#26: Colds, having and being

Actual updates

You ever feel like you’re living inside of a stereotype? Here I am in New England, a part of the world that famously Experiences Winter, and I have had a very winter winter so far, especially this past month. Starting with when our heat went out on me.

Turns out, we had used up all our oil the week before, when Hap was unexpectedly home from school due to a Covid exposure, so of course we put it on during the day (something I normally do not do when I’m working from home alone, or at least I might just turn it on a little earlier than it would normally kick in if it really gets too chilly). So the oil company’s predictions and algorithms were thrown into chaos, and we wound up with an empty tank on a below-freezing day. Ultimately, it got down to 55 degrees F in the house (around 12-13 C).

The oil company sent someone to fill up the tank, and so they did, but the heat still didn’t come on, so I needed to have them send a second person to fix a problem so that the oil could actually be used to heat my home. And when that worker was walking across our front porch to the door… a board in the porch broke beneath his foot. Houses! Truly just a hole in the ground into which you throw money!! We haven’t redone the front porch yet, we just wedged the board back together and avoid it. I know, I know. It needs doing. So much needs doing that I haven’t done. I’ve mentally filed “house stuff” to be done during the waiting period for all the immigration stuff, which I am somehow still not done with! It takes a lot of time and I have none! Aw, excuses, excuses.

And then it snowed. We got somewhere between 20 and 24 inches, but the winds were so high that it nearly didn’t matter. Sometimes it was up to your hip, sometimes it was barely over your boots. It’s lovely but it was a lot of shoveling! We’re lucky it was light and fluffy, but I still wore out before I could do the driveway the first round, mostly from carrying around shovelfuls of snow trying to find a place to put it, and throwing it onto piles high over my head. But I still got the sidewalk done, because there’s truly nothing that frosts my shorts more than people who don’t shovel, unless it’s people who shovel a path from their front door to their car and nothing else. Those people can meet me at the commuter rail underpass at midnight and we can talk about it.

This resulted in a conversation with my brother where I realized that it’s shocking to him that even the side streets get plowed here. I joke about Vancouver having one snowplow and the city shutting down when it snows, but while they do have more plows now, they still don’t run them down side streets! The city has to shut down; anyone who gets around by driving wouldn’t be able to leave the house! Partly this is because the plows they have are just the big fellas, which wouldn’t even fit down a narrow residential street - the idea of independent contractors with pickup trucks who affix a plow blade to the front in the winter and go into business is totally unknown. But we get both that kind of plow and the big truck kind on our little street here, and they make many passes over the course of a storm. I can only remember one time that the street wasn’t plowed in the 9 winters we’ve lived in this house, and it wasn’t even during that one big winter (2015)1 where we got two-footers every weekend.

Further in extremely local news, Boston has a new mayor, Michelle Wu, and she lives in our neighborhood - just down the hill from us, in fact. This would mostly only be interesting in terms of being able to say, oh, I ran into the mayor at the grocery store today, or something, but lately her presence in the neighborhood has been much more noticeable because some people are VERY UNHAPPY with her. They are unhappy with her stance on vaccine mandates (she’s for them, they’re against them), and to voice their displeasure, a group has taken to protesting in front of her house every morning.

Now, you know me; you know the last thing I’d think of doing if someone was being annoying would be to call the cops. But some people do think the police have their best interests at heart and that they will put a stop to any bad behavior in the neighborhood. With that in mind, someone who related her story on the neighborhood Facebook group (I know, and it’s exactly how you’d expect) said she approached the officer stationed in a car outside the mayor’s house about it. The officer replied “But then who will protect my job?” Turns out, the protestors are cops. They don’t think their jobs should be at risk if they decide not to get vaccinated, and they’ve decided the best way to be heard about that is with loudspeakers outside of the mayor’s house.

There are two directions I want to go with this. I believe protest has to be disruptive in order to be useful. Comfortable, ignorable protest goes nowhere, and just allows power to feel like they’ve been magnanimous in allowing it, while not having to change at all. But in order to be effective, you have to protest where the people you’re disrupting are the people you need to reach. This is, in that sense, not really very well-thought-out - they’re bothering everyone on the block, none of whom are involved with any policymaking, and the mayor’s family is affected as well. Would protesting at City Hall work better? Maybe, in the sense that the people they’d be inconveniencing are the actual people responsible for these decisions, but City Hall is in the middle of a vast open plaza (it’s my #1 Most Hideous building in the city of Boston, and I know you all have a similar leaderboard wherever you live), and it would be very easy to avoid them altogether.

On the other hand, do I think this protest has any merit? No, of course not; they’re throwing a tantrum over being required to get vaccinated against an extremely communicable and often very serious disease, which should not even be an issue. If you think police are here to protect public safety, how do you square that with refusing to take an easy step that would do exactly that? The answer, of course, is that they’re police: an institution that isn’t about protecting people but rather property; property can’t catch a disease, so in that sense their refusal has nothing to do with their jobs. Also, they’re police: they’re the group of people tasked with having a monopoly on violence in the community, which makes a big, loud, angry group of them outside a house into something rather different from your average protest. If you think this isn’t supposed to be read as a threat, then why are they at her house where her kids live?

So that’s my month: winter being winter and cops being cops.

Some links

Did you already know that the Atacama desert, famous for being the driest place on earth, is also being used as a giant clothes dump?? I am gasping with rage. Chile’s Atacama Desert: Where Fast Fashion Goes to Die

I am not an aficionado of home reno shows; I have never watched the Magnolia Network (all I knew about it going in was that it was started by this couple who gave off “will absolutely proslytize to you at dinner” vibes, and I still don’t think that’s wrong?). I am completely unsurprised that having your house on one of these shows is a trainwreck in the making. Normal, non-tv renovations are already hell and take forever! Why would adding the constraints of a tv show to it make it better? My Friend’s Life Was Ruined by a Magnolia Network Home Makeover 

Please treat yourself to this story. I could have linked to a Canadian news outlet - this took place on Vancouver Island - but this particular story includes the single best line about it: “This is not how cats work.” They Bought a Blender. Three Weeks Later, Their Cats Continue to Hold it Hostage

Further in Canadian news. I actually love this. If you’re going to make a fake, make it fake fake. These Counterfeit Toonies Circulating in Ontario Right Now Are Comically Fake

The really fun part of this is that it’s considered unusual, but not unheard-of. It Rained Fish over a Texas Town this Week in a Bizarre Weather Event

Further - like, a lot further - in fish: Scientists Successfully Train Goldfish to Drive a Vehicle

Soothing. Also, fun to see how it’s defined in various climates and cultures. This is What “Cozy” Looks Like around the World

Did you know there was a French Dressing regulatory body?? After More than 70 Years, the FDA is Dropping Its Regulation for French Dressing

It’s tempting to think that this couldn’t happen today, since people have access to things like maps and the internet, but if you think about all the patently false things people believe that they got off the internet, I could absolutely see some dupes showing up at the “homestead” they’ve “purchased” only to find out that someone else already lives there, or it’s off the side of a cliff, or something. Anyway, this is really gripping! The Con Artist Who Sold Rich Investors a Fake Country

Same general region of the world, but moving from fake to legendary - and now, real: a famous shipwreck was found (probably!), but you’d be astonished at just how many factors there are preventing it from being investigated and/or any of its contents brought to the surface. What Lies Beneath

I put this one last because it’s another Substack newsletter, so it gives us this little preview link, and why not. But here: read up on the late Ronnie Spector’s life and times, and click every link to a song in it.

What am I reading

I’m about 3/4 of the way through Neal Stephenson’s second-most-recent novel, Fall, or Dodge in Hell, which is to say I’m 600-odd pages in. If you’re not familiar with the author, he is constitutionally incapable of writing any books that are not the size of two bricks laid next to each other. Now, I’m about to talk a lot of shit, but I really do enjoy reading his books and his Cryptonomicon is one of my all-time favorites.

The premise here is that the ability to give dead people a form of digital life has been developed. Things get, as you might imagine, weirder from there. But the “premise” only goes so far: as with at least one of his other recent books, this is at least 3 books stitched together, all but one of which could be built out into a whole book and be interesting on its own. The other segment is the main body of this book, so I guess you could argue that it already has been built out into a whole book.

In general, it follows some characters that will be familiar to you if you’ve read Reamde, which I can honestly say is the only book I’ve ever read that has a hundred-page action sequence. I liked that one a lot; it was, for me, a return to form after his previous novel which didn’t quite get there for me2. And speaking of following characters, one thing this guy loves to do is to tie in characters from his other books, obliquely or directly. You’ll see some familiar last names cropping up thither and yon, and I got a little frisson when I saw a particular character cross the stage. I get a huge kick out of this, because I am exactly the sort of weenie who feels like it’s a special easter egg for me and the other big nerds who read all his books even though it is patently not.

And while we’re talking about names, he really… does some things with them here. So many character names wind up being Big Witty Reveals once they die and wind up in this digital afterlife. I shouldn’t be surprised; he did write Snow Crash3, after all.

I’m not sure it’s my favorite of his recent books - I wish we had spent more time in the era where everyone has an editor who manages their online experience, and different edit streams lead to people having extremely different realities; that was a setpiece that introduced and reintroduced characters and moved them into position for the main chunk of plot, but I thought it was possibly the most interesting part of the book, and I wish we could have had more of it. I do want to find out where this is going, though, both for the dead and the living, and that’s all you can ask of any book, isn’t it?

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

So I’m still enjoying refamiliarizing myself with the tapes my friends made me back around the turn of the century4, but not everyone put a track listing on their tapes, which is killing me right now as I go scouring the internet trying to find these songs. I had no idea this song was a cover of a Magnetic Fields song, for instance, but having now listened to the original, I like the cover better.

Another jam off another old pal’s tape. In listening to these tapes - largely from friends a few years older than me - I’m realizing that I should have leaned harder into diversifying my library to include the stuff I dug on from those tapes. I would have been more interesting as a person, and it’s too late now!

This song!! A high school friend kept referring to just the chorus - “I hate BUNK BEDS!” - and none of the rest of us had ever heard the song. It must have been something she had heard from her older sister - 5 years age difference is enough to have totally different musical frames of reference. And then one day she found it, and as proof that this song existed, put it on a tape for all of us. And now I am giving it to you.

This month’s top 5: Embarrassing things I did this month

1. Hosted a show on the work radio station whose theme was “songs I’ve covered”

2. Hosted, and then shared, an episode of a podcast, where my audio was too quiet and I couldn’t fix it, so I just went “fuck it” and released it to the whole company

3. Tried to convince someone a lot cooler than me that I am interesting and funny via the use of memes

4. Overshared in the Instagram story

5. Existed on this planet of Earth

Well, now onwards back to trying to soothe my kid who has a fever and a cold and is moderately miserable this afternoon but who got a negative test yesterday (so did I). He won’t take Tylenol, which is not helping matters, but he did spend a solid chunk of today running around naked for, as best as I could tell, comedy reasons. Truly my own kid: even sickness can’t stop the impulse to go for the biggest laugh. We probably didn’t get a false negative, I hope! He’s just regular little-kid sick, I guess! Parenthood is a festival of emotions!