Good morning. Hello. How are you? #721
My neck and syndrome's, Nixon's pre-presidency Treason, Caro's lost 130k words, Apple Event, "Scrubs" the song, Icelandic waterfalls as massage therapy.
Good morning! Hello, there. How are you? I am well. I have a decent amount of work to do today and am mildly stressed about it. Gotta write a new process document. Always a bit of a thinker, new process documents. I used to love love love writing them when I was a young pup of a manager. Now I am more consumed with thinking of all of the possible contingencies, and with all of the ways the process can be bent. My process documents are somewhat more principles-based these days, vs step-by-step. That being said, while my modern ones are probably more effective, I gotta admit my process documents at Barbarian were probably a lot more fun.
Epic fit from Jane yesterday afternoon, into evening. Over an hour long. Took a lot out of both of us. It had been a while since we had one that intense. She partially lost her voice from all that screaming. And it all started because Emma informed her that Emma did not posess the power to turn back time.
I would like to congratulate my wife on attending DragonCon, where one of the vendor areas had CO2 readings over four thousand, and not getting COVID. Well done.
I made an appointment for the new BA4/BA5 booster, I am very excited. Not till Monday, though. Emma is getting hers Friday, and we probably shouldn’t both be sick over the weekend, and I have a Spiritualized show Friday night (SO EXCITING) so I’m gonna wait a bit. Still, though. Very exciting. Makes me feel better about this impending (though still yet dateless) New York / Boston trip. It’s happening soon, I swear.
Also, I did not go out last night. I completely forgot. I am not proud of that.
My neck has been killing me the last few days. Just really, really bad. It’s making me loopy. I am doing my stretches and taking my pills, but… nope. This affliction really is a… well, a pain in the neck. Bah duh bump. I wish a doctor would do something about it. One thing I wish is that I had some contraption where I could put my head in it and then hang my entire body from a harness around the crown of my head, so that the weight of my both pulls my entire neck longer. I try and do this with my hands and it feels so much better. Heads are so heavy. Heads are especially heavy when sitting on fused necks. It’s awful. I would like it to stop, please.
It’s kind of cool having a syndrome, though. I even have it in my Twitter profile. No one has ever heard of this syndrome. And I have a mild case. Well, I say it’s mild because I am vain and Klippel Fiel syndrome is perhaps best known for cases where it inflicts cleft pallettes, short necks, low hairlines on the back of the head: things that impact your physical appearance. I don’t have any of those, so I consider mine a “mild” case, but I suppose that’s not the case at all. Would I trade a long neck for a neck without pain? God yes.
Most cases are sporadic, but there is a genetic component. I made them check Jane for it when she was born. She does not have it, thank god.
Truth be told, the only time in my entire life I have felt any relief from the pain was sitting underneath that waterfall at the Blue Lagoon in Iceland. I saw a friend’s instagram pic from there yesterday and it reminded me and I felt such yearning. The pressure was relentless and everywhere and constant and exactly the right amount. It felt so great. God, I should probably go back and see if it’s still that good. I wonder if I could, like, engineer an equivalent waterfall somehow. My god, I never felt better than I did underneath that waterfall.
Take me back.
So I had learned about Richard Nixon’s sabotaging of the Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam war in the Rick Perlstein books I’m reading. What I did not learn until last night, in the Ken Burns documentary, is that Lyndon Johnson knew about this at the time. He had the North Vietnamese embassy in DC bugged, and had spies in the North Vietnamese government. He knew! He called the Republican Senate Majority Leader who was supporting Nixon and told him! He said “look, this is treason and I am pissed and this shit needs to stop.” Then Dick Nixon called LBJ and said “I would never do such a thing I would only ever support your war” and LBJ knew he was lying and he was like “yeah yeah whatever” and this is on tape! And they played both the tapes in the documentary! Dick Nixon was committing war crimes and treason before he even got into office! And the president knew! But he did not tell Americans because, well, I don’t know. The documentary says that LBJ didn’t tell the public because he couldn’t reveal his intelligence sources and methods but it is hard for me, an American human in late 2022 to believe that after Biden so masterfully warned us about the Ukraine invasion without revealing sources and methods (btw Biden’s handling of all that was so, so good it really doesn’t get enough credit even from me. We’ve already forgotten). It seems to me LBJ coulda learned this incriminating piece of information from many different parties, and of course I think attention would have focused more on a patriot within Nixon’s own organization? And Caro has not yet gone over this incident in his LBJ books, I guess that is in the next book. God that book needs to hurry up and come out it is so stressful.
In any case, I really feel like the American people… should have known this? That they were electing a traitor? The election was close, Humphrey’s poll numbers were rising in the leadup to the election because LBJ had made such progress on the peace talks, but at the last minute they flatlined when the North Vietnamese unexpectedly pulled out. This one act arguably influenced the course of the latter 20th century. It’s insane!
As a Caro aside, I am still really torn up over the missing 130,000 words exiced from the original draft of The Power Broker, wherein Caro deals primarily with Jane Jacobs’ battles with Laguardia and Moses to save SoHo and the LES. As far as I can tell, in all the interviews given by Caro in the last five years, he has only been asked about these pages once, and he was indifferent and dismissive, saying that he had no idea where they were and didn’t seem to care one way or the other. This is insane to me on so many levels! One: how does a writer not care about any 130,000 words they meticulously researched and wrote? Let alone words cut from one of the most influential books of all time? Let alone words that could easily make you another cool mil or so if you just blinked correctly at your agent? Let alone words on a topic so near and dear to your heart? Words that so many people would kill to read. I don’t understand why there isn’t a nation-wide emergency manhunt going on for these words. It’s inconceivable to me that they have been lost — Caro implied that but not in any concrete way, and given the size of the Caro Archives at the New York Historical Society - 150 boxes that have not yet been gone through completely — I doubt he could no for sure anyway. Plus Robert Gottlieb might have a copy.
There’s a new Documentary coming out about Caro and Gottlieb, by the way. Made by Gottlieb’s daughter. I am not optimistic it is going to discuss these pages, however. I seem to be the only person obsessing over this, and given the huge personalities involved (Jacobs, Moses, Laguardia, Caro), I find this shocking.
I guess now I gotta dig up a photo from the Moses archive I took during a pandemic visit. Here you go:
Watched the Apple event yesterday. It was fine. Someone mentioned how weird it is that they keep using an empty $5 billion building as a backdrop. It is weird. It feels very Severence, though maybe that’s the point. New watches seem cool, I often think of getting one but then I remember that when I was a hormonal teenager I had major problems with watches and smelly sweat and I get all self consicous and in any case, what would I use it for. The health stuff is kinda cool. I wish I could just keep it in my pocket or something. I don’t know. Maybe. The new phone cameras seem amazing, though they always seem amazing, then I buy one and then I take some pictures and think “yeah, that’s a bit better I guess.” But I will probably buy one, I guess. You know, need that hit, gotta feel something. I like cameras. I like pictures of my daughter. Better pictures of your children: the number one driver of new phone purchases. The satellite emergency stuff is fantastic. Really one-ups, or at least catches up to the Starlink/T-mobile deal recently announced, though I suppose theoretically you could have both, huh. And I’m pretty excited about the always-on display since, well, I never turn my display off already, and boy does that suck down your battery. Will be nice to do it guilt-free.
Still waiting for that Mac Pro announcement so I can make a fully informed purchase decision on my migration to Apple silicon. I am still using Intel silicon like a scrub.
Speaking of “Scrubs,” man I hated that song. I grew up poor, my best friend was rich, I sat on the passenger side of my best friend’s ride (I sweet-ass 1988 Corvette, god that car was awesome shit maybe I need a 1988 Corvette now) and every time I hear that song I get hugely self-conscious. I mean, I guess I was not “Trying to holla at” anyone, so the description in “Scrubs” is not strictly accurate, but I definitely was broke-ass. Even if I did have jobs.
And as an aside on aside, it is totally crazy that that job at the fairgrounds expected me to go, like, eight hours without peeing. I don’t know how that was even legal.
All right well I seem to be in non-linear mode today, that’s what happens when I don’t have enough writing prompt notes, I apologize.
Justa mix today. Half new, half old, most of the old is local to Boston I don’t know why, I am in a mood feeling nostalgic. Plus a Grinderman song that I once listened to like 300 times in a row memorizing the lyrics. I have a very specific memory of listening to it over and over as I walked from the Barbarian office at 11 Beach to my old apartment on Howard street by way of Canal street. Gorgeous day, sun was shining. God help me, I miss Canal street. Tribeca Bagels. Underrated.
(N.B. The neighborhood might be spelled TriBeCa, but Tribeca Bagels, on Canal, does not spell it that way).
Don’t know anything about this THUS LOVE band, but this “Family Man” song is awesome.
Tomorrow is Friday how exciting. Man four day weeks rule. TTFN.