the place is deeply uncool. Of course, I could be wrong about this, the world still has Planet Hollywood and Margaritavilles but I submit to you that Jimmy Buffett is profoundly more cool than Elon Musk at this point.
Anyway, getting home was so great. The kitties were happy to see us, and the house smelled so good. Like clean and not moldy and that fresh country air and familiar and it was just so lovely. I mean, Jane was a nightmare, but eventually I got her to go to back to sleep. She slept most of the drive, but it was bad sleep, I guess, and once I could convince her to go back to sleep (which took forever, because she’s four and does not know what it means to be travel exhausted and know that she needs more sleep), she slept another four hours. So did Emma. While they slept I unpacked and tackled the absurd mountain of records that arrived while I was gone (excellent GMHHAY photo fodder man I have so many great new photos now). Got my computer put back together. Did my Quicken expenses for the last few weeks (man, that was exciting, let me tell you). Turned my Discogs store back on, sold two CDs this morning.
My garden is insane. I will give you a full report tomorrow, I was too tired to do much other than look at it for a couple seconds, but the tomatoes are a jungle, the corn is like four feet tall, the cucumbers completely took over their space and are a solid volume of vines, and there are four foot weeds everywhere. I am going to spend the entire day working on this garden today. We left one night early, and I took the “next day” after our trip off, which means I’m off today and tomorrow.
I received an email that the Bikini Kill show at Cat’s Cradle scheduled for June has been cancelled. “Multiple members of the band have COVID,” the email said. This is sad, but at this point, this show has been rescheduled multiple times across three years — it was originally scheduled for 2020. I wonder if Bikini Kill is even a band anymore, if the reuinion is just done, the band members want to get on with the lives they had when they planned in 2019 to do one quick tour.
And a final thing: at the Mike Gill memorial, Jess gave me a couple books from Mike’s collection that she thought I would like. And she was right, I’m psyched about them. I made little cards for them, like ex libris cards, or like the inserts I get regarding provenance sometimes when I buy a rare book, that explains where the book came from, what it means to me. I didn’t stick it on a page or anything, just inserted it. It is nice.
But it got me thinking: do any of you do ex libris labels? Is this a thing? Is it annoying? Bad? Good? Have there been changes in the trends of ex libris labels since the last time I thought about this twenty years ago? I am idly considering this as something I should/could do but… It feels imperfect. I personally love it when I buy a rare book with an ex libris label, but also, they tend to reduce resale value, right? If anyone has thought long and hard about this, I would love your insights.
How ‘bout a Noise and Metal mix for today? Feels like just the thing with which to really settle into the bucolic countryside and head into a day of gardening. Also pairs well with the Rachels Music for Egon Sheile that I am listening to at this very moment.
Man I miss my friends and I’m sure I’ll be surfing the Zillow listings within a week, but it is so, so nice to be in my home again. Still not quite back on the wagon, though. It is 8:50! I usually finish this by 8. No map games for me today. I played them yesterday morning on no sleep and it was a comedy of errors but I got through it. Okay I am rambling byeeeee!
After reading your comments about truckers and parking, I remembered reading this a few days ago. Not sure if you saw it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/04/business/truck-driver-shortage-support.html