Good morning. Hello. How are you? #694
Weekend doings, bunch of music stuff, gardening, Patrick Radden Keefe and the Sacklers.
Good morning! Hello. Happy Monday. How are you? Apologies for not putting a number on last Friday’s post. I have gone back and added one. My mind seems to be going. I’ve left burners on, like, three times in the last week. And now I’ve forgotten to number a GMHHAY post. Crap. Actually my body and mind seem to be going. I’ve also been low-level nauseus for, like, a week or two, which is pretty unpleasant. I think it is probably this increased dose on the Wegovy, so my doctor and I decided I should go back down a level in strength after this box. Hopefully that’ll work. Also my head still feels like it’s constantly sunburned. Also I’ve been really tired for, like, two weeks now, what is up with that? Just constantly needing a nap, never waking up feeling awake. It is all sort of disconcerting. But, you know, I’m pretty sure now that I have disclosed all of this to you, faithful readers, it’ll all disappear, like that stiff leg and whatnot. Warts and grandmas, warts and grandmas.
I would like to start off by congratulating my friend of 30+ years on getting married to her partner of 10+, god maybe 20+ years, I have no sense of time. Congratulations Annie and Bill!
Woah nelly it is August that is nuts. So I guess, like, no business is gonna happen now for a month? That is the conventional wisdom and it… seems to have some basis in reality? People freakin’ love August vacations. I never got why. It’s too hot in August to go on vacation. May as well stay at work.
Westworld is great this season. Seems ironic now that most people have forgotten about it, it’s having its best season ever. If anything, it’s gonna be too short. We finished The Bear, thank god, that show took too much out of me, stressed me out too much. Also I have many, many questions about the logistics of the big thing at the end. It makes no sense at all, in the immortal words of Xymox, to whom we’ve been listening this weekend. Specifically Twist of Shadows, what a great record. First head that album at the Jay Jacobs in the Bentley Mall when Renée and LaRone worked there. Nineteen eighty-nine.
Oh that reminds me my copy of the 1984 soundtrack by the Eurythmics also came in this weekend and I listened to that record for the first time in, oh, thirty years. It is great. Maybe the Eurythmics best record. Just wanted to close that loop for you from that passing mention of the 1984 soundtrack in GMHHAY like two weeks ago. I followed through. I followed through.
You’ll all be happy to know I found a copy of the The Cure’s 30th anniversary Wish edition, thank you to Conrad, John and Michael who pointed me to various places where one could procure this album. I ended up buying it from a random UK retailer I found on a Cure fan Twitter account that was Tweeting out retailers with whom you could still pre-order. It felt very much like when I was trying to buy a PS5. I’d read a tweet, go to a retailer, and it would be sold out by then. But eventually I found one. Never heard of the place from whence I purchased this album. We will see if it ever arrives.
Anyway, a lovely weekend was had. It was too short, but I got everything done. Mostly ran around like a madman. Saturday was gardening. I have mostly defeated the squirrels — oh that reminds me one of my fake snakes is in the middle of the yard I gotta go get that. Harvested a bunch of tomatoes. Harvested a bunch of peppers, shallots, beans, radishes, cucumbers. Planted more radishes. Planted the first butterfly bed. Oh good news to all of you concerned about milkweek varietals — seventeen different viarieties of milkweed are native to North Carolina, including all the major ones and all the ones I had already purchased, so we’re good there. I wore my new Farmers’ Defense gardening sleeves and they were great, but a little too small, so I got the next size up en route. They were shockingly not hot, to wear these sleeves over your arms in 95° weather. That was a pleasant surprise.
It’s the insane heat of summer but all in all, our garden is doing great! Things aren’t too wilted, I can’t convey to you how excellently the drip irrigation works, it really is a miracle. Doesn’t make a dent in our water bill, either, which is pretty spectacular. The Japanese Beetles are gone, the squirrles seem to have given up, the Septoria on the tomatoes is gone. Really, all things are doing great. I planted more radishes, and re-planted the corn because I learned from an online gentleman named “The Garden Gnome” that you should only plant a single variety of corn in a batch, because you don’t want cross pollination. So I fixed that. Normally summer is a time when your garden just sort of poops out, is sad and brown and droopy. But mine is just swell, just swell.
Then I shredded a bunch of cardboard for mulch and then turned my efforts to making a gargantuan amount of chili powder from the ten pounds of thai peppers that are sitting in the bottom of my chest freezer, over a year old and freezer burnt. Perfect for anti-squirrel chili powder. So I got this very highly rated dehydrator from Amazon and chopped up a bunch of peppers and stuck ‘em in there, but my god they are taking forever to dehydrate. They have gone for 24 hours now. The chart said 8-12. I am worried that the reason for this is because they’re in the garage, and there’s just a shit ton of humidity in the air. Which means I’d have to find someplace in our HVAC bubble to do this, and that is… going to be hard. Like… the things smell. But, I mean, it is working, it’s just slow. I don’t know. I don’t know. Plus I have only dehydrated two freezer bags of this stuff so far. And I have, like, fifteen of them.
Saturday we also did some more pool time and had dinner at our neighbor’s house, which was super fun. Jane will use her little floaty thing now, and she will kick around and can get around the pool on her own. I keep forgetting to take pictures because it is very hot out and I keep my phone in the shade, but I will do it one of these days.
Anyway, Sunday I made some marinara simultaneously while re-filling a Birdies Bed and making new soil. I’d run outside for fifteen minutes, do a wheelbarrow load, add all the soil amendments, mix it up, run back inside, stir the marinara, and then go back outside and do it again. It was a humidity nightmare. Reminded me of New York in the summer when you’re going in and out of buildings the subway and just getting soaked. I swear to god I sweated through like four shirts in an hour. The marinara was good but I added a bit too much rosemary for Emma’s liking. Emma is not a rosemary fan. Also got my prescription filled, worked some more on the dried peppers, did Jane bedtime, which was a pain she was not in the best of moods.
Finished up the other Patrick Radden Keefe book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, which made me very angry since, you know, it does not exactly have a happy ending. Since the book was published this spring, the Sacklers have upped their settlement offer, and it looks like all the states are going to take it. Not that they have any choice, since the entire outcome of Purdue’s role in the opiod crisis has been overseen by a morally-questionably bankrupcy judge who has no business litigating such things. The Sacklers have increased their personal contribution by a bil or two since the last offer. It’s still not enough, but more crucially, they have dropped from this round immunity from future criminal prosecution. So as much as this settlement kind of sucks, a) it is money that the states need now to combat the epidemic, and b) it will get this case out of the hands of this BS judge and into criminal courts where it belongs. So it is not over yet.
Keefe is a great writer. He relies a little bit too much on the two or three word quotes “which is not great,” because you always get the sense that maybe they were taken out of context or something, but I do trust him, and his footnoting is meticulous and ample, so there’s a little bit of reassurance there as well. Don’t love that writing tick, though. But still. After finishing Empire of Pain, I switched over to the first of the Rick Perlstein books on conservative America — God, I am probably going to be reading these till the end of the year. And I definitely found myself missing Keefe’s dry writing style. Perlstein has like zero footnotes and it’s more of a guy spinning a yarn. Which is fun, but a pretty jarring transition from an investigative reporter of Keefe’s caliber.
My fears have come to fruition and I have now asked for my reading prescription from the eye doctor three times, and each time I receive a copy of my main prescription, and not my reading prescription, and it is getting to be a nightmare and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have an email out to them so we’ll see if they magically answer it this morning. But I do not have high hopes. I really don’t want to do this whole thing again.
Justa mix for you today, but it does include a Cure song from Wish and a Xymox song from Twist of Shadows so, you know, relevant to the topics at hand. Other than that, mostly new stuff, oh, the Shocking Blue song is old but that’s because I only just now, at the age of fifty, learned that “Love Buzz” by Nirvana was a cover who knew. Oh and an old Sonic Youth song as a remnant from all my SST listening a couple weeks ago. Sister is such a good record.
Okay talk to you tomorrow.