I really can’t decide on the capitalization of “Good Morning. Hello. How Are You?”
Is it all capitalized? Like a title? Or is it more like sentence? “Good morning. Hello. How are you?” Hrm. I think I like the latter. I am gonna change it. Anyway, Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good. It’s a bit cloudy today. But it’s nice. I’m okay with it. It’s actually kind of a shame because it looks like we’re gonna have five temperate, cloudy days in a row, which is exactly what I need for hardening off my seed starts, but they’re not quite there yet. Still need another week, maybe two of growing. Alas. An opportunity wasted.
My old friend and coworker prince Nick Bonadies has moved to Portland, Oregon (popular thing these days amongst my ex coworkers, I am getting a bit jealous) and is opening a brewery with his friend Zach called Belleflower Brewing. It is very exciting. It’s gonna be awesome™. Today he makes an appearance on a podcast called Graining In which is apparently a beer podcast. I cannot claim to know much about podcasts, despite making one, or beer, despite drinking it. Anyway, Nick has an awesome instagram for Belleflower Brewing that I watch longingly as he preps the brewery. It’s really pulling all my DIY strings. And here’s the podcast if you’re interested in the brewery business. It really is pretty amazing Nick and gang are pulling this off. In a recession.
(It really is galling Substack has this neat copy/paste feature for pasting in a URL and they’ll magically turn it into a nice embed but it doesn’t work with Apple podcasts? So weird.)
I was thinking about the (really just fantastic) stimulus bill last night, and idly thinking how funny it was that ole Riden the Rails Joe didn’t put any money in it for Amtrak and I guess he’s gonna wait on that until the infrastructure bill but… oh look! Biden did put some money into the bill for Amtrak! It’s not everything they need, he didn’t “fix Amtrak” but he got them back up and running to all their stations every day. GO JOE. God I am so excited for Biden to fix Amtrak. Sad mine and Biden’s amtrak obsessions never overlapped, what with him on the DC-Wilmington beat and me on the NYC-BOS one. I really gotta read the stimulus bill. There are endless little joyous surprises in it. Just fantastic. Man. I am just going to put out there that there is no way in hell that we’d ever have spent nearly $5 trillion on a safety net - even with the pandemic - if Trump had never been elected. To the extent that the Republicans actually believe anything, their strategy of backing Trump has been catastrophically detrimental to their agenda. They got a tax cut, but it’s not going to last. The very viablity of “starve the beast” their single guiding economic principle for the last five decades, is out the window because no one cares if the best gets fed anymore. They fucked themselves so hard. It’s just astonishing. Yes, Supreme Court, and yes, abortion, but. Allow me to have the teentsiest bit of optimism today.
Also Merrick Garland finally got confirmed. I wish I could say this felt like just desserts or some sweet revenge, but it doesn’t it just feels like when the bully finally stopped hitting you but you’re still laying there on the pavement bleeding. The worst has come to an end, but it’s not like things are better.
I realize these two paragraphs are contradictory look I am not a political pundit here. Or a public intellectual. I am a dude writing an email to his friends. Lemme alone. Here have a picture:
On a more pessimistic note, I read this really good piece about flying and business travel by Farhad Manjoo about how we don’t need to do it anymore and maybe we’ve learned a valuable lesson in all of this and… lol yeah right. The reason doing sales worked during the pandemic is because no one could do it. The second that a single vendor does travel to go win a sale, every other vendor is going to have to travel as well, otherwise the client won’t see them as having enough hussle. Sure, there might be a few clients who insist on not having to see everyone in person - but those people already existed and already controlled the purse strings. When you control the purse strings you can do what you want, and so the ones who made purchases without insisting on a big travelpalooza already were. Business travel is going to come back so fast. Never mind that tons of people are dying to get away from their families, their lives. A significant percentage of sales people are salespeople because they can only stand their families if they’re away from them half the time.
On a more personal level, it’s such a dilemma. I am still perfectly sick of business travel and I don’t want to do it anymore. I am also completely appalled by the environmental devastation caused by air travel and I don’t want to contribute to that anymore. I also think travel is overrated. Okay, that is an exaggeration. I have said this before, mostly drunk in bars, and it never fails to outrage people, but I believe that personal travel has a declining rate of marginal return. Some amount of travel can be revelatory. The more you travel, the less it becomes revelatory. There is always a low-level morphine drip of awesomeness involved, but no more so than with any other deeply rewarding hobby, and with a much higher environmental cost. Unpopular opinion, I know.
And yet. I miss the places I love so much. I need to get back to New York asap. To Boston. And back to, god help me, Fairbanks. Austin, LA and SF less so but it needs to happen. But also I don’t want to go at all. It’s a real dilemma I haven’t resolved. Plus my plants are going to need watering. Though hopefully my drip irrigation solves that. Man, you guys are going to love the drip irrigation shit. It is going to RULE. Coming soon.
Man I am… I am going to be such a mess with the reopening of the world. On the one hand, I am so deeply thankful for the vaccine. Especially now where all these health care workers are coming into my house and they’re all vaccinated, and my mom is, and my mother-in-law is. Emma and I aren’t but it still makes us feel a lot safer. But it’s going to be hard soon. A vaccinated friend of mine told me about a nice bender of a night they had in New York this week and I was so jealous. It sounded so much like the old days. I literally shook with jealousy. The great thing about the word literal in modern society it means both meanings so I don’t actually have to tell you whether I shook or not. What a great word. We need more liminal words. Like “like.” When people say “I was like” it is a fantastic hybrid of “so I actually said to them” and “and I thought internally” and it is explicitly telling the listener that both of those things are sort of true and sort of not and these are just great constructions and grammarians need to get on the liminal train hyyyyyyype.
PSA there are seven flavors of Kit Kats for sale in the US market right now. Not talking the Japanese imports. I am saying that Nestle seems to be slowly, methodically, bringing the Japanese approach to the US. Right now in the US you can buy regular Kit Kats, mint-chocolate duos, mocha-chocolate duos, dark chocolate, white cream, birthday cake, lemon crisp and apple pie. That is exciting. Haven’t had Lemon Crisp yet but birthday cake was surprisingly good. Of course, tomorrow I am going to the Asian market after my mom’s doctor appointment to pick up some shaoxing wine, so I will hopefully find a few new Japanese flavors as well.
Oh bee tee dubs there is a new exploit for iPhones so go and update all your iPhones and iPads to OS 14.4.1 when you can. Like right now. It’s a bad one.
Ohhh sheeeit the sun came out. That is exciting. I wish I could be out there gardening. Maybe tomorrow afternoon, after my mom’s doctor’s appointments. She is doing well, by the way. I know people hate Medicare, but the way we went to the PCP once and she started making all of this stuff happen with specialists and in-home care and whatnot, it really is magical. Maybe this is just a version of Medicare that exists in a place like the Triangle, which includes two of the top medical schools in the US and a massive medical infrastructure. But it really has been wonderful. Night and day from Fairbanks. But if we get both appointments done, and the asian market, and the drop-off to the PTA thrift store and the other drop off to the UPS store, maybe I can come home and start filling my birdies beds. The big dilemma here is do I experiment with hulgelkultur and fill the bottom of the beds with wood and other organic matter instead of soil. I am tempted but the pile of old branches from Emma’s great forest thinning is really far away and I think she’s using them to shape the creek bed. But we will see. I bet I could get a shit ton of YouTube views (like maybe 20!) if I did a hugelkultur video though. People love that stuff.
Speaking of internet fodder here is a picture of Keely the calico on some hipster record crates:
Forgot to turn the Discogs store back on after the mom quarantine, and just got around to turning it back on this week. Sold a Goo Goo Dolls CD (it was my mother-in-law’s honest) and a Skinny Puppy CD in rapid succession. I really love my discogs store. It makes almost no money and it was a complete nightmare to set up, but the money isn’t quite nothing and I like being part of that community and I like mailing things to people in the physical mail. You know what’s weird is I have probably sent 100 or so things out across the whole assault on the postal system by DeJoy and the only things that have ever been substantially delayed are international packages (of course) and three priority mail packages I sent for Christmas to Alaska. All my first class mail CD mailings have made it fine the whole time. Weird.
Just to warn you, in the next few days - I think Monday or Tuesday, after a weekend of some solid gardening content - I am going to write an exclusively work-related post. Sorry. Has to be done.
Okay let’s do a mix. It’s a moody and quiet one, those are piling up. Whoops. It had two Dawes tracks on it. Let’s do a quick tweak. There we go. Plus it improves the gender balance a smidge. This Mercury Rev song. It… It got me through a lot in the mid-90’s. Everyone really blew them off when Boces came out, they had fired their (phenomenal) vocalist Dave Baker (did they actually fire him? Or did he quit? It’s so weird that I don’t know this). The album was so different than Yerself is Steam, but. Yeah, they still had something. And the tour for Boces, my god. Does anyone else remember that show at Mama Kin? Where they did that cover of Velvet Underground’s Ocean and talked about attending Moe Tucker’s funeral? I still think about that all the time. “Lou Reed didn’t even show up, man.” Damn. This “Hey Lucinda” song is a late period masterpiece by the Tindersticks as well. I didn’t know Lhasa De Sela before this, and she has since passed on too soon. But it’s just a beautiful, plaintive song that captures aging. And I almost put this new stripped down of Blonde by the Wedding Present on the “most depressing” playlists. Seamonsters got me through some shit. Most of it of my own making, god love and hormones make young men do stupid-ass shit. But nonetheless Seamonsters was there for me. Aug and Ben and I met a woman who used to be in the Wedding Present at the pub attached to Camber Sands during an All Tomorrow’s Parties and we asked if David Gedge was as much as a lunatic romantically as his songs imply and she just sort of rolled her eyes and shrugged. It was GREAT. I got to ask very detailed questions about the pronouns in “Because I’m Beautiful.”
OK time to go get Jane and say hi to grammy’s house and choose a dress or a sweater and change the diaper and do breakfast and talk to brown bear and then I gotta chaperone my mom’s first consultation with a new care provider and then do some actual work today and maybe if all that goes well I’ll get the Birdies Bed assembly video done for you for tomorrow! MORE GARDENING IS ON THE HORIZON. Holy shit I have so many tomatoes to thin and replant. It’s gonna be a nightmare. An awesome nightmare.
Sad that Lou Reed didn't attend Moe Tucker's funeral. She seemed super cool. In 1985 or 1986 I saw John Cale in Orlando. It was maybe the worst show I've ever been too. He was so coked-up and drunk, he could barely function. It was super sad and I expected to hear about his death soon. But Moe came up from South Florida to see/support him. Super awesome of her!
And John Cale made up for that performance with some shows I saw in like 1988 or 1989. I think they were at Nightstage and were so beautiful.