Good morning. Hello. How are you? #675
Elliot Smith and his mural, Terfs named Jo and their films, oral fixations, liquidity issues. That was a pun.
Good morning, friend. How is your fine Thursday? Mine is good. It is not the last day of the week though, I have to work all five days this week, like a farmer or something. I am annoyed about it. Five day workweeks are BS.
I’m giving Elliot Smith’s Figure 8 a re-listen. It has been… god, I can’t recall actively listening to this album since Elliot died. For some people, Elliot became a legend when he passed away, an idol. I basically just forgot about him.
I do have an old polaroid of the Figure 8 cover mural in LA, though, with some girls in front of it. I barely knew the girls. I was visiting LA and all my friends had to work for the day, so they foisted me off on these two girls I didn’t know and we went siteseeing. They took me to the Getty and the Elliot Smith mural. I mean, that is a pretty good LA trip right there. Oh look. My filing technique is unstoppable. I found the photo. So that’s good news. But my memory is not. The photo does not have the two girls in it. They are in other photos from that day, but not the one with the Elliot Smith mural. But, then, that’s also good news. It means I can post it here for you. Can’t go posting photos of random strangers from 20 years ago.
Man that Polaroid 689 Pro Vivid. That shit was so good.
There’s a house in our neighborhood for sale. Or there was. It sold in six days. For $880,000, which is $80k under the Zestimate, so, know, cleverly priced for this slightly-softening market. On the other hand, it was two hundred and eighty thousand dollars more than it sold for just five years ago. That is bonkers. But I guess pretty normal these days. It’s a nice house, all the houses in the hood are. One of the top three in “curb appeal” as one of our neighbors calls it. Looks just gorgeous from the road. Definitely prettier than ours from the road. Big lot, but the lot is all unusable woods, which is definitely nice, but there is no back yard at all. Still though, nice place. It’s all the way on the other end of the neighborhood. At the very end of our half-mile street, on the cul-de-sac.
Cul de sacs are nice for kids. I hope whoever bought it has kids. That’d be nice. There are a few kids Jane’s age or close in the hood, but a bunch more have moved away in the last few years, and it is sad. Also a thing I noticed these days is there can be a bunch of kids the same age in a neighborhood and they don’t all go to the same school, their lives barely overlap. It’s very different than when I was a kid where, like, 99 of the 100 kids went to Joy Elementary and one kid might have gone to Monroe, the catholic school. There are even families where both kids go to different schools. It is very odd. Kinda sad. Is it like that in your neighborhood? I suspect there are demographics at play — certain geographies, income categories, housing densities and whatnot. Still, though. We moved here planning to put our child into public schools and, like, her neighbors won’t be in the same school, mostly.
Hrm don’t have any new topics in my notepad. I had such a backlog on Monday morning that the little subprocess in my brain that operates in the background writing funny little thoughts down onto the notepad for future GMHHAY production seems to have crashed. I will restart it in the mental activity monitor. Luckily there are some old ones that I never got to, so we’ll just clear all those out and get a nice, fresh start.
Facebook has started doing this thing whenever I go to post where they’re like “hey! double-check which group you’re posting to!” And then they put a modal dialog up with all my friends groups encouraging me to double-check them. Which I think is probably decently handy the first time but they’ve been doing it for three days now, and I am very happy with my “all friends minus acquaintances” group setting for GMHHAY posts. Hopefully this stops soon.
Back before we left for Boston we watched Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Dumbledore. We watched a pirated version, before it was on the streaming services, because I wanted to make extra sure Jo Rowling, that TERF, did not get a penny of my money. I regret to say that the film was (mostly) very good, they have (mostly) righted the ship from the abyssmal previous film, proceeded at a brisk pace, and did not have a bunch of dumb side plots or stupid little plot elements placed there to just sit there for three films so they could come back later. This is a tactic Jo uses in her writing with much success that just does not work the same way in film, but she, being a control-freak billionaire with so much power they had to indulge her and let her write and produce the last film, went ahead and tried it anyway and it just made for a muddled mess. I imagine her and David Heyman had some long talks before they started this one. It pleases me to no end that this film has by far the lowest box office haul of any “Wizarding World” film (n.b. they are “Harry Potter films,” not “Wizarding World” films and they always will be). I suppose that is mostly because of Covid but also I’d like to think that people are over Harry Potter. Which is sad, because there was a lot to like. But Jo ruined it. She absolutely ruined it. Maybe when she dies if she wills the right of the films to GLAAD or something I don’t know.
I am still not consuming nicotine, I am still eating these Ice Breakers mints with abandon and god, I wish I would stop. I wish I did not have such an insane oral fixation. I wish therapists had some weird tool that was a mix between pensieves and remembralls and could look back in time at your entire childhood and say “oh, you have an oral fixation because of this.” Like.. I was more of a formula baby than most, but not completely, maybe that had something to do with it? Maybe it was pacifier related? I don’t know, man, but it is such a profound, primal thing I can barely stop. I’ll be on a zoom call with someone businessperson I never met and I’ll be waiting for them to look at their email or away from the camera so I can sneak a mint. I like to think I’ve gotten very good at it, but of course I haven’t. They see it. It looks weird. No one drinks on Zoom calls either. Like go to an American office and everyone has a beverage at their desk. But on Zoom? Everyone pretends they don’t need fluids, it is really weird. But not me. I drink my Zevias on Zooms. I am blazing a trail here.
Of course, I drink more fluids than most. Which is to say I drink the amount all the experts say you’re supposed to. And no one else does that. Three point seven liters of water a day for men. That’s what they say. Does anyone drink their recommended daily fluid intake but me? Nah. And I am a middle-aged man. Do you know how much I have to pee because of all that water? My dad, as his PSP progressed and he lost his mobility, one of the side effects was that he stopped drinking fluids, because he was sick of how much he had to pee, and it bothered him so much to walk to the bathroom. So his skin dried out. It wasn’t, like, life threatening or anything – which, lol, whatever, he was terminal anyway I guess, but he sure was flaky. But it did make me promise to make sure I always drank enough fluids, even if it meant I had to pee all the time. And, god. There are times I go pee, walk out of the bathroom, and think “I should go pee.” I have to pee like three times before bed and immediately as I wake up, so that I don’t have to pee in the middle of the night. But, then, I am blessed I can actually sleep through the night without peeing. I know many people don’t have that luxury.
Lol Yeah. There was a reason these notes hadn’t made the cut to GMHHAY material I guess. Apologies. Not my finest hour, this GMHHAY, I give it a 5.5 out of ten. I will put extra effort into tomorrow.
Today’s mix is a metal mix because that’s what was closest to being done. Discovered this great band yesterday, Këkht Aräkh, just signed to Sacred Bones. Ukranian one-man death metal band, it’s awesome it sounds like someone made death metal on a Tascam Portastudio I love the demo quality of it you don’t hear a lot of lo-fi death metal. Very into this older band I recently discovered called Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs because that is a great name. Wayferer I discovered from KEXP, which is not known for its metal delivery.
Talk to you cool cats tomorrow!