Staples
Inkhaven 2 started today. And I have covid.
The current project on my house renovation is tiling the shower. However, doing tile involves a lot of stooping, lifting, stretching, and carrying a heavy bucket of mortar up and down the stairs. I’ve also tiled high enough on the wall to where I need to reach above my head to place a new row. I’ll need to get on a ladder soon. Given the aforementioned covid, I did not have the energy for all that.
So instead I pulled carpet staples out of the stair treads.
You see, when you get carpet replaced, the carpet guys remove the old carpet and padding. But they don’t pry up the staples from the old carpet so much as... cover them again. And my house is over a century old. Suffice it to say, I had a lot of staples in those treads and risers.
Bits of fibers from each type of carpet are stuck under each staple.
I have two needlenose pliers (one for pulling, and one for leverage), a plastic cup for trash, and a shop vac.
Pluck. Pluck. Pluck. The ancient staples come out, one by one. A tiny plume of dust puffs into the air with the tug of every carpet clump. Some steps have long, thin strands of carpet still in the corners. The bits of stringy plastic backing holding the strips together emerge from the fluffy pile like house centipede legs. Bits of dried drywall mud, plaster, and globs of paint from who-knows-how-many wall repaintings coat the wood. Occasionally I come across a spot where two staples are right on top of one another, and it’s extra annoying to lever it out. I vacuum up the dust as it accumulates.
By now I’ve identified four different types of staples from various eras. When we bought the house, the stairs had a beige carpet with short fibers. When I ripped that up, the staples for that carpet were small, bright silver, and narrow. The foam pad underneath the carpet had very wide, flat staples. Half of those pad staples came up with the pad; the others stuck up from the wooden treads, sometimes with one tine high in the air, ready to slice you.
I pulled all of those pad staples the day we took out the carpet. It only took a few minutes.
The older staples are a bit wider. Dark with rust. Some are much more stubborn to pull out than others.
In addition to the beige carpet, there were at least two other carpet changes—one grey, another dark green. The stair treads from the first floor also have the residue of what used to be glue for single-step carpet pieces. That residue comes right up with a scraper.
But underneath the mess, it’s wood. Stained pine. Never painted, thank god. They’ll be much easier to refinish without any (intentional) paint on the treads and risers.
On the bright side, the Fooming Shoggoths dropped their second album, You Have Not Been A Good User. It features several songs from last year’s concert at LessOnline 2025, with a few new songs.
I have so many memories tied to the Fooming Shoggoths. I tend to remember events as images. Sights, sounds. Whatever I was listening to at the time.
The first album, I Have Been A Good Bing, came out in the spring of 2024. I’d listen to the songs while driving across Northside Bethlehem on the way to the grocery store. The spring mountain air whistled through the open window, with the first song playing:
The road to wisdom? Well, it’s plain and simple to express: You err, And err, And err again But less, And less, And less.
LessOnline 2024 happened a couple of months later. I paid my first visit to Lighthaven and the Bay Area. There was a Fooming Shoggoths concert and dance party on Saturday night, where they debuted several new one-off songs that weren’t on the first album.
It would take another month for them to release the new songs to YouTube. This was all one long cut of the whole concert:
And then it was August. My husband and I closed on the house. I quit my job. And I spent the first few weeks of August digging a French drain along the side of the house, listening to the concert album. Some of the one-off songs sounded like endless summer, reminiscent of the 1990s.
But I mostly listened to it while driving. A lot of driving. Mostly back and forth to the local Home Depot. The drive back home took exactly two play-throughs of the AI remix of “Five Thousand Years”.
I dropped off listening to it as the weather got colder, until next summer and LessOnline 2025.
This time, the songs were available right away in the Suno app. No need to wait for someone to post it to YouTube.
So the Shoggoths returned. I listened while repointing the bricks in the basement. Driving to VibeCamp. Dropping a friend off at the Philly airport on the way back from VibeCamp. Dropping a second friend off at the Philly Airport the following day, after he spent the night at our place.
One night last fall, I drove to pick up my husband from the Trenton train station on his way back from NYC.1 Pulling up at the waiting area, I took out my phone and learned that the Suno app had inexplicably consumed over five gigabytes of mobile data over the 45-minute drive, and I had just been charged an extra $80 on my phone bill for the month.2
I don’t know what kind of vibecoding bullshit was going on under the hood, but I struggle to understand how playing a single album consumed more data than what was in my 4Gb iPod Nano in 2007.
I stopped listening to the songs while driving after that.
But now the new album from today is suddenly—officially—on Spotify and YouTube. I saw the announcement post and thought, “Yay! I don’t have deal with that buggy vibecoded Suno app to listen to the songs anymore!”
So I loaded up the playlist on the significantly-better-vibecoded YouTube app, and got to de-stapling my stairs.
One of the new songs is called “Friday’s Far Enough for Milk”. The title feels like the kind of title that’s supposed to be a reference to something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
It’s about the experience of living a mundane life, where everyone around you is making plans for the future, all while the specter of AI looms. The singer contemplates the slight absurdity of worrying about the state of his teeth once he gets to be in his fifties. Fifties!? Are we going to live that long? The title means, basically, “Well, I don’t see a point in planning out for decades, but Friday is probably safe. I can plan out for Friday.”34
In the final verse, the singer is holding his partner tight, singing, “I want to grow old with her. I want to grow old.“
May we all have the privilege to grow old. May all our plans for the coming decades come to pass. I sure hope so.
After listening to the album all the way through a few times, something in me just... kinda broke. I don’t know if it was the waning covid brain fog, or the tiredness from pulling staples for a couple hours while scrunched up on the steps, but I got up and went to hug my husband.
I hugged him and told him about the song. “I want to grow old with you,” I said.
He hugged me back. “I want to grow old with you, too. And we will.”
Meanwhile, another supply chain disaster looms. Who has time to worry about ASI when the Strait of Hormuz is blocked?
The consensus online to “prep” for this round of supply chain chaos is to… just buy a bunch of groceries and hunker down. Maybe buy a few extra gallons of gasoline to keep in the shed. Try to get a 90-day supply of prescription meds. Order any random cheap knick knacks you’ve been waffling about buying for the last six months. And toilet paper, of course. Who could forget the toilet paper!? There’s not much else the average person can do.
I’ve spent the last couple weeks stocking up on renovation supplies. A tool here, some wood there. Another bag of tile mortar. A new fruit bowl that I’d been eyeing for a while. It’s not possible to buy absolutely everything, but I have a plan.
I’m lucky in that I’ve already finished most of the renovation. For the parts I haven’t, I have almost all the materials I need.
What I neglected were the groceries. You know—staples.
I’d been stocking up. A few extra canned goods here, a bag of rice there. I’d thought we were well-stocked, but after a few days of neither of us leaving the house due to covid, it became clear we would need more groceries.
The clock is ticking. This is my chance to stock up, in the remaining week or two before the shelves go empty from everyone else panic buying.
But I can’t right now. Instead, I’ve been cooped up inside all week, resting, glued to my various feeds. Monitoring the Situation™.
But I think I still have time. Tomorrow’s Thursday. Hopefully the panic buying won’t have started by tomorrow. Friday will probably be fine, too.
Friday’s far enough for milk, after all.
The easiest and fastest way to get into Manhattan from where we live outside Philly is to drive to the Trenton Transit Center and take a local NJ train to Penn Station. Way cheaper than Amtrak.
An Uber would have been cheaper.
If I misinterpreted this title, I blame Covid Brain.