Good morning. Hello. How are you? #740
A trip to the Food Bank meeting. Depeche Mode ticket misery. Annie Ernaux.
Good morning! Hello, there! Happy Friday! Today is a good day. Today the single stack of celery I tear off the bunch is going to be a great one. I’ve been working up to this day. The last four or five days I have suffered through middling celery stalks, well, of middling quality, but on the outside of the bunch, all dented and armored, having protected the holy celery bunch on its journey from farm to table. They were fine. But now. Now I have worked my way to the sweet (metaphorically, not actually sweet) juicy center of the celery bunch. Now I am at the good stuff.
Excited for the weekend? Do you have Columbus day off on Monday? Do people still do that? We do not have a Columbus day off, which is obviously the right thing, but… I wish we had a holiday off. I like holidays.
Boy I really screwed up yesterday’s issue, huh? I forgot to number it, and I somehow locked it? To paying subscribers only? Of which there are none? That was dumb. I’m not sure how I did that. But now I’m thinking I should do it more often, somehow, with some sort of content that no one can read. Not, like, a paid tier, but, like, an unobtainable tier. Seems properly dada.
So Depeche Mode are touring and they are playing a single show on the east coast of the United States, where something like 70% of the population lives, and the show is like $300 for the cheapest tickets and $700 for the most expensive. I don’t think I can do this. I can’t say I’ve seen Depeche Mode a million times, I grew up in Alaska so I missed that Violator tour all my friends talk about with reverence. But I’ve caught them four or five times through the years. My gig list says five: Worcester Centrum ‘93, Great Woods ‘94, Centrum again ‘98, Coachella 2006 and Lollapalooza 2009 (That one was awesome, it was from side stage). I skipped the last tour, Emma went with Sean Drinkwater to the Brooklyn show, I am now thinking that was dumb to skip it. I don’t think a five year-old Jane is ready to deal with Madison Square Garden, or, rather, I’m not ready to deal with that, I’m sure she’d deal fine. I would maybe bring her to some sort of outdoor thing, boy I sure wish they’d play Merriweather Post but I guess they are bigger than New Order, people are already freaking out about a show that takes place next April. But I’m pissed there’s no DC show, or Atlanta, or Miami? WTF. That’s ridiculous. Three California shows. Okay.
Yesterday I was up at 5 AM because I left the house and went to the annual “community event” for our local Food Bank. It’s an informational event that they have for volunteers and donors, to meet everyone and let them know what their plans were. It was held at the Fearrington Barn, which is a lovely event barn over in the posh neighborhood down the street that has the best restaurant in the state and looks like Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls.
There were fifty people in attendence. Eight of them were the staff at the food bank, and aside from them, I was by far the youngest man there. Men in general were in short supply, there were maybe 10 men out of the fifty attendees, and I was the only one without grey hair. I’d say the second oldest man was maybe sixty. Only three other people were wearing masks, I guess that’s just not a thing you do anymore but whatever, I don’t care, do what you want. But the mask did make me feel a little antisocial, and if no one else is masking, I’m gonna up the social distancing a smidge, so I sat in the back and didn’t really talk to anyone. But I watched the presentations. I like the executive director very much, she seems awesome. The director of outreach is pretty awesome too. I was less fond of the president of the board. That was a whole weird thing, they had an “annual report” there you could grab a copy of. It had absolutely no detailed information about the budget, which is, like, what I thought annual reports were supposed to have, but whatver. But the weird thing was that it listed some dude as the president of the board, and this woman as the vice president, but here they were presenting her as the president, so apparently there has been a power change as recently as since the annual report was printed. Very mysterious, but no info reported on this.
I mean, this woman was fine, but there were microphone problems. It was weird. There had obviously been a mandate for each of these people to list their resumes at the beginning of their talks, and she had done that, and she was recently retired and all her past work seemed very impressive. But then she succumbed to the “microphone hell trap,” wherein the speaker does not speak loudly enough, then the audience complains, then they move the microphone closer, but in doing so, get scared of their own voice and compensate by either involuntarily moving further back again, or speaking more quietly, thus setting off a vicious circule of audience complaints, microphone movements, and quieter speaking. It is a very basic thing any seasoned executive has learned to overcome in their career of frequent public speaking — to get over the volume of your own voice — and the whole thing just gave me, a third-party observer all too familiar with this phenomenon, massive anxiety and I did not like it one bit.
The vice president of the board, though, she was great. She had recently moved to North Carolina, well, five years ago but more recent than me. She came here with her husband to find a church community and a community of service. She found her church, and in the back of the church there was a blue cart for donations to a food bank and after a few years she decided to follow that trail. She discovered the food bank and started volunteering there. She had such a manifest joy at the love of volunteering in the trenches. She talked about how she started at “intake” (it is unclear if that is the intake of food or customers) and then to bagging, then to bag packing, then to produce, then to other positions further and further into the org. She meticulously explained each one of them and what she loved about them. She had a beaming smile on her face. She kept talking about how this job or that “really filled my cup” which is just a great expression and I’m totally going to co-opt it. That really filled my cup. Anyway she was great.
Other than that, I mean, the usual non-profit stuff. A Q&A session with a lot of blow-hardy questions. I am still mostly a newbie when it comes to non-profit stuff, well, I mean, I was around it a ton when I was a kid, and I’ve done some amount since then but not, like, tons, and the whole consensus-building, board-and-committe-driven approach to things is fundamentally weird to me, so, you know, I keep quiet and just watch and listen. I don’t have time to volunteer yet but someday I am totally going to, and in the meantime I will keep giving them money and going to the meetings and maybe someday when I’m not wearing a mask I will even talk to people.
One last funny thing about this thing. Doors opened at 8, the meeting started at 8:30. So, you know, half hour for banter and coffee. I mis-timed things and got to Fearrington at, like, 7:30, but I didn’t mind because a) I could check my email and shit, and b) easier to park as I’m still getting used to park a truck. So I just sat in my truck reading emails and drinking Diet Coke. But hilariously, at 7:31, people just started streaming to the place. Like it seemed perfectly normal for all of these people to arrive a half hour early? Old people! They love the mornings!
Congratulations to Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize for literature yesterday. I confess I know almost nothing about Annie Ernaux, but she’s been on my short list of hypographic chronicallers of the self. As an individual who’s written over a million words in his journal through the years, I am always interested in other people like that, and I’ve been dimly aware of her. Everything I read about her, though, says she writes “autobiographical novels” which isn’t really my thing, because, as I’ve mentioned, plot and narrative are overrated. It’s for this reason as well that I’ve not read Knausgard, because I get the sense he’s shaping the beautiful chaotic, plotless formlessness of life into something as pedestrian as meaning and order, but I do think I’m gonna have to check them both out soon. I confess I am overly influenced by the formlessness of Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated journals. She, too, has a bit of a plot affliction but at least she tries to keep it in check and unabashedly preferrs feeling and emotion. Then there was Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, really thought I was gonna find a kindred spirit in that one, but Manguso seemed to view her relentless journling as a symptom of her mental challenges, not a cure for them. I’m like Magneto over here: embrace your mutatations, they are beautiful. Keep writing.
If you’ve read any Ernaux, though, let me know a good place to start?
I’m also thinking my next big plunge into some large corpus is going to be non-political. The two candidates right now are the aformentioned Knausgard and maybe, just maybe, it’s time to finally tackle either War and Peace or Infinite Jest. If you’ve read all tree, and know me, let me know which you think is the right move? This would have been a question for Andy Shea, sadly. God I still miss that guy.
All right justa mix for today. A guitar-heavy one, only two synthy songs. A new-heavy one, only two old songs, except two more are secretly old but just now released. It actually flows better than I thought it would. Hard to put teen pop sensation Salem Ilese next to Wolfsheim but it works, maaaaaan. God, that Wolfsheim track. Makes me want to go dance at a Boston goth club.
Okay I hope you have a lovely weekend. Talk Monday. Other newsletters don’t say goodbye to you every day. But I do. But I do. This newsletter cares.
Brutal, but the only way to be sure. Blast off and glass the thing from space.
Thankfully I didn’t really begin journaling until about ten years ago, so I won’t have quite so much ahead of me. Just the thought though makes me miss long plane flights without network access.
> As an individual who’s written over a million words in his journal through the years,
How did you come to that number? Rough estimate, or have you properly archived everything?