Good morning. Hello. How are you? #707
This issue would have been a lot better had I remembered to write that one topic down.
Good morning, friend. How is it going? Hello, there. Happy Thursday. I had a really good topic for today’s edition of GMHHAY. Came to me while I was making lunch yesterday. “Just let me grab this grater first,” I thought, “then I will write it down in my note pad.” But by then it was gone. It has been bothering me for the last 19 hours or so. I apologize for the inferior quality of today’s edition. Well, compared to what it could have been. But we will never know.
Yesterday an old friend texted me: “Rick you are so incredibly prolific in your life documentation and media output it’s truly inspirational.”
I texted back: “I’ve come too far. Every day I dream of stopping I just think I’ll feel a failure. It’s become self fulfilling. It’s like the best and worst thing I’ve ever done.”
It really is so hard. And then when you think of a great topic, and you think “oh thank god. I can really milk that one.” And then you lose it. Oh, woe is me, woe is me.
Also the friend noticed one of my comical asides in my gardening Youtubes that I make from time to time and no one notices cuz no one watches and it brought me a great deal of satisfaction to see someone find one of those absurdist easter eggs. It was a good one, too.
Thank you for all your happy anniversary wishes. Emma did get me a present. She said “it’s not much and it hasnt’ arrived yet,” but then five minutes later, the FedEx guy showed up with the present. So, you know, I doubly failed. I told her her present is the smugness and superiority she could now feel for being the only one of us who got a present. Her gift was my guilt.
Also a thing that happens on our wedding anniversary is a bunch of friends have fun stuff in their Timehop and Facebook memories from that epic night, so that is always fun to remember the wedding. What a crazy time that was. Seems so far removed from our lives now, but man, I am so glad we did that. Really was worth every penny, what a lovely night. Wish we could do it again.
Still have about a thousand matchboxes if you need more.
Well I finished season two of this Westworld re-watch and man, I gotta tell you, wind has really been taken out of the sales on that one not gonna lie. It was like staggering over the finish line. Season two just meanders and meanders. But there were a few things that tied into season four that helped out — especially the physical mechanics of the sublime, sort of, and the fact that Dolores Hale already exists by this point, I had forgotten exactly that whole thing came to be. Man, Dolores is just evil. Dolores is a bad person. We should not root for Dolores after season one, let me tell you. Poor Teddy, oh god, poor Teddy. I don’t know why I am doing this to myself but I am going to go ahead and plow through season three, as well, because I am a masochist. And I am telling you about it instead of that really great thing I hasd for you that I forgot.
In 1972 the Vietnam vets took over the statue of liberty and draped her in banners protesting the war and an upside down American flag.
Man. It really is insane how much criming Nixon did. It really does put Trump to shame. Well, maybe. Who knows. Trump didn’t go recording himself in the Oval so I guess we’ll never know. But I will say I used to see those news reports of some mysterious entity doing robocalls pretending to be one party in a campaign but that they didn’t really come from the campaign and I would think they were kind of flukes. I mean, honestly, I didn’t think about them much at all. But to see just how many awful, illegal, insane “dirty tricks” the Nixon campaign did in 1972, and how the people behind them were household names in the Republican party for decades after that, well. Yeah. I don’t know if they have not crimed in, a campaign in, like, fifty years. Of course JFK and LBJ crimed in elections too. Maybe I am naive to think it has died out in Democratic politics. I guess maybe we’ll find out in the next book.
Criming, man. As American as apple pie and killing people.
Oh also apparently in 1967 twenty people stormed the capitol in protest of… the stalling of a rat mitigation bill. Stormed the capital! At one point a male demonstrator screamed, “Kill me! Shoot me!” Captain L. H. Ballard of the Capitol police responded, “See if I don’t, you bastard.” Ballard reached for, but did not draw, his gun.
These books are doing funny things to me, like all good history should. Re-wiring my brain, making me think about the here and now in a different light. And it’s so hard to really talk about it with other people because your brain has just been assaulted with a barrage of facts, and it is doing its brain thing and trying to see patterns in what you just hit it with, and maybe those patterns are real, or maybe you’re just doing some crazy conspiracy wall thing, and then you sort of try to tell other people about what you’ve learned, and what you’ve put together, but you’re trying to pull threads from a giant pile, and you’re saying it without the backup of the wall of facts you just learned (Nixon tried to frame Kennedy for murder. Thirty bombings in one summer in DC. Daniel Patrick Moynahan was a dick) so you just sort of sound like a lunatic, and even though it’s, like, real history with actual footnotes and source material and whatnot, you still sort of wonder if this is what it’s like to be a conspiracy theorist. Plus, of course, in this particular case, I’m literally reading one batshit conspiracy after another. And they were all real! Hundreds of insane conspiracies! It really is insane. Conspiracy upon conspiracy, lies upon lies.
But, like, these books are taking up all my brain space. I read them in almost all my free time. I am going to bed early just so I can lay in bed and read them. Really makes me not very fun at (GMHHAY) parties.
Clearly the thing I’m going to have to do after this is read that giant, best-in-class biography of Jimmy Carter, because if Jimmy Carter was criming and doing conspiracy after conspiracy too, well, then, the presidency is probably just irredeemable. It is kind of crazy how little I know about Jimmy Carter compared to all the Republican presidents that surround him. Poor guy. That seems unfair.
Jane is getting really into scootering which is so nice. She is excited about after-dinner walks, so that means we don’t have to spend fifteen minutes convincing her to go for a walk every night after dinner. And she zooms on the thing, which means the walks themselves go so much more quickly which is nice. She definitely gets a little pooped scooting up the big hill, but all in all she loves the thing. She took her first tumble from it yesterday. She had a helmet but she really needs elbow pads. But it was just a minor scape. And she got right back up. I didn’t use the “why do we fall / so we can get back up” line, but man I love using that line when she falls. She still doesn’t want to hear it, though. Another year or two.
I should also clarify about the dolls: No, I don’t especially want to go to the dollhouse and play dolls, but my god, I play with those dolls all the live-long day. I probably do doll voice a hundred times throughout the day. They are an integral part of our mornings, of potty time, of getting dressed, of breakfast, of bedtimes, of getting her to do anything at all. If the doll asks it, or if we ask her to do it for the doll, she is 10x more likely to do a thing. I am using doll voice constantly. And kitty voice. So much doll voice. I’m not a total scrooge.
I’m having dreams about taking her on a solo road trip to Boston for Bauhaus. I know she’s too young for it. But I want to take her to a Bauhaus show. Don’t shoot my dreams down just yet, let me have them for another week or so k thnx bye.
All right justa mix for you. New Diiv, that is exciting. Some oldies. Emma and I were watching Only Murders in the Building and the music supervisor on it was Bruce Gilbert and I spun a whole theory in my head that Bruce Gilbert from Wire, in his 70’s, had taken up music supervision but, alas, turns out it is a different Bruce Gilbert. Got me thinking about Wire, though. And I know its blasphemy but my default Wire album is The Ideal Copy, I’m just that kind of guy. Thank you to Bill for introducing me to 40 Watt Sun.
Until tomorrow!
Good morning. Hello. How are you? #707
never in a million years would i dissuade you from road-tripping with jane to a concert! (i can imagine her in her little cans... my god.)
I have a long-term project to read a biography of every U.S. President (with a secondary goal of finding as many as possible in free little libraries). I'm now focusing on more contemporary Presidents and I started last year with that epic Carter bio. It's great. He certainly had his personality flaws but no criming!
Since then I've read a Gerald Ford bio and am into Nixon with H.W. Bush queued up (all of these found in Salem little libraries too). I have a long way to go and am hoping that semi-publicly admitting to this goal will inspire me a bit.