Good morning. Hello. How are you? #749
Midterms and Rowling and the loneliness of a 2006 ten-inch Old Navy Brown Bear
Good morning. Hello. How are you today? I hope you’re doing all right. Not my finest day yesterday. Jane is making bedtimes very hard for me these days and it is wearing on me, and it’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy because she is starting to expect them to be difficult so she immediately just goes right into being difficult and breaking this cycle is very very hard and it’s taking a lot out of me.
I’m stressed about the mid terms! Aren’t you stressed about the mid terms? I’m so annoyed with Americans they are such lunatics. Straight-up “but Mussolini kept the trains running on time” vibes coming from polls around here. “Sure, the Republicans are fascists but… inflation!” I mean, if there were a legitimate actual second party in the US that had policies and a backbone and no fascists, yeah, sure, okay.
Four years of enduring that asshole as president, and now four years of stressing about him running again. This is no way to live, I’m so sick of it.
How do people even consider voting for such horrific people? What has twisted so completely in the “christian” mindset that it’s completely acceptable for them to elect unrepentant sinners, so long as they pretend they’re going to pass the laws they want.
What’s interesting to me is that they still so utterly believe the bargain. Like okay, sure, you’ve decided that it’s morally acceptable to elect contemptible people if they pass the laws you want. I can see someone going that route. But what really blows my mind is how completely confident they are, deep down, that these contemptible people are going to vote the right way. There is not an ounce of doubt in their minds that Hershel Walker will vote to criminalize abortion. That’s really something! I feel like they should maybe doubt that! It’s really sort of stunning to me how confident they are that he will just completely submit to their will. I mean, Bush 1 and 2 both sort of tricked the evangelicals, and their takewaway from that was not “oh we can be tricked by people who are clearly not evangelical,” but “we should double-down on the crazy people! Pick people out of the blue so they owe us.” And it works! Everyone is sure it’ll work! And it probably will! Hershel Walker will probably vote to outlaw abortion even has he has availed himself of these laws literally countless times. Or maybe he won’t, I don’t know, but it sure feels like he will. We all believe it! That’s really something. There is some dark, hidden power at work in the Republican party that everyone is so convinced that they don’t even think about it as a risk. Like there’s some sort of star chamber that these candidates secretly traverse in order to convince the Powers That Be before they get nominated.
Or maybe it’s all just fake, that these people will do whatever they want, and in the end the whole thing is insane hubris and they’re wrong, and Vance and Masters ands Walker will not vote to end abortion in the US because they truly do not care one way or the other and are, maybe, just maybe, using the evangelicals as much as they’re being used by them.
Oh yeah I definitely don’t want to be here today. I was telling someone, on some visit with humans not too long ago, maybe that one-day New York trip? I don’t remember. But anyway I was telling them that most days GMHHAY is the easiest thing in the world to write. It’s a joy. But every once in a while you get one of those days where it is like pulling teeth. And of course the secret to any successful writing is that you have to write through the pain. GMHHAY is a unique challenge for me though, because when I’m writing a book, I can write through the pain and then go back and edit it. Like I have found passages in book drafts that say things like “…in a reference to his earlier study oh god this is so hard please make it stop the pain the pain writing is pain.” But here in GMHHAY I have to, you know, have it be a semi-coherent edit on the first pass. No fun.
Question for you: I use this app called Captio, it is the greatest thing. All it does is let you email yourself. You open the app, it’s one big text entry field, one button, “send.” Thank you to Michael Galpert for recommending this app to me like ten years ago it has truly been life changing. The thing is, though, despite changing the copyright to 2021 on their home page, Captio hasn’t been updated in years and it is really starting to show its age. It still works, but the bugs are piling up. There is an app called MeMail that seems to do the same thing. Has anyone used that? I am scared to try it, though I suppose there is zero lock-in in this whole situation. I guess this is a question that is also a protip lifehack for you: try Captio (or MeMail). It is so, so useful.
JK Rowling is out there saying crazy stuff again. Scotland is proposing a law that people can change genders without, you know, submitting to a bunch of doctors prodding them. You have to self-attest. To be clear, this self-attestation comes after living as the other gender for six months and there are criminal penalties for lying. Rowling just leaves this fact out completely when she wrote her editorial against the law. She just goes on and on about how evil men will pretend to be women so they can get into women safe spaces. This may well be true? I don’t know. But the law puts criminal penalties on these people if they do this. But that is not good enough for Rowling. She wants every law abiding person to suffer needlessly just in case. She dresses it up with a ton of weird, creepy, transphobic “statistics” that are irrelevant to her argument. Because that’s the argument: some people will cheat with this law, and making cheating illegal is not good enough. She actually says outright: “It is dangerous to assume any category of people deserves a presumption of innocence.”
Really something else. I suspect she knows she “made a mistake” with that sentence, not because, you know, she believes it, or thinks that trans people deserve a presumption of innocence, but because it distracted from her glorious pyramid scheme of irrelevant but important sounding words to gussy up her hatred.
Really is something the stupid shit people fall on their sword about.
There is another 2006 ten-inch Old Navy Brown Bear on eBay right now. It’s asking price is $59. Man I really screwed up that market. These people all think there’s a market, there is no market. There was never a market, there was one toddler who did not take enough care of her toys. I am both happy and sad to say that Jane now does not ruin her Brown Bear at nearly the same rate. Part of this is because she is more careful with her plushies (still hate that world) than previously. But also — and this is the sad part — Brown Bear just isn’t her favorite anymore. He rarely leaves the bed with her in the morning, unless I suggest him to her. I am feeling really bad for Brown Bear. Dude is literally a buddha he’s been reincarnated so many times and now he sits there in a peaceful, trancelike state, unperturbed as his sole reason for existing in life slowly abandons him. It’s really tragic. I feel his pain.
So. Yeah. That’s where I’m at today. Dread about the mid-terms and empathetic misery with a toy.
Moody and quiet mix for you today, since I’m depressed. Feels right. Mostly new, there is a new Hayden song come on that is so exciting. And new Sault. I put a Springsteen track from Nebraska on here but that’s because there is a new pressing of it. Listened to the new Brian Eno record and the new Archers of Loaf record yesterday they are both great. Thank you, local heroes Merge Records for sending me the Archers vinyl before the album is on Spotify so I can listen to it on vinyl first without having to restrain myself. That is very kind of you.