Good morning! Hello there. How are you? I am good. Back from a long four-day weekend, ‘twas lovely, thank. Oof. Issue 911. I should skip this one. Make 911 a number like 13 where we just skip it. Oh and it’s Tuesday, technically I should be doing fiction today, but I guess I’ll postpone that till tomorrow. I should document this weekend and stuff and things.
Don Holland, the owner of Man Ray died. That is sad. It seems he was 82, which is crazy. It’s crazy that an 80+ year-old opened a night club in Central Square. Don was driven to fulfill his mission, and fulfill it he did. I took this photo of Don in 1992 or so. He immediately walked over to me and said “no photos.” I don’t know that he ever said much to me ever again in thirty or so years. Honestly I don’t think he liked me much, and he made me nervous. But he had a huge influence on my life, and I’ll always be thankful that he made such an amazing place where so many people could feel safe and at home. RIP.
Also, look at Baby Hass and I think that might be Doug on the left?
Anyway, the weekend. It was great. I spent the bulk of Friday and Saturday moving out of my storage unit. Took six truck loads, and my truck holds a lot of stuff, what with that whole extra frunk area. My god I have so much stuff. So much stuff. I moved it all into the old basement acupuncture studio at the new house: one room completely filled with boxes of various electronic devices. I save my boxes so I can eBay my items for a smidge more money. One room is filled with my hard drives, personal files, old photo frames and assorted stuff, and an entire room devotes to my old record label inventory and extra copies of my books.
Man. I have created a lot of media that people don’t especially want to consume. Founding a record label right at the moment that the CD died was a weird thing. Nowadays most people don’t even bother to make them. And certainly almost no one buys them. I don’t know why I keep them all. Anyway, if you need an old Archenemy CD, let me know, I’ll mail you a copy. Or a copy of any of my books. Don’t you just love GMHHAY? Don’t you want to re-live the pandemic’s early days? Of course you do.
Friday I also made my Walmart run, well, the first of two. They were playing Mr Brightside and I love it when the Muzak plays shit from the clubs and my past life. Really makes me feel awesome. Big news I have migrated from the normal One-A-Day for Men multivitamin to the One-A-Day for Men 50+ multivitamin. I avoided doing this when I turned 50 but now that I’m the ripe old age of 51, it seems time. Maybe it’ll cure my arthritis and my chronic tennis elbow. Also in the vitamin aisle, there’s a whole section of supplements for muscle builders with super macho branding and design and names like TOTAL WAR and whatnot. Except one of them is inexplicably called WOKE AF and I wonder how it’s selling these days or if it is one of the less sympathetic victims of the Republican’s endless culture wars. The COVID tests are basically unfindable at Walmart now, they have relegated them away from an end cap and into some random aisle where even the pharmacy personnel aren’t sure where they are, and they don’t have any BINAXNOW tests, just some other brand. One more place relegating COVID to the past.
Also Nyquil has redesigned their bottle and brand and it looks generic and bad and it is no longer a distinctive (in the Sharpian sense) triangular bottle it’s just a normal rectangular bottle and I swear to god brands keep redesigning themselves into generic territory and I would not be surprised at all to find that the same people that did the Zevia redesign did the Nyquil redesign and it just makes me sad I loved that bottle, that bottle and I have a long, long relationship.
The other big thing Friday is I went to that estate sale that was selling all the hi fi gear and I bought the Klipsch speakers, which were RF-7 IIs. I got them for about 1/4 of retail. They are pristine. I am very excited. I also got myself a small statue of a tiger, which is great, and you really deserve a photo of it but I have not yet taken a photo of either thing, I was so focused on getting out of the storage unit. I will get one for you. The tiger is great. I want to set it up somewhere with my tiger tapestry that my great aunt Fanny made. They would go great together. The house was pretty much a hoarding situation, one of the oldest houses in Pittsboro, filled with playboys and toys and antique furniture and so many bottles just bottles everywhere. The McIntosh receiver has not sold yet, they were asking basically retail for it. I talked to them yesterday and they said I could lowball but no guarantees, so I am debating about that, but gawd, even a lowball on a McIntosh receiver is still a bit of coin and I am not really an audiophile or anything I can barely tell the difference.
Saturday was more moving of the storage unit. Jane helped me on a run that was fun. She fell and skinned her knee but she bounces back fast. I had really wanted to get the storage unit done on Friday, I had big plans for the weekend, so Saturday afternoon was noteworthy chiefly for the radical downsizing of my weekend ambitions, alas. But it got done. I moved out. I ended the lease. $280 a month saved. That’ll pay for most of the utilities at the new house.
Saturday night I went to Cats Cradle to see some bands, even though my god, I was so exhausted. First on the bill (for me) was a band called Dark Crystals that has this woman Lindsay in it who moved down here a few years back and it seems like half my friends in Boston know but we have never met. Emma is keen to meet her, but we couldn’t find a babysitter so Emma didn’t come to the show. I kinda wanna join her band and play bass. Nice experimental loops and drones with some poppy vocals. They had a song at the end with a guest saxophonist that sounded almost like late-period Talk Talk.
The headliner was Neptune, a Boston band who released their first album on our label, the Archenemy Record Company. I still had about 10 copies of the vinyl and I found 3 boxes of the CDs in the aforementioned storage space moving, so I brought the vinyl and a box of CDs and met up with Jason from the band and he just put them right on sale next to all of the other merch it was perfect. Neptune was playing with their lineup from 14 years ago, which was perfect because that was the last lineup I knew, so it felt like old times. I talked to Dan and Mark, the other band members, and we all dimly remembered each other from 20 years ago that was funny. The show was great, Neptune makes their own instruments and they had some of the classic instruments from back then and man, talk about a time warp. Really was something.
Oh god this is gonna go on forever I will pick it up.
Sunday I cleared the brush from the leach field at the new house. You gotta keep your leach field brush free. I went, oh, four or five years doing this on the leach field for our ADU at the main house and it was quite the chore. I don’t think this leach field had been cleared in… a decade? It is probably fucked. And my god, it was a lot of work. Cutting down whole-ass trees. Very unpleasant task. Took hours.
But I was rewarded with a Father’s Day pool party at Ricardo and Selin’s house with my fellow pool contracting partners and our families and it was just lovely. Jane loves the pool so much. She spent hours in there. And I got to relax and eat yummy tacos and cheese cake and swim and lounge around and it was somewhat unnerving to not be doing chores but also just lovely and just the ticket.
Monday was “computer day.” I reorganized my desk to get my new Mac Studio mounted on the underside of my desk, it is awesome I love it. I did a bunch of work that needed to be done, answered emails, and listened to a lot of records. Yeah, it was kind of working on a day off but also it was at my own pace, on the tasks I felt like, and that is always a great work day.
Somewhere in there I made a second Walmart run, and a run to Lowe’s hardware. I think Lowe’s was Friday. I bought a pole jack, which is a thing I have been looking for for ages but didn’t know the name, so I couldn’t actually find it on the internet. You can try any combination of “extension pole” or whatever, but until you type the exact words “pole jack” you won’t find what you’re looking for. A lot of Google searches for industrial products are like that you gotta know the exact magical incantation to make Google work. There is a similar one I’m stuck on now, which is a pole, like a pole jack but less beefy, that you use to prop up from your floor to your ceiling, to prop up plastic drop cloths when you’re working on one segment of a home. Scott Brown Carpentry on Youtube uses them all the time, but I don’t know the name of them, so I can’t actually buy one. Really is a weird quirk of the internet. Frustrating.
We had a couple Daddy Jane Dance Parties this weekend but nothing special on the musical front. Seem stuck in a Katy Perry rut, gotta get out of it.
Jane also had her first tick bite this weekend — Emma retrieved it and we’ll be sending it off for testing — and her first bee sting. There was a bee floating on the water in the pool and Jane thought she’d help it get to shore and the bee thanked her by stinging her. She is, thankfully, not allergic. Took it like a champ. Recovered in maybe ten minutes. Also the internet tells me you’re not supposed to suck bee stings but I did that anyway and I’m convinced I saved the day because I am such a good dad.
Pat me on the head.
Good daddy.
Happy father’s day.
Ambient playlist for you today. If you’re running a massage or acupuncture studio, this is the playlist for you. Man that’d be so awesome to get a massage and have the music be super good. No shade to any of my past massage therapists. Man I need a new LMT. My neck. It’s defective.
Until tomorrow, friend.