Good morning. Hello. How are you? #745
A rough night of dadding and an ill-advised, long rebuttal to a more or less innocuous comment about yesterday's post.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I hope you’re doing okay. Hope things are all right. I am… hanging in there. Rough day yesterday. Had a few minorly frustrating things at work, and I was in a bit of a mood at dinner and on our evening walk. Wanted to talk to my wife about it, which usually snaps me right back into a good mood, but Jane was demanding attention and it was clear she wasn’t going to let Emma and I talk at all, so I just didn’t bother.
Then it was my turn to do Jane bedtime. And I says to myself, I says “Rick, don’t let your bad mood ruin your night with your daughter.” So I am so good, I swear to god. We start off bedtime with a snuggle and an episode of Cardboard World and everything is great and I play with her all night and don’t try and watch home improvement videos on Youtube like I really want to. But eventually she tells me she has to pee, and we have a rule that when she says she has to pee, Daddy stops playing with her until she pees. This is a dubious rule. Maybe it’s a bad idea, but it’s the current rule and I’m not gonna switch up our foundational rules mid-evening. She’s got this bad (and getting worse) habit of announcing she has to pee than insisting she isn’t going to do it. I don’tt order her to do anything, I just tell her she can do what she wants, but that I am not going to play with her anymore until she goes pee. Just standing next to me yelling at me, as I say, over and over: “Please stop yelling, we do not yell in this house, I don’t want to argue with you. You don’t have to pee but you can’t tell Daddy what to do and he doesn’t want to play with you any more until you pee.” In the mood I’m in, it’s essentially torture, but I endure. Parenting, man. You just.. endure sometimes.
She then proceeds to whine and scream at me for thirty minutes, until she eventually gives up and goes pee. And she screams and whines all the way to the bathroom, and all through the act of peeing, which really is commitment to a bit, I gotta admit.
I thought that’d be the end of it, but no, the whole thing has broken her, and of course she wasted half her bedtime whining, and she hates it when that happens, experiences profound regret, so she starts screaming and whining and demanding a do over, which of course, one cannot do. I try to teach her this lesson all the time: what is regret, and how we can’t always do things over, and it’s important we realize beforehand that we will regret our actions, so we can avoid them. But of course, I always try this when she’s in a state, so it never takes. I should try it the next day or something.
So all of bedtime is just the longest, most brutal bout of screaming and resistence that I’ve encountered in… well, only a few months, but when she’s getting better all the time, a relapse like this, yeah, it does you in.
But eventually we lay on the floor and finish our routine of kissing goodnight and singing our lullabye and it is gorgeous and touching and cute AF and she goes to bed and begs me to stay a while, and I do, because she’s had a rough night, and in the end everyone lives happily ever after.
Which really was an accomplishment given my own bad mood to start. A+ parenting. Okay, maybe a B+. Good enough.
And then I stupidly check my email and get this:
I am a subscriber and regularly read your blog every day (the two do not always go together, as I do not have time to read all the blogs I subscribe to). I usually like your reading and make an effort to at least skim through it every day. This is why I was a bit saddened today to read your comment: "Roger Waters is out there saying batshit things about Russia and Ukraine." Because I respect your opinions, I decided spend a bit of time to provide this feedback. I read the Rolling Stones article, which apparently is the basis of your off-the-cuff judgement. IMHO, the Rolling Stones article is a "batshit" summary of what Roger Waters is really saying. I wish you had taken the trouble spending the time to find out what the guy is really about. For example, his recent chat with Joe Rogan on Spotify Joe Rogan podcast. I am only half way through it but from I heard so far I would describe it as an inspiring interview. Please try not to form opinions so quickly.
Ever since Substack started reccommending my newsletter to strangers, I feared this day would come. I deleted the comment from yesterday’s post, because I don’t want anyone going and making fun of the guy who posted it, I don’t want to contribute to that side of the internet and once Joe Rogan’s involved, you’re on thin ice so we need to be careful. But let me touch on a few points here.
a) I hate recaps, hate them. I hate endless caveats in writing1. I recognize they are required to some extent, but one I am not writing a book here, or an article for a news publication or scholarly journal. One of the greatest joys of GMHHAY has been that I can just write without a ton of caveats, and the small audience who mostly knows me knows where these things are coming from. I knew this wasn’t going to last once strangers started signing up. I guess that was inevitable. But it does make me sad.
b) It doubly makes me sad because I have never had any aspirations for this. I don’t want GMHHAY to be successful, I don’t want it to be widely read, I don’t want it to be like the rest of the internet. It is intentionally impenetrable and not marketed at all. I don’t mention it on my other social media platforms where I have many followers, because I don’t want people to find it in that way. It seemed rude to ask those other Substacks to stop recommending me, and so far it hadn’t been a problem. I was hoping that the structural impenetralism (did I just make that word up) of GMHHAY along with the inherent friction of the newsletter format would act as a buffer from the larger internet’s ill tendencies, and it has, but I am now feeling like I’m living on borrowed time.
c) Not only do I not want GMHHAY to be successful, I actively fear it. I used to write things for the larger internet. I would write things for big, famous publications, small, burgeoning publications, or on my own blog and then tweet out snippets to my ten thousand Twitter followers. I have Medium posts that have been read by over a million people. I’ve turned Medium posts into books. And while those posts allowed me to meet some amazing people and some famous people (usually not the same!), and they were beloved by 95 to 99% of their readers, every one of them came with the downside of the remaining 1% who would say terrible things to you. I am very, very ill suited to this. And this commenter is not saying terrible things to me, but it sure feels very Gandalfian Stormcrow and a dim portent indeed.
d) Now I gotta be a guy spending a ton of time on a comment, trying to have an earnest, heart-to-heart conversation with a stranger on the internet, which is not only impossible in 2022 but probably illlegal in some countries. Also, half the people you don’t know on the internet are fake and who wants to have a conversation with a robot, not I what is this GPT-3MHHAY or something? Bah duh bump. Sorry. Anyway. It also felt bad just completely ignoring the comment, though that is what I’m hopefully going to do in the future. But for this one, I decided to try and do this in post form instead, so maybe it would mitigate things, but it won’t. This whole exercise is a terrible idea, and I am sorry I’m putting you through it.
e) Turning to the reader’s comment, I don’t understand why someone would assume my comment was off-the-cuff. I read the whole interview. In the commenters defense, he did say the interview was “apparently the basis of your off-the-cuff judgement.” One could grammatically read that as saying the basis is unsure, but the off-the-cuffedness is not, but I will be generous and assume the “apparently” also applies to the “off the cuff” as well, so I will chalk it up to an honest mistake. I’ve read several related interviews where Waters says similar things. I have been following Roger Waters career my entire life, at least since I was thirteen and Tom L’s older brother played me the Wall in 1985 at mile 7 of Farmer’s Loop Road in Fairbanks, Alaska. I obviously remember the exact moment. I own every Pink Floyd album. Shit I own every Roger Waters solo album. I’m the only person out there sticking up for his 2017 solo album Is This The Life that we Really Want? Great album. The thing about an album, though, is every line of lyrics flow by, pretty much at the same rate, and one of them is kind of batshit, you just sort of skip it and move on to the next one and don’t really dwell on it. But in hindsight, it’s there, it’s there. I’ve not missed a Roger Waters solo tour in twenty years.
f) Turning to Roger Water’s comments, I stand by the “batshit” descriptor. However, I will allow that I did not spend enough time enunciating my comprehensive theory of Roger Waters’ brain, because it was 7:30 in the morning. This is what I said: “Really evidence of how people can lose nuance and complexity in their world views when they just fall back onto heuristics, onto short cuts. It seems perfectly reasonable in any default international politics situation to assume that the US is probably to blame for things. Reality, however, is much more complex, and you can’t just take the “probably” out of that sentence and still be right.” I stand by this 100%. In the interview, Roger Waters said: “Of course, we — when I say we, I’m now speaking as a taxpayer in the United States — are not. We are the most evil of all by a factor of at least 10 times,” he says. “We kill more people. We interfere in more people’s elections. We, the American empire, is doing all this shit.” This is incorrect, but it is not batshit. America has done a stunning amount of bad things in the world, and I often find myself thinking these exact thoughts. I disagree in the end with this statement, but it’s a widely held one and not unreasonable.
Also, fun fact: Waters is using “taxpayer” here because he is not a US citizen. But he pays taxes here as a resident. But he doesn’t vote here, and he doesn’t even always vote at home.
g) Batshit part one:
“You’ve seen it on what I’ve just described to you as Western propaganda,” he retorts. “It’s exactly the obverse of saying Russian propaganda; Russians interfered with our election; Russians did that. It’s all lies, lies, lies, lies.” ← this is every bit as much a lie as what he is accusing others of. It is a complete failure of Roger Waters to fairly apply Roger Waters’ own vision to things. I am not in the mood to re-litigate it. Even Roger Waters knows this, as evidenced by the reporter:
I try to push gingerly through Waters’ brick wall. I haven’t just seen things via corporate media, I say — I’ve got friends in Ukraine, and friends who went to Ukraine as journalists. I’ve even got friends who are Ukrainian journalists. I’m relying on testimony of people I know who’ve seen things with their own eyes. And it’s not only Ukrainian officials and Western media reporting atrocities — there are war crimes investigations already underway. This does not go far with Waters. “Maybe…”
h) Batshit part two:
“Because it’s an unnecessary war,” he says. “And those people should not be dying. And Russia should not have been encouraged to invade the Ukraine [Waters insists he is not making a political point by saying “the Ukraine”] after they tried for 20 years to avoid it by suggesting diplomatic measures to Western governments.”
In other words, it’s NATO’s fault that Putin decided to invade Ukraine.
Now, okay, sure. Does he come right out and say it is exclusively the US’s fault that Russia invaded? Not quite, one could argue that the journalist put words into his mouth. But he has said similar things before, this one is very close to that, and even on its own merits, this line of thinking is batshit. It is so tedious. Russia invaded Ukraine to keep it out of NATO, an organization that for thirty years did not join. America has had essentially warm relationships with both of these countries for years. Our relationship with Russia is not that of other countries out there we are adversaries with. And it’s not an economically predatory one, another bad habit of America’s. Russia has had Most Favored Nation Trading Status since 1992. We buy Russian goods, Russia buys our goods. They have Apple Stores and McDonalds and we have… Russian venture funds and private equity. Well, we did. Congrats, Yuri. Our last president arguably had the warmest relations with Putin of any country. We did not start this war. We did not make this war happen. You can be the biggest bully on the playground and sometimes fights break out that you did not start.
i) My statement: This is what I mean when I say Waters lost “nuance and complexity in their [his] views when they just fall back onto heuristics, onto short cuts.” Waters believes that the US is the most evil country right now. Therefore it must be responsible for all evil. That’s where a heuristic takes you – rules of thumb can be wrong, and they can take you to incorrect places. It feels right, because it’s usually right. The situation is complex, why unpack it when your heuristic has, historically served you well. And if it doesn’t appear to be serving you well in this instance, well, even then, nine times out of ten, give it enough time, and it’ll pull through. We get old, we get lazy, the world is infinitely complex, and when you’re one of the best-selling artists of all time, people want your opinion on everything. In that situation, you fall back on heuristics. It’s understandable. But it is incorrect. And no one is forced into that situation. Was “batshit” perhaps too harsh? Perhaps. But the line of thinking is deeply flawed at several points, Waters is aware of the megaphone he has, and he has doubled down on it, believing himself to be principled, at significant personal economic cost. He is currently acting as the antithesis of Homo Economicus, i.e., irrational, i.e., “batshit.”
j) I don’t understand why in 2022 anyone would feel compelled to reccomend Joe Rogan to anyone. Putting aside his utter loathesomeness (to me), he is hugely famous and popular. If people wanted to check him out, they would have. It’s like recommending the bible. Less said the better here. Though I will point out Joe Rogan did not interview Roger Waters in 2017 when he had a new album out. Only seems to have decided it was worth it when he started saying certain things.
Shit, it’s time to get Jane this took too long. We shall speak of it no more.
Justa mix today. Starts with an oldie, ends with an oldie, everything in between is new. New Alvvays is great. Bill Callahan is getting stronger and stronger as the years go by. I love the idea of naming your band True Faith. I don’t know anything about Guerilla Toss or whether or not this is really a Neu! collaboration, but man I love this song. I may have already posted it. It’s that good.
We shall return to our mundane nothingness tomorrow. Apologies.
I once wrote this brilliant parody talking about the launch of a social platform called Caveatster where you could list all your caveats in one place so you could always refer back to it instead of starting all your writing with a bunch of throat clearing. It was hilarious. Alas, I cannot find it.