Until the End of the World

U2 – Until the End of the World

Friends, I am kind of freaking out. This Muskolini takeover of the Treasury is going unchecked and has the potential to wreck the economy, far beyond what the tariffs will do. It’s been two weeks. Not even. I don’t have a fat bank account or a bunch of assets to lose, but I also need every dollar I have.

I am thinking about that scene in the Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World, when Claire is someplace with sacks of money and it’s all worth nothing. I haven’t seen the movie in a super long time but that’s the way I remember it. And I know being online is NOT helping, but I kept looking to see if someone, anyone, was going to do something about it. Obviously the Democrats in Congress are useless, not that they could actually do much in the minority, but for fuck’s sake they could at least say they have a plan of attack.

How does this end? With the US becoming an authoritarian country with a tin pot dictator? I mean, duh. But really, what happens when the world’s largest economy collapses? If we go down, everyone’s taking a hit. What can the states do, anything? Withhold federal taxes? I wish the blue states could just say fuck off, we’re done. This isn’t what we voted for and you hate us anyway so we’ll just leave and let you sit in your own pile of shit.

I saw someone use the phrase “avalanche of idiocy” today and I think it perfectly describes our situation. Dullard is too much of a simpleton to see what he’s unleashed but we are all going to be buried soon, thanks to the egos of the broligarchy. They don’t even need him now that they’ve got the keys to the vault.

There are people who have it way worse than I do. People whose lives are at risk from this administration. Literally. At the current moment, nothing in my life has actually changed, yet.

I so desperately don’t want to be here. Here, meaning at this juncture, and also here, in this country. Here, the mother of two young adults who have already watched their futures implode multiple times over the past 10 years. I will get up in the morning and go to work and sit in meetings and try to keep it together, all the while thinking about the end of the world.

Making Flippy Floppy

Talking Heads – Making Flippy Floppy

A couple of weeks ago my best friend and I were talking about expressions one could use when you’re asked how you’re doing. Most of the time people say good, whether they mean it or not. It’s a reflex. But in the times we find ourselves, I feel like it rings hollow to just say good, fine, or, ok.

This was brought on by something in Patti Smith’s Substack. It was her daughter, Jesse Smith, retelling a story about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the captain of the ship had said, “We are holding our own.” as his last radio message. Jesse said she finds those words to be “grounding during times of struggle, when all odds are against us, when it maybe just isn’t looking good.”

My issue with this expression is that I don’t feel like I’m holding my own, I feel very much like I’ve dropped the ball and, you know, the ship sank and everyone died. So I think that’s not really going to work for me. Listening to this song I thought about, “trying to do my best.” It’s kind of admitting that things are hard, but you’re trying. I’ve never really known what making flippy floppy means but I always took it as things being tossed around, upside down and back again. That feels like what we are heading into with our crazy president returning and the absolute insane shit he says.

When I started this NaBloPoMo I thought about doing this challenge I saw on Instagram; 20 albums that influenced your taste in music. I thought we would prevail in the election and I’d be able to put some attention to really nailing down that list of albums. 20 was always going to be hard but the way things turned out just destroyed my ability to focus on fun and frivolous things. Not that I think my blog posts are riveting reading but the posts I like writing most are ones where I can spend some time really trying to articulate something about why a song/album/band has meant something to me. Maybe I can come back to this idea later but for now, this NaBloPoMo has been brought to you by me, trying to do my best.

Bug

Fontaines D.C.

Thanksgiving turned out to be very busy. Driving, cooking, driving. Today was more relaxed but I still had things to take care of. One of the factors about having the kids home is that there is no such thing as time to myself. Writing something here requires some uninterrupted minutes to think about what I want to write and actually do it. That’s also why the posts are always late at night.

I feel like this week flew by. It’s already the weekend and then it’s back to work. And December! That is nuts. I hit up my local record store today to get a couple of the Black Friday record store day releases as Christmas presents but otherwise didn’t do any Black Friday shopping.

Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving!

Talking Backwards

Real Estate – Talking Backwards

After several conversations today, I am still not sure whether we are going to do our Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow or postpone it a day. My daughter recently got a cat and she doesn’t want to leave it alone overnight. She can’t bring it with her because my husband is very allergic. The plan has been that we would pick her up in the morning, have our dinner early like a late lunch, and then take her back in the evening.

The forecast is rain for tomorrow, sunny on Friday. It doesn’t really make a difference to any of us when we have the traditional food, but I kind of don’t have other meal options ready for tomorrow if we push it by a day. Mac and cheese maybe?

Also scuttled were other possible plans that involved my mom coming here or some combination of me and the kids going up to her place. As everyone gets older these things have become much more difficult to organize. I never liked it when we did this mad dash, picking up the kids from early dismissal on Wednesday and driving up to Maine, arriving late and hungry. But the logistics were simple and it was just a bunch of hours in the car. Facebook has this (super annoying, usually) feature where it shows you stuff posted on that day in years past. Today it showed me a picture I posted 10 years ago of my mom’s backyard and driveway with a foot of snow on our cars. She is supposed to get snow again tomorrow so I ‘m just as glad we aren’t trying to get up there.

I hope you all are where you need to be and that you have a nice Thanksgiving!

Greenpoint Gothic

Deerhunter – Greenpoint Gothic

Maybe it’s because it was such a warm fall, and we had so many sunny days, but it really feels crazy that Christmas is less than a month away. Thanksgiving is late this year so as soon as it’s over, then it’s the sprint to Christmas.

I am not feeling festive for obvious reasons. People keep asking me what I want and the only things I can think of are things people can’t give me. Travel. Financial independence. Insurrectionists in jail. The usual.

Nothing

Insects vs Robots – Nothing

I’ve got this week off from work, one of those times when you can just take a couple of vacation days and net a much longer time off. Consequently I did a whole lot of nothing today. The usual sort of laundry, errands, kind of nothing, but I didn’t do anything more substantial like plant those bulbs or exercise. I always feel like I should do more when I take time off from work and am just hanging around the house, but I also manage to convince myself that I need the time to just veg and relax.

My son is home for Thanksgiving and he recently got a VR headset. He wanted me to try it and while I really had no interest, I felt like I could humor him and put it on. That was kind of trippy. One game he had me play was some little alien puff balls whose space ship comes crashing through the ceiling and you have to try to hit them with lasers. The other was a lightsaber game that reminded me a little of that Japanese game show, Hole in the Wall as you had to dodge things coming at you and swat away these boxes with your lightsaber at the same time.

I wonder if the headset has some kind of tropical beach scene so you could just put it on and feel like you were actually away on vacation. Kind of Star Trek holodeck style. Now if they could just work out that Star Trek transporter…

Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3

Ian Dury and the Blockheads – Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3

I got in the car this afternoon and just as I started driving, this song came on the radio. Funny timing because I’d been thinking of it recently, given the state of things.

I am not someone who always looks on the bright side of things, and cheerful is hardly a word I would use to describe myself. However, it’s a good reminder not to focus on the awful things, especially as it gets dark so early. It’s something I need to work on; being present, looking for a positive instead of always seeing the negative, noticing the beauty in small, ordinary things. I think it will be even more important as the shit hits the fan.

Noise Annoys

Buzzcocks – Noise Annoys

When we moved into the house we live in now, there were a handful of families with kids, like ours, and a larger number of retired people. Lots of old ladies living in big houses by themselves. Most of the kids have grown up and moved out and new families with young kids have been priced out.

At the same time, many of the elderly neighbors have downsized or needed some assistance so they sold their houses. This has created the perfect environment for people with tons of money to swoop in. Rarely the buyer actually lives there. Sometimes they keep it as a second home, but most of the time they make some minor renovations and they rent it out as an Airbnb. This annoys the crap out of me.

In the first place, it turns our neighborhood into a ghost town for much of the week. Then there’s the fact that it’s made housing impossible to come by. No one is going to rent to someone long term for a reasonable price when they can make that same amount of money renting it out for a weekend. When people do rent these big houses for a few days, there are so many people and cars that our normally quiet street is suddenly noisy. Not for nothing, it also means one less voter lives here now.

The house across the street from us sold a year and a half ago. The woman who lived there was a widow and really couldn’t keep up this giant five bedroom house anymore. The guy who bought it had grown up in the area and his parents had a house in the next town over. He and his wife had had a baby and we thought they were looking to relocate to be near family and out of the city, or at least have a summer place. They spent a year making small changes. Then all of a sudden one weekend there were four cars there and lots of people. At first I thought they had just let friends stay there, but when it happened again I went online and sure enough, Airbnb. They are charging something like $800 a night. If you have five couples staying there, it works out to be a bargain, I guess, but now it’s ten people having a party weekend instead of a 70-something year old widow. I am not happy.

Just on my block, on our side of the street only, out of eight houses, there are four that are either second homes the owner uses infrequently or Airbnbs. The other side of the street is pretty much the same.

I’ve never understood why people who rent are seen as undesirable. Transient. We have lived in our house for 20 years now and at this point, we’re the ones who have lived in the neighborhood the longest. The transient ones are the seven cars parked on the street and doubled up in the driveway across the street, partying all weekend.

Option 8

Horsegirl – Option 8

I went ahead and got a ticket for Horsegirl. Every once in a while I feel a little guilty about going to see a band whose members are young enough to be my children, just in case my being there means some kid isn’t getting the chance to be there. But I don’t want to be relegated to only seeing shows by my contemporaries. I still love those bands, but it’s different, you know?

That said, I did see Billy Bragg twice this year and it was worth the significant distances I drove to do so. He made a comment about people not buying music anymore, so tickets and merch have to cover more of the cost. On that same topic, he mentioned having played on one of those cruises full of bands. It kind of sounded like he felt, gotta go where the people are, but it didn’t really seem like his scene. It wouldn’t be mine either. I would much rather be the mom hanging out at the club full of kids.

Gone, Gone, Gone

The Feelies – Gone, Gone, Gone

There are a couple of Feelies shows in March. Right now I have tickets for Ride in December and Gang of Four in April, but there were a couple of shows announced this week that I think are also in March. I like having tickets for things a couple of months out because it gives me something to look forward to when the winter doldrums hit.

I’m also thinking about that Mama vacation I took in February of 2023. By the time we get to February or March, chances are I will need some kind of escape. Might as well let the concert calendar inform my planning.