Attempting to Feel Groovy

Floods, Fires, and Fongool

Confession: for the last ten days or so, I’ve been a little stressed out. A combination of work projects and family visitors are what I think is to blame, but in reality, it’s me.

I naturally tend toward speediness. Get it done and over with, so I can relax. This sounds great, if I actually relax. But if I look hard enough, there’s always something that needs to be done. So I never really relax. I had to go back and substitute “I” for “you” in the previous sentences, as I had projected it into the second person. (It’s easier to handle it that way, then it’s some other person who needs to focus on their mental wellbeing, and not me.)

So, this week I am focusing on ... focusing. The Perseid meteor shower peaked on Saturday night. I was planning on joining people in Batsto to watch them, but it had thunderstormed and flooded us that day, and I was worn out from a bike ride and yard cleanup. So I stared up at the sky for about five seconds, didn’t see any, and set up my GoPro on a tripod to watch for me. I had important things to do, like write this newsletter. I could have been relaxing in the Pine Barrens dark, swatting mosquitoes and watching star-streaks in the sky, but I decided to play with computers instead. The GoPro caught a few, and a plane:

The title of today’s newsletter comes from “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” by Simon and Garfunkel. I had forgotten it was their song, which begins…

Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last

… and came to mind at breakfast, as I read The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. I took it out from the library, so I need to read three or four of his 100+ delights a day before I have to return it. This may sound awfully regimented, but if I don’t set a routine, I’ll forget and have to read a couple dozen at a time, which feels against the nature of the book. I should have bought the damn thing, and maybe I will. It’s a neat little hardcover, and as a poet, his prose and thought process sparkle and are a joy to read.

I can’t think of “groovy” without imagining Bruce Campbell firing up his chainsaw hand in Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, or “Groovin’ (on a Sunday Afternoon)” by the Rascals; when they were The Young Rascals, my mother’s best friend Joyce knew Eddie and David Brigati, members of the band until 1970. Listening to their music always reminds me of her. She was a tough broad who had a rough childhood—I remember her telling me that her father once threw a fork across the kitchen table at her mother, and it stuck in her head—but she had a spark and a sense of humor, even if she defined Jersey Girl brashness. She was abrasive enough to cut steel, and she used that edge to defend her friends and fam. We loved her, and she is missed.

Continuing my social media exodus, I have removed Instagram and the Substack apps from my phone. Insta was so crammed with ads, and the only new followers were scam accounts and some guy who wanted me to join the Illuminati. Really. I should have replied with “fnord.” One of the repetitive phrases from the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson is “never whistle while you’re pissing.” It means do one thing at a time. And it’s something I need to remember to do. I would totally brush my teeth while I’m pissing, if I wasn’t afraid I’d pee on my toothbrush. For what, to save a few precious seconds? For that I’d risk gingivitis, and distract myself from the relief of a pleasureful morning micturation? No, one thing at time, Tommy.

I avoided the diagnosis of adult ADHD for a long time. Even though my father died of depression, mental health is something you get over and go to work in my family. Like Sully in Nobody’s Fool, you’re supposed to work on that busted knee that looks like a rotting grapefruit, much less when your feewings hurt. I’m trying to be better about it. Sometimes I’m too busy thinking about the next thing to finish the current thing. For example, here’s a video I took at the Futuro House, which I visited with Hannah, and wrote about on Sunday. And forgot this video. Which gives you a peek inside:

I’m no longer obsessed with finishing every book that I start—life is too short for that, and my glimpse into the sausage factory of publishing was enough to end my glorification of books—but I still obsess on things. Lately, it’s been the bicycling. I try to get 5 miles twice a week on work days, and ten miles or more on a weekend ride. This Saturday I started late, it was sweltering in the mid-90’s and humid, and by the time I hit seven miles a torrential thunderstorm was approaching. I keep a Gore-Tex coat in the car for this, but I was exhausted, and headed home. One reason was that some dude with a porn ‘stache hollered at me for “not reading the signs,” that “e-bikes are not allowed.”

True, my fat tire bike does resemble some e-bikes, but the Taint Hammer is entirely Salami Powered. Perhaps I need to stencil that on the side, for dudes who like sporting the facial hair of the cop in the Village People. I let bother me way too much, as you can tell. Bicycling was my de-stressor, and this was the first time it had been invaded by ignorant authoritarianism. I find the e-bike ban on New Jersey trails to be ableist and misguided. I saw e-bikes that looked more like dirt bikes when I was hiking in Iceland, and those might be detrimental to trails, but I don’t see how the power source matters when your tires are bicycle tires. I’m sure there are powerful e-cycles that can tear up a trail, but Nature is for Everyone. Unless someone is causing damage, what’s the harm?

Tuesday morning’s bike ride was much better. I saw a great blue heron, an Eastern box turtle, and a northern cardinal; both big blue and li’l red always make me smile. My morning rides are on very familiar trails at a county college, and I often listen to podcasts while riding. It doesn’t distract me from seeing the ubiquitous whitetail deer, American robins, and occasional squirrels and chipmunks, and keeps me from other mental distractions.

Here’s an example of the flooding I encountered on the drive home. The yard had incurred over four inches of water, and the sump pumps took hours to drain it all.

But there was still joy that day on my ride. My phone decided to stop charging from its power port, and I used that excuse to buy a wireless charging dash mount with a robotic gripper arm that holds the phone. It’s awesome and utterly ridiculous. Expect more videos of me rolling down Pine Barrens trails and going “wheee!!!” like so:

If you haven’t heard about the wildfire destruction in Maui, the short version is that a blaze on the dry side of the island—exacerbated by hurricane-force winds minus hurricane-force rainfall—killed nearby a hundred people at current count, destroyed homes, businesses, cars, and wildlife in a terrifying fast conflagration. The alert sirens didn’t even go off, though that may be due to human error. The people of Hawai’i have been hurting since the pandemic began, and the people of Maui need our help. Here is a list of places you can donate to help people who have lost their families, homes, and livelihoods.

Okay, something good. My favorite new Substack is the aptly named

Kent’s Substack

by

Kent Peterson

, who writes on a collection of dozens of typewriters and posts the model at the top of his newsletter with the date, like a real old-timey newsletter! His missives are short and sweet, like this one about a Ken Kesey novel he enjoyed. Click through, trust me. It’s an image of the typed page, which is why it doesn’t show up here. It’s an awesome concept and I love it.

Sailor Song

I also loved this post by

Planet Carnival

, who always tells a great story through the lens of Carnival. This time it’s about Calypso in the United States, and much more:

APPROPRIATE

Via

Animation Obsessive

I learned that one of my favorite Cat Stevens songs, “Moonshadow,” was animated by Errol le Cain, an underappreciated animation genius who contributed to one of the greatest unfinished films, The Thief and the Cobbler, among many other things. You can learn about The Phantom Legacy of Errol le Cain at Animation Obsessive. His books look gorgeous!

Another great read came from NPR, about the Cossack tradition of warriors who are fighting on the front lines in Ukraine. They look down upon the Russian Cossacks who fought for the tsar and led pogroms, and they still train to fight from horseback, and with two swords, and… there needs to be a movie.

And from Hannah came a bit of forgotten American history, that one of the founding fathers, Gouverneur Morris, was disabled. It’s a great read; he empathized with the enslaved and was against the three-fifths clause, he married a woman tainted by scandal, and apparently didn’t let his disability stop him from having many love affairs. His diaries need to be ensconced in a delicious biography! To quote:

“Gouverneur Morris’s diaries are very frank about things that one wouldn’t want to put into the public,” she said and laughed. He writes a lot about bodily functions and sexuality, including descriptions of his, uh, concern for the pleasure of his various romantic partners.

It sounds better than the latest thing on BookTok, don’t it?

I mentioned that I deleted the Substack app, and that’s because of Notes. There’s some good stuff on Notes from people who’ve left the Dirty Bird, but there’s also a lot of posts that smell like the crap that writers peddled during The Golden Age of Self-Publishing, which was a few months in 2011 before Amazon realized you could hire people to write fake 5-star reviews and pump your books up the recommendation algorithm, and then make your real money selling e-books about How to Make a Million Selling E-Books. Now it’s how to make six figures on Substack, which is… tell people they can make 6 figures on Substack, if they pay to subscribe to your newsletter. Much of Notes is the excruciating navel-gazing of writers that we got on the Dirty Bird app. (You know, stuff by people who’ve never worked retail, scrubbed toilets, or worked for a maid service talking about how tough writing is as a career.) It is tough to be a writer, of course, but no one wants to hear about it. Maybe some people who can’t get enough of “inside baseball” want to hear it, but as someone who’s washed dishes while ankle deep in sewage, I find it akin to me complaining about the bad drainage in my yard with a pool, when people in Maui have lost everything to the flames. There’s a time and a place, and it’s not in public. It’s among your fellow writer friends.

The other thing that reminds me of the E-Book Revolution era is seeing new subscribers who read 900 Substacks. Oh yes, of course you do. That was the other thing that was going to make every self-pubber a millionaire; buying each other’s books. If we all subscribe to each other’s ‘stacks, the Algo Rhythm will play “We’re in the Money!”

Of course it won’t. Just like every other art form run by large entertainment cartels and tech giants, some people will do well. Some will be lucky, others will work hard and see rewards, but most will work hard and see jack shit. If you don’t love it, don’t do it. And don’t turn your love into work. Then you’ll have nothing to love.

And if you’re still trying to make bank on the Muskrat’s X-hole, read this:

Burn it down.

One good thing about Notes is you find people like this. There’s a shop in New York City that sells nothing but moss. It’s kind of NYC’s thing; David Letterman goofed on shops like “Just Lamps” and “Just Bulbs” decades ago; Meatball restaurants were a thing for a while; but this seemed like a parody, and it’s not. It’s real. People are putting embalmed moss all over their homes. I suppose it’s an affordable version of the fad where billionaires steal a fucking giant tree to stuff it in their mansion’s atrium until they get bored of it and it dies? I dunno, but I like my moss on the north side of a tree, thank you. By the way, according to Natural Navigator Tristan Gooley, looking for lichens on the south side of a tree is more often accurate, if you need to find your direction in the woods.

The NYC Store That Only Sells Moss!