Notices by Human G-G-G-Ghostwriter (hg@beige.party)

@Binder

It's getting harder to prove you're human.

When I die, I want my kids to get a dog and name him Dad.

I had the best kind of guys' reunion. Three of my besties from high school and I rented a house in Vegas and went to a music festival (BFF Fest, which had a Gen X bent that wasn't exactly our sonic sweet spot, but it had a bunch of bands we liked and we had fun, damn it). It had been eight years since I saw two of these guys. We got silly, we laughed, we did things none of us would have done if left to our own devices, and we added to a decades-long friendship. We hot tubbed. One of my friends blew it all ($20) on mechanical ponies. A pair of nice young ladies offered to whip me and I said no thank you. We tried to go to a national park but (duhdoy) it was closed. I discovered that Korean barbecue is the thing that will kill me one day.

Now that the concept has been proven, we are going to make a habit of reuniting. Having learned our lesson from the music festival, we are hoping to plan less and leave more space for hanging out and/or playing outside than cramming in performances. So, if you have good summer/fall ideas for the greater Bay Area, I am all ears.

I also learned (or confirmed) that I really don't like Las Vegas. It has a sweaty, forthrightly lowest-common-denominator aspect that disagrees with me. The spectacle of the strip, the greasier spectacle of downtown, the gravity wells that the strip and downtown create. The lowbrow maximalist. The performative joy. The guys quoting The Hangover. The knowledge that the summers are inhumane. The gambling (I really hate gambling). I won't knock Vegas for you if you like it, but it is not for me.

@NickGates @skinnylatte

1. Hell yeah. Tell him I hate him.
2. Are there any places where hikes and outdoor recreation are particularly good? Although I'm happy to load the boys up with wine, I don't partake and would get very bored very fast.

Children are awful. "I'm tired!" Then why don't you take a nap? "NEVER!" and then they headbutt a wall and slap you.

I'm a death lawyer. It's nice. But what surprises me is how rarely people do cool stuff with their money (or their bodies) when they die. "UhHhH tAkE cArE oF mY wIfE wHeN I DiE," "i LoVe My ChIlDrEn EqUaLlY." Grow up.

Where are the bequests of fortunes to shirtsleeve relatives in exchange for spending a night in a haunted house? What about having your remains loaded into a cannon and fired into rush hour traffic? Where are the scholarships for bagpipers and other undesirables?

We would not be in this political moment if the electorate were more like Hank Hill than Dale Gribble.

I cannot imagine Hank ever voting for someone from *shudders* New York.

Finding decent role models in comedy is so nice. I'm a plain vanilla suburban cishet white dad in a loving marriage. I'm not a selfish oaf. I believe in doing things the right way, in being fair and thoughtful, and working really hard on the things that matter to me.

I'm not Hank. But my dad is Hank adjacent. He, too, is disappointed that I can barely plunge a toilet. I suspect that he finds my inability to keep my lawn in fighting trim disgraceful, but he has never once mentioned my black thumb. But he also fabbed an irrigation system for his greenhouse and worked out the exact amount of propane (!) to use to goose plant growth in the greenhouse.

I know that living next to your three best friends and being unfazed by politics is a fantasy. I sorta don't care. I am completely here for it.

Dale Gribble is a piece of shit. He's really funny, and is in his own ways a good husband and father, but he's a cowardly and delusional little bitch who is essentially bereft of principles. You can't build a society around Dales. But Hanks? Hanks create society without even thinking about it because, dang it, it just makes sense to them. They return the shopping carts.

I fucked up and called it Lasagna. Everyone is shrieking.

Parenthood and branding go hand in glove. For example:

"Lasagna"
- proof that you hate us
- stupid
- ethnic?
- fuck you, dad!
- sounds gross
- we miss mom
- I hope I'm adopted

"Noodle cake"
- yay!!
- we love it
- dad rules!
- all other food is poison
- I will die if I don't eat noodle cake now.
- why does other food exist? Are people stupid?

I still kinda remember when politics was for nerds who cared deeply about highway construction materials standards or whatever. Now, it's for the dumbest, angriest, least informed people you've ever met.

I hate knowing that working myself to death would be a financial slam dunk for my family. They could afford to weather the automation wave very comfortably if it does materialize.

I tried dopamine mining a little earlier and it didn't work, so I'm back at it:

I have noticed that, whenever I get true break, I become much more sensitive to the natural world, my body's rhythms, and to little joys. Today, and the last three weeks or so, but especially today, felt like that one episode of The Bear. You know the one, where they accidentally leave the online ordering system on and basically suffer through the human equivalent of a DDoS attack.

From before I walked into my office, I was getting pummeled with requests and work issues and staffing woes. My email stopped working. I spent six straight hours in the kind of meetings where I needed to talk constantly, take detailed notes, and give highly contextual advice under the dangling sword of personal liability. I followed this with another six hours of a mad scramble to complete a gnarled mass of tasks that have come crashing up my ass like so many train cars slamming into a Honda Civic broken down at a rail crossing. Today felt like recording Lorna Shore live on a single shitty microphone. I felt like I was peaking and distorted all day long, washing and compressing so much that the whole experience would best be deleted. I wanted to throw up. Those sweet moments - sitting in my car outside my wife's office and waiting to pick her up when the sun came out, reading to my daughter about an astronaut who would later, unfortunately, explode... these were as good as I could get today, and I was numb to them.

Tomorrow will be more of the same. Every day for the next four weeks will be a lot like this one. I will not have anything to show for this financially. It's like a series of rib kicks, or being trapped in a loud room you aren't allowed to leave. I hope this is worth it, because it feels like it is gonna kill me.

The leaves are changing outside my office and there is some termination dust visible on nearby mountains. I am not ready for summer to end.

It'll be another 4 to 6 weeks before winter gets here in earnest, but winter always comes in Anchorage. It's cold, it's dark, it lasts until May. I say I can't handle it, but I obviously can. I just don't want to.

My life would be so weird if I were as expressive and articulate in person as I am in print. On the page, I'm animated and energetic and exciting. In person, I'm dry and I stutter and I lose my train of thought.

Me: [explaining the cultural context behind "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" for like three minutes]

My wife: "I don't need to understand it to hate it."

Me: "It was an early viral YouTube phenomenon"

My wife: "I cannot imagine why that needs to be my problem now."

If something happens to me, I want my family to go through all my toots (and Lrrr's, too) to see who I really was. These are curated versions of me that are shamelessly batting at the dopamine button, but it's probably the most coherent (lol) corpus of my thoughts, impressions, values, and ideas that I'll ever produce.