Good morning. Hello. How are you? #784
My brilliant Christmas song, kind pain doctors, printer wars, Bunnyman.
Good morning. Helloooooo. Happy Tuesday. Before we get started, I should do my once-annual pimping out of my brilliant 1999 Christmas song, “Christmas is Murder.” It really is the best.
Look I know the production is a joke, what do you want I did it in a single afternoon on a 90’s Mac laptop. But I stand by the lyrical content, it really is a gem. Enjoy:
Headed to New York today. Big day. I am deeply ambivalent about this trip, given New York’s raidly increasing COVID numbers. It’s almost impossible for me to make a rational decision, an unholy brew of conflicting moods, philosophies, facts and concerns swirling around in my head. On the one hand, millions of people walk around New York every day without getting Covid. On the other hand, those numbers are going up up up! On the other hand, maybe I’m just going soft, becoming one of those people who doesn’t like to leave their house, but if I could just get off my keister and leave my house, I would enjoy the experience. Classic Catch-22 of “going out” that I have done a remarkable job avoiding throughout my life but maybe those days are coming to an end. Also planes suck. But seeing friends is awesome! And so are New York bagels. Also airports suck. But New York is great. Also I will miss my daughter. But also she is super looking forward to a few mommy breakfasts this week. Mommy, on the other hand, well, she’s more ambivalent about the whole affair, but it was kinda her idea.
In the end I decided to go. I really hope i don’t get COVID. Luck is another weird thing, swirling around, because I feel like I’ve been so lucky about COVID, and maybe that’ll hold for one more trip, though of course I’ve not been particularly lucky, I’ve been reclusive, and plenty of friends’ luck has run out on their no-COVID runs of late.
Three years in and we can’t even decide if Covid is capitalized or not.
Three years in and we didn’t do jack shit about ventilation.
Three years in and we made a big discovery about UV light and Covid and didn’t do anything with it.
We are so useless.
You really get that whole “no one talked about the Spanish Flu” thing. No one wants to talk about Covid, no one wants to remember it. I will be the same way in another year or so, probably. Talk to me when I’m sixty, grandpa what was Covid like, don’t ever say that word, granddaughter.
(n.b. I will be nowhere near being a grandfather at 60, my daughter will be 15 lol).
Anyway. Excited to head to the city, the dirty city, I am excited to see “you people,” my friends.
And a few work-related items.
Went to the pain doctor yesterday, that was an experience. The most earnest, sympathetic set of doctors I have ever encountered. They seemed to actually care about my problems. The earnest young man doctor and the older woman doctor, both just great. In fairness, they did tell me that my new PCP is great, and I agree, she is. I’m lucky to have her. I told them about my neck doctor who was brusque and indifferent and I didn’t have a glamorous ailment and eventually she just abandoned me — not because she left the UNC system or the profession or something, she literally just dumped me. They did not seem surprised.
They listed a long litany of possible non-narcotic pain relief approaches we could try, literally like a dozen things I had never heard of, that no one has suggested in the last thirty years. It got me excited. I mean, I will probably be in and out of that clinic for the rest of my adult life, and it is not particularly conveniently located, but it is a ray of hope for pain reduction that I’ve not had, ever. The idea of walking around without neck pain even for a second, while sober, is… well, it fills me with tears at the mere possibility.
So we are trying to things first. We’re killing off the daily pill I’ve taken for years that I swear doesn’t do anything, swapping in another pill that takes an entirely different approach to pain reduction and has the side effect of anti-depression. Also diahrrea or constipation, so I guess crap shoot there. I’m a bit hesitant cuz I once tried Wellbutrin in an effort to quit smoking and it made me very aggro, and I had to quit it, but hopefully that won’t happen here. We will see.
Also going to do some weird shots right into the “problem” muscles in my neck. This isn’t till next month. I’m very excited about this. Just turn them to jelly.
On the way home from the pain clinic I stopped at Walmart to buy a cheap-ass printer, because my beautiful, wonderful, HP LaserJet 4025N, industrial-grade office color laser printer than I have had for almost ten years and paid thousands of dollars for is broken. I did a lot of work on it and diagnosed the problem and the problem is with the transfer assembly, which has a belt-gear misalignment or breakage, but this is, unfortunately, not a user-serviceable repair. And so I need to find a professional HP printer repair person who will come to rural North Carolina. The first one I emailed did not answer, the second one said they can’t come into a residence for insurance reasons. The thing weighs a ton so I would prefer to not have to haul it.
And in the meantime, Timehop’s accountants need me to sign and mail a DTF-620 which is not, sadly, a Down-To-F**k form, but rather a “Application for Certification of a Qualified Emerging Technology Company,” natch. So i need to print it out. And I have no printer.
Janet has an old cheap-ass HP Inkjet she said was “broken,” but in my hubris I figured it was just a clogged ink nozzle or something, so we brought that over to the house and nope, sure enough, it really is broken.
So I stop at Walmart and buy a $99 Canon laser printer and it looks very nice and I think to myself “maybe that horrible thirty years where all consumer printers are garbage is over maybe they make good printers for individual humans now.”
I bring it home, take it out of the box, plug it in, and it flips the GFI on the outlet. This is the selfsame outlet that has been hosting my giant HP Office Printer for six years so, you know, curious. I try a different outlet. Immediately flips the GFI on that one. Bring it to another room, turn it on, it gives me three errors:
One for a paper jam — it has not had a piece of paper in it even once yet.
One for a mis-seated transfer assembly which, you know, I suppose I could have inserted improperly, but after watching an utterly charming video by an Indian printer repair guy, I am sure I did not.
And one that is E001, which, when you look it up, Canon makes no pretense of it not being fatal: “Call Canon for warranty options,” is the only thing listed in the coumn for addressing this error.
I fiddle around with it for another hour — which I do not have, because I have work to do, but it’s also work to get this infernal tax form printed — but it has become clear this printer is DoA.
So now I am three printers deep into this saga with no path toward a solution.
If I knew my glorious 4025 was truly dead, I’d suck it up for a new industrial office printer. The HP Color LaserJet Enterprise M653dn looks like a worthy successer, perhaps. But I’m sure this thing can be fixed. And that is a lot of money I was not expecting to pay.
I could, I suppose, just keep plowing through cheap-ass, broken, consumer “printers” that are really just money traps and honey-pots for ink cartridge spending, but god, the environment, environment, so much pastic into landfills. Those things are an ecological abomination and should be banned.
Finished Will Seargant’s autobiography, Bunnyman. Will is, in case the title didn’t give it away, a Bunnyman, as in the guitarist for the band. It’s not really a band biography, it’s more of an historical account of living in postwar Liverpool in the shadow of the Beatles, and it is evocative and rich and you feel like you were there, from the crumbling council estates, broken familys, the Cavern Club being torn down and replaced with a parking lot, war-torn buildings everywhere, and the rise of punk and the legendary venue Eric’s. I picked it up because I am fascinated with the life of another Bunnyman, drummer Pete Defreitas, but he only shows up on the last page, as the Bunnymen are just getting famous. This is not a diary of rock excess, it is a diary of post war English rock and roll longing, something much more universal. Quite enjoyed it.
The holiday cards are all designed (excellent job, Emma) and going out imminently, so one last call for addresses, if you would like one, fill out the form here.
Got a playlist of covers for you today. Starts off with the PJ Harvey cover of Leonard Cohen that is the opening song to a show Emma and I are watching, Bad Sisters. Can you imagine making a TV show and getting PJ Harvey to cover Leonard Cohen for the opening? Who even had the chutzpah to go try and make that happen. Ambitious. Brilliant. Got a Low cover I didn’t know about till Mimi passed, a Bauhaus cover cuz I just bought the Beggar’s Archive re-issue of Mask (and Burning from the Inside, and the Love and Rockets LP Box set, whomever has the job of running Beggar’s Archive has the best job). Mark Lanegan’s (RIP) amazing Nick Cave cover. Lotta good ones on here.
I really don’t know how this week and GMHHAY is going to go. I’m not going to be waking up at 6:30, I can tell you that. Maybe I’ll do them mid-day? Difficult to predict. Expect a spotty week. But I will do my best.
i spy a suzy ornament on your tree 😁
"Also diahrrea or constipation, so I guess crap shoot there." - effortlessly brilliant sentence.