Good morning. Hello. How are you? #995
Claritin withdrawal, Sinead's Gospel and Reggae albums, Mars is a red herring, how Apple spends its money, the Apple car saga, Anaïs Nin graphic novel, Emma queen dream
Good morning, friend. Hello. How are you? Well, I hope. I am good. Put the wrong date on yesterday’s playlist, forgive me. Today is the 23rd, not yesterday. And it turns out I am probably not sick, I am just going off of Claritin. I had forgotten I was doing this. Emma spoke of how whenever she quits Claritin she gets burning itches and it is really hard to quit, and having taking Claritin every day for, oh, twenty year or so, probably more, I thought “huh maybe I should see if I even need this drug anymore.” After all, I do take three other allergy medications, and I haven’t had any real problems with my allergies in years. So when I refilled my handy-dandy daily pill dispenser this weekend, I skipped the Claritin. “How bad could it be,” I cockily thought.
Welp. It seems I have overthought myself into a corner, because man, my allergies are back with a vengeance today. Yesterday it was a massive headache and a tight chest, but today it is much more recognizable allergy symptoms. Fun times. Who knew. Turns out it was probably a good thing taking this pill every day for twenty years. I guess sometimes science is right. I’ll stick it out and go the week, but sweet lord a mercy, what a mess.
So I realized in the last few days that Spotify has nowhere near all of the Sinead O’connor albums on there. It’s missing three important ones: the Irish folk songs one, the reggae record and the gospel record. So I tracked those down on Youtube yesterday and finally listened to the reggae record and the Irish folk songs one and they are both really good, I don’t know why I ever thought they were going to be bad. They’re both beautiful and her voice is amazing and they are just all around well-made. It’s starting to occur to me that my loosely-but-long-held heuristic of Sinead’s albums being not as good as the first two was incorrect, that all of her records are brilliant in their own way, and I was wrong, and it was probably some mixture of sexism, blowing her off for mental illness, and of course post-SNL bullshit and even though I always loved her, and suspected this to be true, and even tried to listen to every one of her albums a year or so ago, I missed the boat, and I deeply regret it. At least I had an inkling of this before she died. I just. Ooof.
Grimes wants to die on Mars and I mean, that’s fine with me, go for it Grimes. It did recently occur to me, though — I don’t remember how, it was probably Manu — that this whole Mars thing is a red herring. Manu and a rewatch of Total Recall made me realize that space colonies will just mean new forms of tyranny, but the thing I realized quite recently is that no matter how much we fuck up the Earth, it will always be easier and cheaper to fix the Earth than terraform another planet. It will be cheaper and easier to build sealed space colonies on Earth than it will be on another planet. The only way it will be cheaper to go to Mars is if we are ditching billions of people and only building for a select few. And shit. Even then, it’d probably just be easier to do it on Earth. The whole thing suddenly, clearly seems entirely pointless to me, at least for the next 7.59 billion years until the sun consumes the Earth. We probably have a little time. What is the point.
Man if you had told 12 year-old Rick that yeah we got pretty close to the point of being able to colonize Mars but that the whole idea was dumb and you’re not into it anymore, 12 year-old Rick probably woulda been pretty pissed at me and called me a square old. Except 12 year-old Rick didn’t use the word “square.”
Apple spent like a billion dollars on a soccer player and before the implosion of PAC 12 — a college sports league if you don’t know, like I didn’t — Apple offered every school in the league $25 million, possibly going up to $50 million each. So, you know, between $300 and $600 million. This is what the richest company in the world wants to do with its money. It’s kind of… weird? But also endearing? Like Apple isn’t making blimps or satellites or cars (lol) or really doing much of anything but spending their money on live sports. It’s so weird. Maybe also good? Maybe it’s best they don’t bother trying to innovate or change the world maybe they’re content with their past universe-denting and now they just want to be MGM or something. They never use the words “AI,” bless their hearts. They avoided crypto. It seems weird they got sucked into VR, though.
Also I wonder how much they’ve spent on not delivering a car now. Has it it $10 billion? A hundred billion? I wonder what they have to show for it internally. Do we think there is even a prototype car? Do we think it’s even as good as, say, a Chevy Volt? God, I desperately wish someone could write the definitive history of the Apple car endeavor. It’s probably one of the most herculean efforts ever undertaken in the history of business and no one knows anything about it and it may stay that way forever and that just seems… deeply unfortunate.
Speaking of Apple, how much money and engineering resources do you think Google consumes trying to make www.google.com work with Apple’s shitty-ass autocorrect keyboard? How much energy to they put into guessing all of our mis-typed Google search queries because none of us can use Apple’s iOS keyboard anymore because it’s autocorrect algorithm has been infected by The Joker? I bet they have… a lot of people on this. A lot.
Finished a graphic novel about Anaïs Nin based on Henry and June and Incest, two volumes of her unexpurgated diaries. It was a nice trip down memory lane, re-reading those stories, and the art is great and it’s a nice succinct recap of the events, the crazy things that lady did when coming out of her shell. If you are an Anaïs fan, I recommend it. Absolutely lovely illustrations and an interesting twist on the many faces of Anaïs, endowing the journal itself with a personality that wields an influence on Anaïs, rather than acting as a receptacle. I liked that.
My “sickness” caused me to take a mid-day nap yesterday (no meeting week rules). Jane threw a giant fit at lunch, just an old-school, inconsolable endless fit all because mommy didn’t play “knock knock” at the door coming back from swim class, and then mommy had the temerity to tell Jane she would get her iPad after she finished making her sandwich, or Jane could get it herself. Not sure what it was, but this caused a giant fit, she threw the strawberries into the pantry and shut the door, pissed Emma off, Emma left her to me, I did my best, but she was really on a rampage, and I was dozing off from this Claritin withdrawal, so I took her to my bedroom, which is where we take her when she has fits. We haven’t had to do it in ages. But I figured I was going there anyway for a nap.
Anyway, took about an hour to calm her down but eventually she got calmed, Emma and her reached some compromise where she could do Duolingo on her phone, and I said she should stay with me in bed and she did and she did Duolingo and I put my CPAP mask on and fell asleep with her next to me. Which was just great and I wish I could do that more often.
And then I had this fantastic dream where Emma was the Queen of England, only she was still Emma. Maybe Emma from earlier in our relationship. We lived in Somerville, MA, near our friends, in a walk-up apartment (Emma in a walk-up lol). We tried to keep a low profile, and it mostly worked. Like she was the queen, so she was famous, but people in Somerville sorta let us be. Kinda like back when Christina Ricci was filming Prozac Nation and everyone in Cambridge just sorta let her be, and she started dating Dave and going to the Lizard Lounge and shit. And then one day her private secretary called, and informed her that there was some English bigwig visiting Boston and the Consulate was going to send someone to welcome them to town. And Emma was like “no, it’s fine, I’m the queen, I’ll do it.” And so she got her crown and silver silk gloves out of some closet and put them on along with her pajama bottoms and hoodie and we went downstairs and got into her chauffeured Rolls that they had sent around.
And she’s like “look, I know I’m a pretty low key queen but there are still some protocol things we gotta do so when we get to where we’re going and we go visit this dude, you gotta go in first and announce me. I’m sorry. You’re the only one here.” There was, of course, our chauffeur driver and some English version of the Secret Service a few cars back, but okay, fine. I will announce my wife.
So we get to where we’re going, which is the old Enormous Room, and I have to go in and shout “Her Majesty Queen Emma, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and his other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, long may she reign” and Emma came into the Enormous Room and said hi to some dude sitting at a table.
End I woke up and Jane was still sitting next to me and she asked if she could go find mommy and I said she could.
The end.
Here have a synthpop mix.
Until tomorrow, champ. Peace. Sniffles.
i love that dream so so much. you announcing Queen Emma will stay with me for the rest of the day. i’m also curious about to hear more about chritina ricci....😁
your dream is epic, and i love it—but what's this about christina ricci and dave?! goolkasian?! how do i not know this story? please elaborate!