Good morning, friend. How is your Thursday morning going? I hope it is going swimmingly.
I am sorry to report that my old neighbor Peter Valentine has passed away at 80. Peter was a fixture in Cambridge, MA, and his house was even more of a fixture. Well, his fence.
In the early 1990’s, Peter was living in a house, as a tenant, that was slated for destruction because it was where they were going to build the new University Park at MIT. He convinced MIT to not only give him the home, but to move it to a new location and give him the lot as well. When the house got there, they set it down on the lot, perpendicular to the street. He had them lift it up and rotate it 45 degrees, so the house sat at an angle, and you could enter the front door from the corner of the road. He was very proud of this. He carried photos around in his wallet of the move. I saw them so many times I am semi-convinced I actually remember the day the house moved, rolling up Brookline Ave toward Man Ray.
Peter’s new address was 176 Franklin street, at the corner of Franklin and Brookline. I was one door down at 53 Brookline Street. My house had a little back garden, walled in on three sides, accessible from both floors of my house. It was a lovely garden and I wish I was a gardener back then. We did use the garden, though. For gatherings and parties and hanging out. And the back fence of the garden was connected to Peter’s back yard. So we had a relationship like in Home Improvement. I still remember the first time that we were hanging out in the garden and he poked his head over the fence to say hello and chat. It would become a regular fixture. And we would talk. Often. We talked a lot about his fence, of course, a fixture in the neighborhood. We talked about his current metaphysical projects. We talked a lot about his yard, since he was standing in it and he was usually working on something in the yard when he’d come talk to us.
I remember at the time thinking that he was old, very old. I am shocked to do the math now and realize that he was only in his mid 60’s. He looked older, more wizened, Gandalfian.
He always wore the same coat. It is the coat he’s wearing in the photo in the obituary above. That photo is from 2018, ten years later. I get a lot of grief for wearing the same coat for years, Peter was the same way.
One time I flew to LA for a trip of work and pleasure. I was going to a conference in Orange County. I was standing out LAX, looking for a cab. Bounding up, out of nowhere, comes Peter Valentine to say hello. Wearing his weird coat, and purplie silk or satin pants and a rainbow shirt and a very odd hat. I asked him what he was doing in LA and he gave me an enigmatic, slightly mystical answer that made no sense. The whole scene was so disorienting. I had never run into Peter outside of our houses, let alone across the country.
Peter was Tom Bombadil. A merry fellow, Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. None has ever caught him yet. Master of wood, water, and hill. Ho! Ho!
Farewell.
I gotta say I’m a little surprised so many of you are like “yeah just enough news to feel informed and I gotta limit myself to stay happy.” I mean, yes, this seems the logical and healthy answer, and probably the wise one. But I just… don’t buy it for me. In the same way I feel like people like Alex Jones, who started out pure grifters, after all those years they come to believe the conspiracies. In the same way a good person might become a cop in a corrupt department but the job itself, over the years, changes and wears them down. How informed we are in our world effects our views, even in the null set, and I feel like if we don’t continually remind ourselves of the evil in the world, of the pain and suffering, we will forget, and it will effect how we vote. I dispute the characterization that as long as we “vote right” and donate and do what we can, we don’t need to keep abreast of the horrors of the world. Well, maybe I don’t dispute, but I doubt. I don’t have the answer, I have a worry. I’m reading about the rapid shift in public sentiment in America in 1966 as the civil rights struggle continued, as rioting broke out, and how quickly so many white Americans — virtually all, really — abandoned civil rights at the drop of the hat, even though nothing bad happened to them. This is an ill-formed thought, but it just feels like it’s too easy to block it all out. Even with all the news I read, I feel like I block too much out. I mean, yes, to some extent we all have to to survive, I don’t know how Luke O’Neil is even still alive after writing Hell World for so long. But I am acutely desirous, adamant, that I not block out the world’s suffering just for my own happiness.
Or maybe I just keep looking for lessons in history and I keep not finding them.
Raccoons are at the top of the food chain, you know that right? A raccoon would eat a human, 100%. No problem. A human would not eat a raccoon. Well I just Googled this and it turns out its not true, humans would eat raccoons, but I did not know this last night when I formed this theory. In any case, Katherine corrected me and said that raccoons aren’t at the top of the food chain, raccoons encircle the food chain. They encompass the entire food chain, evoking surrounding Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Her wise words inspired me to put this phrase into the various AI image generators, in hopes of finding a logo for a project we were working on and, yeah, wow, these things are so good.
Craiyon / Dall-E Mini was the worst, but still not bad:
Dall-E was pretty good and it would be impressive enough if this was the best that machines could do:
But really the best, by far, was Midjourney. My god, so glorious. Also there were two passes, both yielded different results, and they were all this good:
This one is probably best:
Very, very satisfying.
The window washers were at the house yesterday. Scared the bejeezus out of me when I was making breakfast for Jane and suddenly I heard banging and saw shadows on the porch. Emma had warned me, but it still freaked me out. But the fascinating thing was, throughout the day, like six times, while I was working in some room of the house, I would see them, and I would look up, and sort of stare at them, trying to catch their eye so I could say hi, because I feel so weird when people are working on my house and I just ignore them and I make a point to make eye contact and say hi to the lawn guys every week and whatnot. But these dudes, they would not look at me. They are very obviously trained to make no eye contact. Which is weird. I would love to know the whole situation like that. Are they trained? Because most people get creeped out and the company has decided to make it very clear the dudes don’t care about what’s in your house? Or do they each arrive at this habit individually, through trial and error? I want to know more. Just like I want to know more about how optometrists offices work.
Also I love these guys cuz their name is Window Wizards and the whole place is vaguely Tolkein themed.
Gotta say, though, houses are such a pain, man, you always gotta do shit to them. I talked to the world’s most conversational electrician the other day, need some electrical work done. I now know all about this guy’s wife and her nursing job and how she was thinking about changing jobs to do nursing for a telehealth company but in the end she decided she would miss having coworkers, so she stuck it out at the hospital she’s at. At first I thought the guy was terse and weird but then he slowly just got to chatting and I ended up talking to him for over thirty minutes, just to schedule him coming over next week to check things out. Really kind of amazing. THe best part is at the end of it, he made me text him my name and address and what I needed, which is hilarious because this whole conversation started on text, and could have stayed there, but we had to do this half hour detour on the phone just to return to text to put the salient details in. He even said outright that he is lonely and he doesn’t get to talk enough. He works alone, he gets home, his wife is exhausted from nursing and he is looking to talk.
What the world needs now is Long Now houses. Houses that last a thousand years with zero maintenance. I guess you would call them caves or something. But, you know, modernly functional houses that last a thousand years. Like every single thing built on every planet in Star Trek where they arrive eons after a civilization collapses but the lights are still functioning and so are the robots. Long Now Houses. A new fundraising real estate division of the Long Now Foundation. They have a COO job open maybe I should apply just to pitch this groundbreaking (get it?) idea.
Finally we have an incredibly relieving article in Ars Technica that most people who suffer from locked-in syndrome are pretty happy in their lives. I cannot tell you what a relief this is becase ever since I saw the majestic Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and then promptly went and read the book, I have lived in absolute fear and terror of getting locked-in syndrome. But the guy in this article makes it sound like his life is pretty good. Provided, I guess, you live in France or somewhere with decent home are.
Look, yes, I wish this photo were less blurry and that Jane’s face was a little bit more visible but it’s the best one I could pull off with no notice and two very wiggly subjects.
Maybe this will make up for it:
A Smooooth playlist for you today. Half old, half new. Keep it smooooooth.
Talk to you guys tomorrow!
Good morning. Hello. How are you? #702
sorry to hear about your neighbor! i didn't know this story, but of course it makes sense that you'd know each other, living so close! he sounds singularly charming.
i'm also one who consumes the absolute minimum news to be informed and then moves on. same with social media. i find both tiresome and anxiety inducing. might leave a group text for the same reason.
although dall-E was inescapable for a bit there, i had never heard of midjourney before tuesday, when my office took a tour of the harvard visualization lab, probably the highest-tech space on campus. they have all 8k screens and are set up for all sorts of AR and VR experiences for teaching purposes. (hilariously, their web presence is very old school: https://hwpi.harvard.edu/eps-visualization-research-laboratory/home) but it's been a steady stream of AI-art news since! is it one of those things where the news were there before but i'm only now noticing them now that i've been more immersed? so weird.
finally, i'm gonna seek out that article about locked-in syndrome. it will be a comfort for my sister, too: you may not remember that my brother-in-law can't really communicate beyond blinks as a result of a TBI suffered in afghanistan.
love those photos of jane and emma in their matching bottoms!