Omigod

What hahaha.

I did focus groups and surveys for money. I often would just stock up on toiletries from Amazon when I had gift cards. That shit is expensive so it lets my grocery budget breathe.

Thank you.

Does that work for Google Play books? Is it an app?

Almost everything on Amazon is cheap trash, and they promote the hell out of all that trash instead of products of any quality. I am also so sick of the click funnels where you search for a specific item and they just give you pages full of knockoff trash as search results even if you go to a specific brand store. It’s nonsense.

Everything feels like it happens so fast now and yet I have nearly no free time despite all this convenience. I did things one at a time and had to make an effort to do things like shop or go to the bank or pay bills or whatever. I cannot believe how many books I read and all the time I spent in the local library just browsing the stacks of all sorts of random shit; it was not routinely pared down to popular books, but had all sorts of odds and ends. I deliberately listened to music by putting a tape in the machine, and it was active listening. Radio was creative and beautiful. The local bar I spent time at was home to all sorts of burgeoning local bands. Food was not “small plates” at trendy bistros, but was sizeable satisfactory portions of ordinary food. A trip to the mall was an adventure, and my mall even had a library branch in it. You went to fish fry dinners at the Royal Canadian Legion on Fridays. One restaurant we used to go to we had to write our order down on a pad inside the kitchen, and the cook would come and slap your food in front of you. If you phoned someone and they weren’t home, you just phoned later on.

Nothing felt shitty and overly marketed and ads just existed and weren’t tailored to you. Television sitcoms lasted 26 seasons and you had to wait until next week to see the next one.

Even social media was better before Facebook, it felt organic and you made friends for life. Even early Twitter felt like this constant humorous conversation even if you didn’t agree with someone. Nobody was routinely crucified for misstepping in public (not that they shouldn’t sometimes). Things were definitely more generic but didn’t feel fake and marketed and inauthentic. Google was better and actually found things and didn’t just spit out a few results and then start adding unrelated things.

I’m not trying to sing the ballad of the boomer in B Minor; I appreciate convenience. I am tired of seeing bloated companies turn everything into shit. I want art and music and local watering holes to flourish. I want food to be good and satisfying. I don’t want every episode dropped at once. I just want things to slow down.

So my advice is slow down. Do one thing at a time. Go places and do one thing. Go to old restaurants. Go read paper books at the library. Go listen to a band at a bar. Do things. Don’t reduce it all to your phone. This is my goal for the new year is to do things.

They’re morons, and they’re just conservatives who want to smoke weed. Whatever your opinion of size of government, you have to have some central systems to run a society.

Probably 1997, way before anyone had cell phones routinely, I went to an open house kind of interview for some cell phone company who were hiring people to go door to door. They hired everyone who came on the spot, and I never heard from them after that day. The only thing I remember was when the guy who interviewed me said that eventually everyone would have their own phone number, and that was such a foreign concept then.

You really should buy a bedbug proof mattress cover and interceptors for the legs of your bed and furniture. Trust me when I say that an ounce of prevention will save you a lot of trouble, cost, and emotional trauma. Even if it costs more, buy then anyway.

Television set.

I hate giving up my seat on the bus. So I will pretend not to notice someone standing there until I absolutely have to, and then feign ignorance. Fuck off, I wanna sit down.

Because of Nick Cave.

Even Satie. Who collected umbrellas.

The great opera singer Enrico Caruso was the 18th of 21 children, only 3 of whom survived infancy.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote an opera about coffee addiction.

The Russian composer Tchaikovsky was afraid his head would come off while conducting, so he would hold his chin with one hand while doing so.

The girlfriend of composer Erik Satie wore a corsage made of carrots, and she was a painter and liked to feed the paintings she made. Satie once threw her out the window but she survived.

I can’t answer as to frequency, but I can say that recently a woman I know slightly cheated on her husband of 20 plus years, and the reason I know this is because he hired a private investigator and put the video of her kissing the other dude on Facebook. Apparently he did not include the video of them having sex but it exists. That seems like a really heinous thing for him to do, but if you know this family they’re actually really well raised good members of the community, and he’s clearly extremely hurt, stating that the depth of her lies to him was unreal. This woman’s mother is a saint walking upon the earth, without a shadow of a doubt, and her daughter was what seemed to be a very ethical well brought up mother herself raised in the Christian faith (not the conservative kind but the really decent person kind), so this was all a big shock. Apparently she was just lying to everyone, including her saint of a mother, all along. Her husband asked her to stop the affair (which was with some guy she had known for years) until they separated houses, but she kept on and kept on lying about it until she was caught on tape.

So until someone’s mask slips, you just really never know what someone will do.

Tokkie claims he was sexually and physically abused by them and made into a slave. None of the sources seem very well sourced, it’s just based on a video he made, and they state that he’s an addict and trying to extort them for drug money. Capetown child welfare workers went to their house to see if their daughter Sixteen is ok, and apparently had no problems with them. I take abuse seriously but what he’s saying seems super farfetched and made up. I don’t think they’re great people exactly, but their characters are obviously an act and they’re middle aged parents under it all.

Apparently South Africans are NOT fans of the band despite their success. I think what Tokkie claims about them sounds made up, apparently he’s an addict and trying to extort them is their take on it. It just doesn’t sound truthful at all.

I’m leery of most romantic gestures now because it turns out some of them are just self-serving narcissism so they feel good about themselves for performing them, but honestly trying to cheer someone up with a nice dinner and a peaceful evening is really heartfelt and says, I can’t fix this for you but I can do this much and try to help you have a better day and show you I care about you.

I listen to Die Antwoord still and read the poetry of Anne Sexton. The former is because I think some of the accusations against them are exaggerated, and part of their whole act IS being jerks. The latter is because what she did was clearly in the throes of her severe bipolar disorder which was long before they had any good medications.