Starting off with a long weekend to contemplate the looming decline. As Matt Christman said on Inauguration Day in 2017:

This is the stupidest day in American history, a record that will be broken by every subsequent day in American history.

Spent an upsetting amount of Monday tracking down an Amazon package from somewhere on the block based only on the blurry little hostage photo they send out on delivery. Thanks to our neighbor for having a distinctive enough shovel and doormat.

It got really cold really fast, which throws the delicate balance of the house into chaos. Gotta keep it dry enough that the windows don’t ice over, but humid enough that the floors don’t crack, all while making sure none of the pipes or vents freeze shut, which they absolutely did. Shoutout to having a drone in your homeownership toolkit so you can inspect the roof without falling off an extension ladder.

Flashed back to our late twenties with a celebration of gone-but-not-forgotten Balena at a pop-up where they played all the hits (including that Tagliolini Nero!) Even managed to close out Gilt Bar afterwards. Look at us, living large on a school night.

YouTube has a treasure trove of motivational videos for scammy door-to-door salespeople that I can’t stop watching. I first stumbled across them before we went car shopping a few years ago and figured I could use them as a sort of booster shot to build up antibodies to high pressure sales tactics, but they’ve become a weird fascination in their own right. Over the past few years, it’s been wild to watch as the overall tone shifted from “mildly sleazy” to everyone being a full-on predator doing pickup artist shit while shilling artisanal growth hormones and berating you to dominate the customer!!!

Maybe viewing the other side of your transaction as a rube to be fleeced has always been a part of a certain kind of sales, but the escalation still seems noteworthy. I think ripping people off has sort of assumed an air of legitimacy now. Like Hamilton Nolan notes in “The Land of Greater Fools”, “the assumption that scams are the way to get ahead has gotten so big that it now envelops something approaching the majority of this country.”

Not to mention that being scammed has become entirely unexceptional both in frequency and effort. Every day I get dozens of profoundly lazy emails, texts, and calls trying to steal my identity or renew the Norton subscription I don’t have or tell me how to bail my non-existent children out of a Caribbean prison that only accepts payment in iTunes gift cards.

Somehow the takeaway from this is just mild annoyance and “report as spam”, but it feels like there has to be a long-term psychic toll at attempted muggings via every communication channel all day every day. I’m sure someone has written a better version of this thought. Let me know if you’ve seen it.

Just barely warm enough Sunday to finally pull the Christmas lights down. Still January; pretty respectable.