Good morning, friend! Hello. How are you? I am good. 48+ hours of being covid negative. That is exciting. I might be let out of my basement hole sometime before Christmas. We are thinking Friday. I mean, it would probably be fine now, but Janet will take Jane tomorrow night on her regularly scheduled Thursday night, if I stay away from her till then, and that’s more rest for me, and a night alone for Emma to recoup and one more day before I have to begin my penitent one week straight of daddy breakfasts and bedtimes. Seems like a good approach. Also I’ll have to mask for ages, and if I’m just alone for another 24 hours, that’s a 24 hours I won’t have to mask.
Had a lovely doctor’s appointment yesterday, the recptionist did, in fact, ask me if I had covid and I just said yes, loud and proud, not my fekkin problem you guys have such a dumb system. The other two people in the waiting room did not seem to be listening or care. When I got into my doctor’s office, we were chatting about reception and I told her it was weird they asked and made me say it out loud, I felt bad for the other people, and she told me she had already told them and they weren’t supposed to ask out loud, so, you know, routine disorganization is always the actual answer. But from then on, they were actually very careful around me, everyone was in face shields and masks and gowns n shit, and they did all my lab work in the exam room intead of making me go to the lab, and they let me out a special exit, so, yeah. Not the worst.
Then I tried to go to Taco Bell and I pulled up in the drive through and they were like “can you come in and order we’re not doing drive through now” and I’m like “I have covid” and the woman literally said “that’s cool.” So, yeah.
Needless to say, I did not do that.
Drive through seems iffy enough.
So they are releasing Trump’s tax returns to the public and I gotta say… that seems… weird? Kinda wrong? Is that weird of me? I mean don’t get me wrong, I don’t really care about fairness for the dude. In a sort of might-makes-right kind of way, the way he respects and follows, it’s just desserts, it’s his comeuppance but in my boring-ass rule-of-law kinda way it seems sort of dodgy. Like… pass a law saying presidents have to release their tax returns! There is no such law! Or, like, grow a pair and leak it like a real politician. Or, like, find a crime in there and prosecute him and enter it into evidence. Just sort of saying “oh hey we finally got this so you get to see it” just seems weird to me. But then again, I just spent a paragraph arguing something that is not my battle, not my problem, so I will stop now.
Yesterday was our old friend Mike Gill’s birthday, and a bunch of us had a Zoom cal to commemorate it, and hang out with his partner Jess in LA before she went out to see some more of his friends. It was very nice but very sad. Good to see old friends. We kept turning to sad topics. The thing about Zooms for sad topics is that they can go two ways: you can all joke around and cheer each other up, and there was a little of that, or you can keep gravitating to sad topics. This one was more of the latter. Felt especially poignant during a quarantine. Also Mike died of heart issues and I am in the middle of a whole clinical process to get my heart checked out because I seem to have a once-a-decade hypochondria about my heart where I freak out and make a bunch of medical professionals check it out and tell me it’s not going to fail on me. The two of these things happening simultaneously makes it feel more sad, more poignant and substantially less ridiculous. Mike was younger than I am.
I drank too much on the Zoom, as I do on Zooms, and afterward I fired up Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles on the Plex. I watched this film in the theater maybe 25 years ago and found it mesmerizing and perfect. Plus I have forever been in love with Delphine Seyrig from her role in Last Year at Marienbad, perhaps the greatest film ever made. Anyway, I’ve been working on Jeanne Dielman for a few weeks now, since it was literally named The Greatest Film of All Time by some Very Smart People. It is notoriously slow, which I loved back then but of course none of us can sit through slow foreign films these days the modern world has killed off our attention spans, etc. Except this time I was a little drunk, and I was also listening to a slightly sped-up mix of a Stromae song, and man, the two worked together so well, it was like time-bending. Sped up remix, slowed-down film, some fine wine.
The secret truth about “boring” films these days is that they’re fine to watch in the theater, where your attention is forced, almost impossible to sit and watch at home, but then if you try and watch them with a little alcohol in you again, they are amazing.
This seemed a lot more profound last night.
Downloaded a two hundred and fifty megabyte update to Quicken this morning. It took like… three seconds to download? And for some reason, this one time a blazing fast download happened, I remembered how much time I used to spend waiting for, like, 500k downloads from usenet. You know, ten minutes for one little half meg. Just insane. It just just insane how fast bandwidth is now, how fast everything is. Does it need to be any faster? I do not think it needs to be any faster. I don’t really think 5G is gonna be all that. I kinda think we’re good. I think we’re probably good on Moore’s law, everything can just stay this speed from here on out and it’ll be just fine.
Like after reading this Chip War book I kinda feel like the whole purpose of Moore’s law at this point is just a military industrial complex conceit to, like, maintain America’s technical superiority, so our weapons are better than the Russians (back in the day) or the Chinese (these days). And if we just stopped and decided that, like, twenty teraflops, in a consumer desktop machine is enough — BECAUSE IT IS — then the Chinese will catch up to us. Which is obviously bad, but also, so is a pointless Moore’s law rat wheel!
Chip War was so good. It was exactly as good as everyone said.
On the domestic front, the novelty of Facetiming has warn off for Jane, and tonight she just played Animal Crossing during our Facetime sesh, though I did watch her do a meticulous edit of a pixel-pattern in an editor and make a nice Hello Kitty pattern. That was hella impressive. And she did come over and kiss the camera. And she said tomorrow we would text. That was nice. I miss my daughter.
All right this is a mix I made for someone in, like, 1989 or so, I think. I think it was Ann G. They sent it to me this year, so when I was sorting through my photos the other day, I found it. So I made it for you. Except I took the Morrissey and Smiths songs off, cuz fuck that guy.
I have zero recollection of ever liking some of these bands: Housemartins, Big Audio Dynamite. I assume the cool obscure stuff on here — the Judys, the Woodentops, were bands that I learned about from my friend Chris who was a year older than me, had great obscure taste and was sending me mix tapes from college. And actually, the Judys track is not on Spotify — though another of their albums is — so I put a Tullycraft cover of it on here that seemed appropriate.
It’s old school it’s like 2020 when I first started writing these missives and I was still going through and ripping all my old mix tapes. Retro.
Until tomorrow!