—Steve Goodman

Two hundred and fifty years of saints and sinners and rascals and rogues and a blueprint for how things are supposed to work, with all sorts of nod-nod-wink-winks for how things DO work. Rarely has this nation ever lived up to its lofty goals, but there’s always been a stubborn sub-set that figured Jefferson knew what he was doing when he put quill to parchment. Aside from his own compulsion to own other human beings, that is. Right from the start things were fucked up, in other words, and it’s been a struggle to keep this train on the tracks. Morality sprinkled with a hefty dose of old-testament cruelty has whipsawed us back and forth like a flag in the wind, and if every 2 steps forward results in 1 step back, at least there is a net gain. To some we move too fast. To others, too slow. But a nation HAS to move. Otherwise, it will wither and die.

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Probably 150 people showed up. They were infinitely patient, and only howled when howling seemed the only decent response. Which was often.

Early in this entire process the town was semi-fucked by some of its own representatives, but most of these people have since been smoked out, and current council seems united in opposition. The residents have self-hired their own lawyer. Our fight has become everybody’s fight. We’ve garnered national attention. Even our own Governor, who gazes longingly at lovely stretches of PA forest and thinks, “I wonder what Elon would pay me for that?”, was forced into an off-the-cuff PR visit in a failed attempt to calm the natives. Our upcoming Congressional race, featuring 2 blatantly pro-data center candidates, now features a flurry of “we’re not REALLY for data-centers….let me explain” statements, which is the sort of hypocrisy that drives right and left voters together into high school auditoriums on a Monday evening for 3 hours of technical tedium interspersed with moments of brutal fact-checked hilarity.

I’ll say it plainly. I never want to sit through testimony from another “sound expert” again. This is my 3rd meeting featuring this sub-section of our species, and quite frankly nobody should have to go through this more than once. My favorite bit is how they are introduced. Their handler ticks off their entire resume in agonizing detail. Education. Awards. Publications. Golf trophies. Whether they’ve ever kicked a puppy. This isn’t the Kennedy Center Honors, hoss…..can you just give a copy of the guy’s qualifications to council and move on? We’d like to get home before it gets dark.

And then it begins. The patter of buzzwords and insider jargon meant to either impress the bumpkins, or put us to fucking sleep. I suspect they’d take either option at this point. They circle and re-circle the same wagons and conclude with, and I’m paraphrasing only slightly here, “It won’t be that loud. Trust us…”

It’s interesting to note that all of this sound analysis focuses on singular structures. A single data center. One power plant. How loud they will be in isolation. What of the sound of ALL of these things in parallel? A power plant is this loud, but a power plant surrounded by 51 other fucking buildings and generators is THIS loud. As a collective these things are going to sound like the soundtrack to War of the Worlds. It needs to be thought of in this context. If these things are actually built, this town becomes a Jeopardy! answer.

(At the next meeting, can somebody on council take up this cudgel? Thank you.)

Now, I’m not suggesting that the sound guy is blatantly lying. I suspect there is wiggle room in his own head when he says what he says, mostly because he’s being paid to say it, but also because in the meeting he was asked by council….point blank….whether he would choose to live 850 feet from a 500,000-square-foot power plant. At this, he could only stammer like a terrified donkey. For a brief moment I almost detected shame. Almost.

Turns out the guy came up with all his calculations at his desk, using computer software, topography imported from an unknown source, and a series of incorrect assumptions. He repeatedly claimed in his testimony that the plant would be covered on three sides with forest to mitigate the noise, completely unaware of the fact that this forest has already been razed. He may or may not have been working from incorrect specs (the developer provided 2 sets, and he was unaware which set he was using), and not only did he not consult the borough’s own sound engineer on his findings, he was completely unaware that the borough HAD its own sound engineer. His numbers assumed one generator. The specs given to council specified two. When pressed, he admitted that, in the “hundreds” of these cases he has been involved in, he never once suggested that ANYTHING would be too loud. Which may or may not suggest that he’s a rubber-fucking-stamp for the industry, but I guess that depends on your level of cynicism, eh?

Council wasn’t really having it, pointing out that previous sound gurus provided them with 100+ page reports, while his was 7 pages. What type of equipment would be used? What guarantee is there that the developer wouldn’t simply choose a cheaper option, and thus render his numbers meaningless? No reply. One council member called the entire presentation “insulting”, which prompted the biggest crowd reaction of the evening.

Also insulting is that the zoning permit for the plant was filed on March 12, or one day BEFORE Essential Energy LLC actually existed. I’m no lawyer, but to me this is the definition of a “technicality”, no? If this thing ends up in court, how is this not a smoking gun?

The entire operation smells like the Dunmore landfill, and something still feels off. We need to keep the pressure on. This is our home.

In a bit…

—tf

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The man turned the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool into Mountain Dew Lake… through a byzantine combination of stupidity, spite, arrogance, and the rejection o…

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There’s only so much you can say about these gatherings. Large swaths of the meetings seem interminable, a hellscape of PowerPoint presentations and “experts” droning on about this or that study, gently prompted by leading questions from their own side. It’s as if the goal is to build these things while we’re all asleep. It’s more of a staged performance than anything else. You get the feeling that these people are simply mercenaries, and what they say in one town uses the same script as what they say in another. As long as the check clears, and their own backyards aren’t being threatened by these things, it’s a helluva second job, to be honest.

As Dylan said, “money doesn’t talk, it swears…”

Last night’s “expert” was surely paid well, but he offered no new testimony or figures, instead merely commenting on things that had been stated previously. More than once he was asked point-blank what the fuck he was doing there.

And that’s the thing with mercenaries. What he was doing there was being paid. Otherwise he seemed about as engaged as a child reading a cereal box.

At times the testimony makes sense, at other times they go so off the rails that the entire auditorium groans in unison. The most common thread is condescension and arrogance….the kind I used to endure from tenured professors way past their prime in college. At one point it was claimed that the exponential traffic growth on Route 247 would actually make the road safer, as we local bumpkins would be less likely to go tearing around its hills and curves knowing that we might crash into a data center truck. Our skeptical response was met with the suggestion that we look such things up using AI, which is a bit like the fraternity pledge getting hit in the ass with a cricket bat and saying “thank you sir may I have another”.

Now, this could have been a tech-bro flinch…..the type of thing that Bezos-boys (and sound engineers) instinctively fall back on when challenged about anything. More likely it was a “fuck you” to a community he clearly despised, as if his compensation package was tied to a certain level of smugness. Either way, I immediately wanted to kick the shit out of him, which is not the sort of rage conducive to fighting these pricks. There are societal rules and all that. Also, cops were all over the place. So I blew out a few heavy raspberries and composed myself. I know for a fact I wasn’t the only one feeling this way, because the guy sitting behind me with his wife said “I’d like to kick the shit out of that guy” and his wife said “well if you do let me know and I’ll start the car.” and I just thought “I love this place.”

One thing I’ve noticed is that the questioning of these mercenaries has gotten a bit sharper. In the past I’ve been critical of the kid-gloves approach, everybody doing their best to be almost painfully civil. Last night the lawyer hired by the residents was more combative. More willing to raise his voice and show audible disdain. The council, too, seems to be running out of fucks, and where they may have been silent in the face of technical gibberish in the past, are much more likely to jump in and say….and I’m paraphrasing here….”what the actual fuck are you talking about?”

Tamara Misewicz-Healey continues to lead us, and you get the feeling that the data center gang onstage would rather face 1000 lawyers than this fierce young mother. She’s prepared. She’s eminently rational. She never loses her cool. And if hell froze over she’d fight these people on the ice. She is, as I’ve called her before, the tip of our spear.

I’m told that Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti was there last night, fully intending to speak. Surely her attendance (and the continued attendance of certain other pols) is due to the wildly unpopular political stench of these things. She hasn’t exactly been leading the charge against data centers previously, but she’s now involved in a tight Congressional race, and may have finally come to the realization that, in our valley at least, being seen as as carrying water for Josh Shapiro is not gonna get you many votes. Only time will tell if she’s too late to the party, but the fact that she’s crashing it at all means our message has gotten through. I can still be cynical with a smile on my face, right?

(To be seen as pro data center right now is about as popular as being pro landfill-shit-smell. So none of this is exactly a profile in courage. Let’s keep that in mind before we commission any statues, eh?)

I do think the fierce opposition has taken them ALL by surprise. The developers, the politicians at local, state, and federal levels, and maybe even the ghosts of our ancestors, who were so used to being fucked over by money-men that they just accepted the graft as the price of doing business and stepped around it, like somebody dodging dog shit in the grass.

No more. This is our home. Clean up after your fucking dog.

In a bit…

—tf

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But hell, at least it distracted …

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That this monumental dunce and his r…

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—General William T. Sherman

In my office at home there’s a framed painting of Abraham Lincoln on my wall. It’s an oil-on-canvas painting by George Peter Alexander Healy. Lincoln is leaning forward in a chair, his elbow on his knee. His chin propped up by his hand, deep in contemplation….as if fixated in a crack on a nearby wall. Lincoln’s son Robert was so taken with the painting that he purchased it himself. "I have never seen a portrait of my father which is to be compared with it in any way”, he said.

Robert’s wife eventually bequeathed it to the White House, where it currently hangs in the State Dining Room….assuming of course it hasn’t been replaced by the current occupant with….well….a portrait of the current occupant.

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My inner snark is not often contained, but for now at least, I consider yesterday’s photo-op a positive step.

Make no mistake. He only came here because of the data center opposition. I’m not suggesting that our pressure campaign is keeping him awake nights, merely that our bitching has become the type of nuisance that a politician with national ambitions cannot completely ignore. The Governor of the state does not come to Archbald to have a beer at Bud’s.

Shapiro acted like he was just informed on the drive up here that the 51 proposed data centers in Archbald were gonna be in our fucking backyards, and the crazy thing about men in power is that this is entirely possible. Whether this changes anything remains to be seen, but I would certainly suggest keeping our collective foot on the accelerator. These guys live in a bubble. They are surrounded by sycophants and yes-men. In politics, perception trumps reality. In the Valley, Josh Shapiro is about as popular as Elon Musk. Fair or not, he has become the FACE of these AI data-centers. He’s the mayor in JAWS who wants to keep the beaches open. Whether he actually realized this on his own, or somebody broke ranks and told him, I do not know. But make no mistake, his coming here was a chink in the broligarchy armor.

But there’s still a twinge of patronization. Always.

So he rolls into town, handpicks a few residents to pontificate in front of, and invites the press to take pics of him looking contemplative in a Q & A. He unveils a program with a snappy acronym, GRID. Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development Standards. Whatever staffer came up with this is probably gonna get a Christmas bonus. I would have been the guy in the back of the room saying “shouldn’t it be GRIDS with an “S”?

Ignoring these “standards” comes with a “penalty”. Which is fine I guess. But you need to read the room. To get to Archbald the guy probably took the Casey, and thus had to drive past the Dunmore dump that smells like constant ripe shit, another raped piece of land that is routinely “penalized”….and manages to pay the fines out of the petty cash drawer.

This type of thing gives off way too many “double secret probation” vibes, and if the actual meeting was open to the public my eyes may have rolled out of my head. Which is probably why I (or you) was not invited.

As far as I could tell, nobody at the meeting stood up in front of the cameras and said anything like, “Governor, your GRID and threats of penalties would not be necessary if the state simply declared a moratorium on these things”. Or, you know, suggested that his donors might hold more sway over him than the residents of a town his driver needed Google Maps to find. Such questions are the difference between a town hall and a ticketed performance.

Did the Governor come here to listen, or to be SEEN listening?

Things that make you go “hmmmmm”

I voted for Josh Shapiro. I feel like he owes me this answer.

To be fair, Josh Shapiro has lots of things on his mind. We are a blip on his radar. He is a frequently rumored Presidential candidate in 2028. He needs to raise unfathomable amounts of money. That he felt the need to cancel some fundraising and divert his motorcade 2 hours to attend to a mini rebellion in coal country is a much bigger deal than people are making it out to be.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still pessimistic as fuck. But I’m more optimistically pessimistic as fuck now. Progress, Bubba.

So now what?

Well, for one thing, voting.

Once again the mid-term voter turnout was embarrassing. I swear I saw tumbleweeds rolling across some voting locations. This area is filled with decent, passionate people who don’t ask for much more than a fair fight. But WAY too many of them spend election days binge watching fucking game shows, and until this changes we can expect much more of the same. Too many people in the valley expect that fair fight to be waged by somebody else, but are not shy about swooping in during the trophy presentation.

So let’s keep the pressure on. Governor, you are ALWAYS welcome here. I’ll buy you a beer at Barrett’s next time.

But this time, I get to invite the guests.

Deal?

In a bit…

—tf

*******************************************************************

OH NO
there goes Tokyo
Go Go Godzilla

Godzilla - Blue Öyster Cult

It’s only the greatest rhyme in rock and roll history. Those of us who write songs have been pissed off that we didn’t write this since the day we heard it. So clean. So economical. Dylan has spent decades chasing this rhyme, and despite his Nobel Prize, he NEVER found it on any of his cue cards. This is a lyric so important it required TWO lead singers to get it across. If the immortal riff to the Rolling Stones “Satisfaction” has a lyrical equivalent, it is “oh no, there goes Tokyo”. Keith Richards would have woken up and written those words down, bro. These words distilled an entire decade, and if you don’t agree with me it means you’ve never sat glued in front of the TV during the Dialing for Dollars movie, awaiting the wanton destruction (and the gerbil races).

(I’m referring to the live version of the song here. It’s playing as I write this. The one from the record with the Grim Reaper on the cover riding a horse through what looked like a Star Trek backdrop. I bought this record when I was in 6th grade, and I assumed my life would always be as uncomplicated as Blue Öyster Cult made it out to be.)

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‘Tis election season, so we’ll soon find out if there will be any consequences for the pro crowd. All the opposition in the world doesn’t mean shit if the same players remain. If they rigged the game once, they’ll surely rig it again.

The one thing insane nations have in common is they do not heed the definition of the word “insanity”. These days a national pol either enters office rich, or leaves office rich(er). Surely this type of system-rigging is not hard to grasp? Both of these things could be rectified at the same time if our democracy worked the way our founders intended.

To quote the great Hunter Thompson, “Who elects these dishonest shitheads?”

News flash. WE DO.

To even suggest that a letter or the ubiquitous “online petition” to a Shapiro or a Bresnahan or a Fetterman or a McCormick is going to elicit some type of proportionate response is the same as thinking the stripper is going to go home with you. The only thing these men will understand is being forced to get a new job.

Again and again you’ll notice the same names. The same players. Those out front and those who pay PR people to keep their names OUT of the paper. The world is often smaller than we think. What we may in fact be seeing is the same coterie of gangsters and bag men who have picked this place clean for decades. We’re so often wary of outsiders that we forget that it can be our own neighbors rolling us in the alley.

Just some food for thought.

Apathy is the enemy here. If you don’t want these things, and you stay home on election day, yours is a yes vote. It just is, and no matter how you try to spin it or how many times you say “they are all corrupt blah blah blah” that fact remains. Thinking you are chastising ANYONE by staying home is like punishing a dog by bopping him on the nose.

More than half of us who can vote, don’t.

And I say “us” because, especially in primaries, I’ve been guilty of being too lazy to drive the mile to the polling station. Or to put a stamp on my mail-in ballot. No longer.

Why?

Because I want to bitch about it. I want to rant and bloviate and opine on all things political, and to do that you really should need a ticket. How can I rightly criticize a process that I have a hand in changing, yet choose not to?

I need a reason to vote for you. I want to know what your plans are. I want to know what you are for and what you are against. But then I want to see how you VOTE. A politician will SAY anything. Take them at their word at your peril. Do not listen to what they say. Watch what they do.

I’m also a cynic, so if your campaign features dumb boilerplate ads touting your willingness to do things like “stand up to big corporations” I’ll probably write-in Mickey Mouse because nothing says “I’m gonna roll over as soon as the check clears” more than this type of lazy shit. I mean, what’s next? “I promise not to shoot my dog?”

I want somebody scrappy and smart and willing to say “here is my platform, if you don’t like it, don’t vote for me”. I want somebody who falls and gets back up again. I want somebody who comforts disturbed people and disturbs comfortable people.

A pandering politician during election season is a lying politician. These guys can worm their way out of a Houdini straightjacket if you let them.

So don’t. How did they VOTE? Proceed accordingly.

I will define whatever you call this kind of democracy in 3 lines….

They are NOT all corrupt.

That being said, MOST of them are corrupt as balls.

And lastly, some are more corrupt than others.

So if for whatever reason you cannot vote for the honest few, do your best to vote for the least grifty.

That’s about all you can do. Either that or run for office yourself.

Which brings me to my next point.

I recently said some pretty snarky things about the current Archbald council, for which I now publicly apologize. Because they are actually IN the arena, and I’m just some guy popping off from the crowd. Council must conduct themselves in ways that their often seething constituents do not understand. So while we’d probably roar with approval if a council member DID stand up and throttle a smarmy developer lawyer, that is NOT the way these things work. Council must cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s, in their SPARE time mind you, and then carefully bob and weave in front of 500 people…who all think they could do a better job. It really seems like a shitty gig and I don’t know why anybody would want it, but I’m grateful for what the town has now, and thank them all publicly. It takes a lot of guts to do what they are doing.

As for the AI itself, I was recently accused of using it to write my columns, because some of them contained hyphens (a big AI favorite, apparently)….so now I’m paranoid and using 3 dots so nobody thinks I’m having a secret bromance with Musk.

As another aside, at a college graduation ceremony this weekend in Arizona, AI was used to call out the names of the graduates as they walked across the stage to receive their diplomas, and it randomly skipped hundreds of names, and butchered the pronunciation of dozens more. People were so pissed the school had to stop mid-ceremony and start AGAIN, this time using actual human beings.

It is a weird time to be alive, Bubba.

As for the data centers, a neat trick is to ask your LLM of choice what will 51 fully built data centers in Archbald look like in 3 to 5 years.

If you dare.

In a bit…

—tf

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This one, however, is for me.

But you can still come along because it’s no fun bragging if nobody is around to hear it.

My youngest, Kiera, graduated from Widener University Commonwealth Law School yesterday. She was hooded onstage by her big sister.

Alyssa Flannery Esq., is a 2023 graduate of the same school.

Kiera was the class valedictorian, along with being the Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review. And yes, that is as hard, and as rare, as it sounds. Initially I was skeptical of her taking on the prestigious EIC position, not because I didn’t think she earned it, but because I figured she’d wear herself down to the nub carrying it out.

Turns out she just set her alarm clock a little earlier.

I can assure you that the qualities required to reach these levels of achievement I do not possess. I am not a purveyor of the alarm clock. I was a middling student at best. My only goal when enrolling at a school was finding out where the exit was. I had no patience. No real drive. I could be thrown off the academic scent by the pop of a beer tab, a new REM record, or a new set of guitar strings. But I married well. My wife is the brains of this outfit, and I’m the assorted spare parts.

But the world NEEDS spare parts.

The part that knows the material but fails the test on purpose. The stubborn part. The part that dives into rabbit holes and doesn’t come out for weeks. The part that is buried in books and historical documentaries and music. The part that notices every wrong and wants to fix it, often in the most naive ways possible. The one who rages against the machine. The one who thinks all lawyers should be Clarence Darrow and Atticus Finch, with Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s DNA sprinkled over their heads. In other words, I am HOPELESSLY impracticable and did almost nothing to help Kiera…except trust her implicitly. The only piece of advice I gave her for 3 years was “stay focused”. She did. She will always be, as I love to point out, the adult in the room. This includes when I’m there too.

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She was born with a spark. Her intensity terrified baby-sitters, who frequently only lasted once gig. She wanted what she wanted. And she wanted it now.

Whatever she did, she wanted to be the best. But it had to be on her terms. If she even sensed a hand on her back, pushing her forward, she’d buck. After gently suggesting she take up the piano, she became so good so fast that her teacher intimated we might have a prodigy on our hands. But we noticed that she almost never practiced. She didn’t have a passion for it. And the more we pushed, the less interested she became. It was frustrating for me, because I kept thinking I’d soon have a built-in band member that I wouldn’t have to pay. But alas, I’d need to find a keyboard player somewhere else. She would go her own way.

Kiera didn’t need to be pushed. Once she had her sights set on a goal, I just assumed everybody else was fighting for second place. During her sister’s 2023 Law School commencement, after the class valedictorian spoke, my wife turned to Kiera and said “that’s going to be you”.

And Kiera just smiled. But she was thinking it too.

But never….not once….ever…..did she mistreat another person in pursuit of her own goals. I am even MORE proud of her for this than I am of her reaching the goals themselves.

Let me tell you little bits and pieces about law school. I feel competent to opine after two separate sprints.

It is an all-consuming SIEGE. From the first day to the last the pressure never relents. There are no real days off. Even on so-called “vacation” weekends Kiera would drag those ridiculously heavy law school books along with her. Like most law schools, Widener Law Commonwealth offers no student housing. So, as Kiera’s favorite songwriter said, “you’re on your own, kid”.

Law students are broke, perpetually exhausted, and forever terrified that one day the train is going to leave the station without them. It can change you. It can flip a temperament on its head.

And after you graduate? You must still face the DEATH STAR.

The bar exam.

The bar exam does not give a shit about your fancy Ivy League credentials. The bar exam spits out people like JFK Jr. and Michelle Obama and Franklin D Roosevelt, all of whom failed it on the first attempt. The FORMER DEAN of Stanford Law failed the bar exam, which is a bit like the head of the IRS failing an audit.

The bar exam is diabolical. And you have to PAY to take it.

My Alyssa passed the bar on her first attempt, with a score in the 90th percentile, and there is no way Kiera is going to let this Flannery family milestone stand alone. Before she actually graduated, Kiera was already more than 50 hours into bar-prep, and woke up the next morning to her books. Not even an exhale. She will not relent now. If anything, she will push even harder.

Law school graduation is making it to Mount Everest base camp. Passing the bar is reaching the summit.

Somehow Kiera entered law school with grace and compassion, and despite all the pressure, she never lost that. She was beloved by her professors and her classmates. As I watched her navigate her way through classes, exams, back and forth travel, various intern and externships, AND the essentially full time position of Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review, and do all of it with a smile, I’d often just sit back with that smug “that’s MY KID” look on my face. But I never quite got over the feeling that I’ve somehow won the lottery. Because HOW IS THIS MY KID?

I’m almost 60 years old. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve fucked up. My regrets have regrets. But my wife and my girls are a constant reminder that I must have slipped a few good things in the mix. Maybe when I wasn’t paying attention.

So as I sat there listening to Kiera’s speech as valedictorian, and she said of her parents that “my proudest achievement will always be….being yours” I was reminded of why she give me orders NOT to record it. “You’ll cry” she said.

And I did and I don’t think I’ve ever had a happier cry in my life.

One final bit. There was a woman behind us at the graduation. As the Dean was introducing Kiera, and listing all her accomplishments, I could hear this woman say “this girl is a BOSS”.

M’aam, she is indeed.

In a bit…

—tf

The Tragically Hip are one of my favorite bands. I’ve written about my discovery of them here. I never grow tired of talking about this band. I never grow tired of listening to this band.

I also never tire of flogging myself for missing this band in real time. In regards to Canada, there are still way too many Americans who believe The Band were collectively hatched by Bob Dylan on Max Yasgur’s farm, and that Neil Young attended Kent State University with Joni Mitchell. It’s can be a pretty weird vibe at times.

These are the same people who want to make it the 51st state, by the way.

I’m not in this category of course, so I do not have this excuse to fall back on. Which makes my lapse all the worse.

As a sort of ongoing penance, everybody who enters my car or my home studio is hit with a Tragically Hip wall of sound. I make no apologies for this. I have become more than a fan. I am Fully and Completely a Proselytizer. My wife and I frequently travel the 4 hours round trip to visit our daughters, and I’m pretty sure she can sing all the words to “Fifty Mission Cap” back at me…and now knows who Bill Barilko is.

Hip guitarist Paul Langlois recently released a solo record. Not much press behind it. He just dropped it one day via a social media post. It’s called Smooth Rock Falls and it’s meat and potatoes rock and roll. Guitars. Bass. Drums. Recorded live on the studio floor. I listened. I liked. It’s the way the world should be. It should be small and connected. If there is one good thing about the streaming world it is the immediacy of it. The way a record can be dropped in Canada….and moments later be cranked loud enough on an Archbald, PA back porch to annoy the neighbors.

Things like this make me very happy.

I wake up to music. Music fills my days. I fall asleep to music. I write music. I play music. I release solo records. I release full band records. Music is the only thing that has never let me down. If used correctly, it is despair-proof…and could bankrupt the pharmaceutical industry.

If used correctly, it could bring a nation together for what Justin Trudeau once called “a cathartic cry.”

Which is what it did when the Tragically Hip played their last show. Lead singer Gord Downie was terminally ill with brain cancer. On August 20th, 2016 the band played their hometown of Kingston, Ontario, and fully ONE-THIRD of the country’s population watched the broadcast on the CBC. The Prime Minister himself attended the show, wearing a band T shirt.

There is no comparable American act that could do this (or American President who can pull off a band t shirt). Perhaps a reincarnated Elvis and Prince topping a bill of REM, Dylan, and Springsteen. And even then, we might have to add Taylor Swift for the Swifties and Kid Rock for the MAGAs.

I don’t wish to revel in this sort of ghastly jingoistic thinking. I’ll simply say that Canada does a lot of things better than we do, and yet still has grace enough to not suggest we become their 11th province.

As an American, writing about how good this band was will ALWAYS fall short, because we’re born into cynicism and division and there’s a part of our often-too-small brains that may still refuse to admit that for probably 10 years the Hip were the best rock and roll band in the world. And we missed it all because we were down here watching Kurt Loder and listening to Creed and Fred Durst.

For that alone I felt extremely sheepish for what I was about to try.

I wondered if Paul Langlois would want to talk about these things.

To me.

I followed him on Facebook after all. I could just drop him a message and hope that it was actually him on the other end and not some PR guy. Or worse, hope I didn’t get the dreaded auto generated “thanks for getting in touch” message which is just a polite way of saying "nice try asshole”. So I entered my plea, which included a few links to my writings about music and musicians, and waited.

Nothing.

I followed up (stubborn bloody American).

Eventually I got a note back, suggesting I contact his manager.

Which I immediately did.

Managers are paid to give a shit about things like this. Who was I? What publication did I write for? What exactly was my plan?

All totally valid questions, if a bit daunting because I’m not exactly Lester Bangs offering the cover of Rolling Stone here.

I considered concocting a line of bullshit that would give my pitch more gravitas….perhaps inventing a newspaper with an impressive sounding name, like the “Scranton Sentinel”. But managers who give a shit are apt to follow up on such claims, despite the flashy (fictitious) masthead.

That plus my Irish Catholic guilt kicked in so I decided that being dead-honest was the best policy here. So I replied….and I’m paraphrasing here….I’m just some dude who writes about music (and lots of other stuff) on a personal substack page, and have no real plan other than shooting the shit with Paul Langlois on a Zoom call and maybe writing a magazine-type article about the experience for….well….whatever lucky souls on the interwebz I can coax into reading it.

I must point out that Paul’s manager is a guy named Jake Gold, a member of the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame and a judge for 6 seasons on the show Canadian Idol, Canada’s answer to American Idol. A prominent and esteemed man, in other words. He had plenty of reasons to shoo me away, or to never respond at all, but instead he came back with, “Let me talk to Paul.”

Now, if me and Paul’s roles were reversed would I, one of the most acclaimed rock and roll artists in Canadian history, want to talk about my new record with a complete stranger from another country with an all-over-the-map Substack page and a marketing pitch that, to be kind, was a bit disjointed?

Probably not. But Paul is a Canadian, and they are generally much nicer than Americans. I cannot imagine getting the same reception if I had approached….say….Iggy Pop for a Zoom call. But part of the appeal of The Hip is that they just SEEM like guys you could cold-call and ask for 90 minutes of their time. I remember a story from somebody saying that back in the day they used to let traveling bands flop at their home after gigs, and while some bands were predictably disgusting, the guys in the Hip were always unfailingly polite and actually did their own dishes.

So while it is possible to be a gentleman in rock and roll, it is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of rock and roll stars. And make no mistake. In Canada Paul Langlois is a rock and roll star. For over 30 years….stage right, Les Paul slung low like a gunslinger, cigarette dangling from his lip, crunching out the type of rhythm guitar that anchors all great rock and roll bands.

And at the same time writing the music to some of his band’s greatest songs, including “Ahead By a Century”, sometimes referred to as the informal Canadian national anthem. Also note that Paul Langlois’s background vocals in the Hip are as necessary as the job Mike Mills of REM does for his band. Remove them, and you have inferior product on both sides of the border.

In short, this is a bad man.

I remember Bruce Springsteen inducting U2 into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and saying they might be the last band whose fans could actually name every member. Well, the Boss can be forgiven for not considering the Great White North. The two Gords. Johnny. Rob. And Paul. In Canada they were as synonymous as John Paul George and Ringo.

But let’s reiterate once again. What are the chances I’m gonna get Sir Paul or Ringo on a Zoom call?

But first, another reminder that I was dealing with a very important and busy man.

My request went from Paul’s manager to somebody else who worked for Paul’s manager.

This person proceeded to ask the same “Who was I? What publication did I write for? What exactly was my plan?” questions that his boss had already asked me.

Clearly there was a built-in firewall to keep the weirdos out.

Once again I was scrupulously honest and said, essentially, that I was a random fan and writer out of Scranton, with good intentions, who wanted to talk to Paul about his new record.*

*(I am not sure he completely believed me, because ultimately this person let loose some sort of automated AI bot into the Zoom call that recorded everything, just in case. This was a bit weird, as nothing like video surveillance was discussed beforehand. But, to be fair, why the fuck should ANYBODY trust an American these days?)

With this Jake Gold and his people graciously offered me a time. Noon on a Wednesday.

I have a real job of the 9-5 variety. So this time really sucked. Did I suggest the time be moved to better suit my schedule?

I did not. I did what any true rock and roll fan would have done.

I called in sick.

And so here we are, a few moments after the agreed upon time, Paul Langlois enters my Zoom waiting room, and then he enters the chat window. Sitting in a shed at his home in Kingston, looking relaxed in a green flannel under a hooded sweatshirt, coolly bathed in cigarette smoke. I heard train whistles in the background. He was disarmingly friendly. Willing to talk. There were no ground rules. Nothing off limits. I had no real PLAN here…..no printed list of questions or bases that I promised myself I would cover. I was a bit in awe to be honest. Here was one of my rock and roll idols, and suddenly he was in my home office. I surely stammered a whole lot. But ultimately it just turned into 2 guys who write songs and play guitar talking about music. Talking about bands. Talking about friendship. Talking about making records and what producers actually do. (“They break ties”) Talking about our insistence that a record has to contain at least 10 songs. So much so that he wrote the delightfully droll “MorningGuyNightGuy” at the last minute on the last day of the album sessions, because he only had 9 in the can.

Through it all I could hear his cell phone dinging with new messages, another reminder that this man’s time was valuable. But he never once checked it.

The playing field is NOT level, of course. I am who I am and he’s Paul Langlois. But throughout our 90 minute conversation he never once reminded me of this reputational disparity. At one point the Zoom call dropped (because the greedheads at Zoom placed a post-Covid 40 minute limit on free calls that I was unaware of). I figured that was it. Game over. I was crushed. But Paul immediately called me back on my cell phone so we could continue the conversation.

Let’s see Iggy fucking Pop do THAT.

It must be said that I am not good at this interview thing. As stated I didn’t really have a plan or a set of questions, and I was so pumped to be actually talking to the guy that I frequently talked over him and asked rambling questions that often weren’t questions at all….more like first-draft dissertations. Listening back to it all made me cringe. I often sound like I’m auditioning to be a talking head in a Ken Burns doc. But Langlois was a good sport about it. It gave him plenty of openings to smoke.

(This scattershot approach eventually wore him down, however, because in the midst of another of my meanderings he suddenly announced that he had to drop and go to the gym. Which may or may not have been true, but it sounded so oddly precise that I almost believed him. Either way I didn’t blame him. He had already been more than patient with me, and towards the end I was diving so deep into stuff that he may have been afraid I’d come to Kingston, track him down, and start throwing pebbles at his window…)

Hell, that’s the difference between being a reporter and being a fan. Fandom wins out.

But back to the conversation itself. We talked about the new record. I was particularly taken with the aforementioned “MorningGuyNightGuy”, which at one point uses the Looney Tune characters Ralph and Sam as stand-ins for the id and ego of rock and roll living, and if you don’t understand this you’ve never been 10 beers post-gig deep at 3am with a 6am wake-up call. It’s my favorite song of 2026 thus far.

Smooth Rock Falls is his 4th solo record, and after each one he was tempted to not make another. I asked him what else he might do instead. What else was he good at?

“Nothing” he said.

And that was that. Smooth Rock Falls is a lovely record largely focused on loss, driven in part at least by the recent passings of his Mom and Dad. At one point Langlois, discussing the tragic loss of Hip lead singer (and best friend) Gord Downie, suggested that perhaps he and the surviving members of the band should have went to therapy to deal with the pain and the ghosts that followed. “But we never did”, he said. “I had never lost anybody close to me before", he says. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I just isolated.”

This record may be the closest thing to that therapy. Until the next one. Because I don’t believe that Paul Langlois will ever stop making records. Despite his protestations to the contrary. I do understand his ambivalence, however. The best records SOUND easy. They flow. From the outside it can seem like creation is as delightful as chasing fireflies. But our backrooms are littered with angst and discarded ideas and coffee mugs and empty Molson bottles. The creation is WORK. The “playing” doesn’t start until the songs are done. And that part often seems like it might take a fucking lifetime.

Every record I’ve ever made I think 2 things.

This is my best work.

I’m never doing this again.

And yet here we are.

And while Paul freely admits to being over the drudgery of touring, when it’s time to actually PLAY, he still gets the same rush he always did.

“I still dread a ‘Paul Langlois’ show”, he said. “I never dreaded a Hip show in my life. But then again I didn’t have the heat on me like Gord did. Now it’s me up front. But when the first chord is struck, I’m happy.” He tells a story of his current bandmates having to repeatedly remind him, “You’re fucking Paul Langlois. Just go around thinking that before the gig. You got this.” He says this with a twinkle, but you get the sense that he DOES need to be reminded sometimes. He is modest to a fault, and even decades into this seems genuinely touched when people tell him what the music of the Tragically Hip means to them. He still calls Kingston home, so this happens fairly often.

“Sometimes in a bar somebody might be hesitant to put a Hip song on the jukebox or something, thinking I might be tired of it, but I never get tired of it”, he says. “I appreciate it all so much”.

*****

Rock and roll is an insular world. So we did have a connection of sorts. Much as I missed the Hip as they were happening, I also missed the Philly based band Marah. Marah was led by the brothers Bielanko, Serge and Dave. Over the last 6 years I’ve become good friends with Serge. I mentioned earlier that I sent samples of my past work to Langlois and his manager. Among these was a long form article I wrote about Serge in these very pages.

It turns out that Dave Bielanko wrote the band a letter in the wake of the Hip’s final show in 2016. It was, essentially, a love letter. What the Hip meant to him and his brother, and how rare if was for a band to form, remain together, and with steely grace and determination not fuck up in the 1000 different ways bands are supposed to fuck up. He used the analogy of a rock and roll band being a hot air balloon, and said that the Hip were the only band he knew that managed to land the balloon safely.

Paul Langlois was incredibly touched by this letter. “The letter affected me greatly,” he said. “I shared it with people close to me. It meant a lot.”

In truth, the Hip did just fine in America, carving out a solid niche and playing some of our most prominent theaters, including sold out shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco. “We’re proud of our career in the States”, he says. “Any band would take it.”

And that’s the thing. The people who GOT it in the US were bands like Marah. And the bands like the Central PA based the Badlees. Bands who were traveling the same roads and playing the same places. To this day Bret Alexander, guitarist and primary songwriter of the Badlees, contends that the Tragically Hip were the greatest live act he has ever seen.

These guys were there. They were paying attention. And they were fucking envious.

Bringing up the whole Canada/US thing made me feel like a rube. Because it’s the low hanging fruit the lazy writers have been focusing on for decades. In other interviews, and in our conversation, Paul is always magnanimous. In the past his fellow Hip guitarist Rob Baker has not been. “Fuck them”, Baker said in a recent Hip documentary, and when I heard that I felt like standing up and belting out O’Canada.

*****

And so that’s how I spent my sick day.

And now it’s time for a summary, and I don’t quite know what to say.

Other than thank you Paul Langlois for what you do. For your graciousness. And for putting in the work that allows you (and us) to play.

And finally.

The Tragically Hip didn’t seem aware of the rock and roll rules.

They weren’t misfits. They weren’t already broken. They all came from solid, 2 parent households. They were surrounded by love. They didn’t NEED to climb into that (already paid for) van. They didn’t need to brave frequent brawling, testosterone-laden crowds. In a way they had much more to lose than the wild men rock and roll is usually associated with. They didn’t enter with scars. They earned them on the way. Their friendships bent in private, but publicly theirs was always a united front. Their sound was the crack of the whip. Onstage they were a force that remains scratched into green room walls. On record they managed to crystalize a nation without being nationalistic. And in the end their heartbreak from losing a brother somehow remains both impenetrable, and awe inspiring.

There will never be another like them.

In a bit…

—tf

PS - for my next trick I will contact Jake Gold and ask if I can speak with Rob Baker, Gord Sinclair, and Johnny Fay.

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So tired.

The more I tried to sleep this away the more tired I am when I wake up.

‘Tis a ghastly cycle.

I try to remain engaged. And then somebody this nation actually elected (sometimes more than once) does or says something so breathtakingly stupid that I do a double and then a triple take and then have to google to make sure that the reporting is not from some parody site. It’s getting almost impossible to tell the difference, as you know. You’ve shared fake shit on social media because you thought it was real, and didn’t share real stuff on social media because you thought it was fake. Admit it.

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a. I was broke as balls
b. I could still afford them (I just looked. They were between $22 and $28)

That was two cases of beer.

This was before the world went mad, don’t you see.

I had been listening to Bruce since my teens. I first spotted his records in my sister’s room. That’s where I first heard “Jungleland” and “Racing in the Street” and the Nebraska record, which put hooks into me that I can still feel today. I remember being at a summer picnic and a guy walking around carrying a boombox that was blaring “Born In the USA” and feeling like shit was about to get real. Seemingly overnight he went from the odd Starkweather dude who blithely ditched his wife in Baltimore to a combination of Elvis Presley and Captain America.

What a time to be alive.

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I’ve been thinking about the concept of Home.

That feeling you get when you’ve been away for a while, and you finally reach that highway exit—and you just kinda take a deep breath and the blood pressure normalizes and everything just feels a bit more manageable. We all have our own piece of dirty ground. Getting there feels like crossing the finish line. That door closes behind us, and we drop that bag to the floor, and for a few moments at least, it’s the greatest feeling in the world. The people we love are there.

Even our dogs understand. As home gets closer, they are suddenly at the car window. They instinctively KNOW. The way the tires feel. That last stop sign. The left up the hill. The left onto their street. By the time you hit your driveway they’re practically on your lap. They’ve been with you the whole time, but now they get to be with you AT HOME.

It’s our sacred place. And our safe one. It’s the only place in the world where we can be our true selves. “If I cannot plop down on my couch in sweat pants while holding a bottle of Yuengling, I want no part of your revolution.” I think anarchist Emma Goldman said this. I’m paraphrasing a bit, but you get the idea.

But now people are trying to fuck with this vibe.

As somebody who lives in Archbald, this data center deluge has triggered the rage of a much younger man. I’ll be 60 come July, and I don’t wish to be bothered with anything more than Phillies games and a good book. I’ve followed the rules for the most part. Fought all sorts of good fights. Loved and lost. Worked 5 days a week for more than 40 years. Paid my taxes and all that civic shit. I’ve got another 15 good years if I’m lucky, and just assumed assholes like Bezos and Zuckerberg would set their greedy sights on larger zip codes than mine.

But then again, it’s zip codes like mine that assholes like Bezos and Zuckerberg ALWAYS fuck with, so that assumption was wishful thinking. The initial thought was that we could be bought with a few strategically placed paper bags. Spiritually exhausted descendants of coal miners could be purchased out of petty cash, after all. Turns out not so much. A few local pols may have hit I-95 South and kept on going, but that was that. It quickly became clear that a plan B was required.

This was the propaganda portion of the program, which was managed in such a heavy-handed and condescending way that it drove the local PR firm responsible for it underground, where they now spend all their time removing their bad online reviews.

So that leaves us where we are now. Send in the lawyers and flood the zone. This or that hearing is held here or there, at frequently bizarre times and with as little notice as possible. Faceless developers look for legal cracks to exploit. They bring out the big guns—Shapiro and McCormick and Bresnahan reading prepared talking points seemingly written by Amazon flacks, touting the exact same bullshit that sent Ryan Leckey packing. A never ending assortment of greasy lawyers from even-greasier law firms are sent in to lecture the yokels on the upside to carcinogens and brown bears wandering across Main St. It’s been wild.

They don’t argue this precisely of course, but to us listening, theirs is the ‘Wah wah…’ of Charlie Brown’s teacher. You ain’t gonna have any credibility in this town with the 30 pieces of silver audibly jingling in the lining of your fancy suit.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that Archbald is in a fight for its life. The latest figure is 51 data centers, each more than twice the size of the fucking White House, sharing space and air and water and electricity with the plebes who actually live here. Even Ryan Leckey would have a hard time spinning this into a win for property values. Without organized opposition, this place could turn into an above-ground Centralia.

In Act Four of Eugene O'Neill’s play Long Day's Journey into Night, the family patriarch reflects on his wasting his talent for money….

“What the hell was it that I wanted to buy?…..”

Imagine an Archbald boy quoting Eugene O’Neill eh? Surely Altman and Musk assumed we all just watch The Price is Right and Fox News. Whatever. It’s a valid question. What DO they want to buy? After you have a billion, what is the worth of another billion? And another on top of that. Surely this nation has problems more pressing than giving Wall Street bros a hard‑on and eliminating Python programmers.

Why do we always measure the health of our economy by how rich people are doing? Do you ever wonder this? I do. Nobody asks the guy who just spent more on a tank of gas than he used to spend on a used‑car payment in the 1980s (me).

Dr. Ian Malcolm from the movie Jurassic Park was no Eugene O’Neill, but he did inadvertently sum up the billionaire bros in one memorable line…

“[Your people] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

…and so there you have it. Eugene O’Neill, the greatest American dramatist of all time, and a fictional scientist played by Jeff Goldblum, the current shill for Apartments.com, united in their opposition to billionaires showing up on my doorstep with concrete battering rams and a note from the Governor. You just never know who might arrive in these pages to buttress my arguments.

By the way, everybody’s favorite part of Jurassic Park is when the “bloodsucking lawyer” hides from the rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex in an outhouse, and is then plucked from the bowl and devoured in one gulp. There’s a reason that people universally cheered when this happened, which is the same reason that data centers lawyers here are treated like they’re wearing a Cowboys jersey at an Eagles home game. The great Pete Seeger sang the song “Which Side Are You On?” in the 1940s. The question still lingers 75+ years later.

And speaking of Emma Goldman, she once said that “If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal”…..and in this fight at least, that is true. There is nothing partisan about rich people becoming more rich, or statehouses with For Sale signs on the front door. I point this out mostly for MAGA folks, who are rightly pissed at Shapiro, but act like Fetterman post-stroke when somebody brings up Bresnahan, a man so crooked that he needs to screw his pants on every morning. But also for Democrats, who need to grasp that getting robbed by the stripper is the same thing as being robbed by the john.

And let me tell you. When a national publication owned by a parasite like Jeff Bezos breaks its own ranks to shed front page light on our struggle, that is more newsworthy than anything stated in the anodyne article itself. That is the arc of justice bending in real time.

And so much for all that. The fight goes on, and if people here have to chain themselves to backhoes to stop this invasion, they will do so.

And by the way, as per the 2020 census, 5 people still live in Centralia. They won’t budge.

This never ceases to make me smile. Some of that stubborn energy has surely made its way down 81 North.

In a bit…

—tf

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So my hometown of Archbald has gone national.

First CBS News, and now the Washington Post have featured the town in recent reporting. The Post article hit a bit harder — being less concerned with what Dave McCormick, the PA Senator from Connecticut, had to say in defense of data centers and more focused on what these things are doing to our community. It must be said that outside journals like the Post cannot resist dropping cutesy lines like “The town is so small that some of its most recognizable buildings are funeral homes…,” although I congratulate whoever wrote this piece on not mentioning coal mining until page two. Admirable historical restraint. Try as they might to avoid condescension, they can never quite get there.

You can almost hear Bezos in an editorial meeting. “Oh LOOK at them. Aren’t they just so ADORABLE?”

(Interestingly enough, Archbald, the 8th largest borough in the entire state, is much larger than Medina, Washington, the home of tech bros like Bill Gates and Bezos. One wonders what their most “recognizable buildings” are, eh?)

But still, Archbald’s plucky little fight is inspiring the nation. Safe to say that NOBODY saw this coming.

The aforementioned condescension is the river that runs through it all. The developers, the lawyers, the political insiders who view this place — and other small towns like it — as pliable. We are a political non‑entity. Our places are too small to appear on maps. We are engulfed by larger ecosystems. We will bend over and take the paddling like Kevin Bacon in the movie Animal House. Thank you sir, may I have another.

Except that’s not what is happening. Outside lawyers who swaggered into town a few months back are now sneaking in through back doors to avoid our ire. Council members who kick‑started this whole mess have run for the hills, resorting to whining to the Post reporter about the “meanness” of fellow residents — as if providing a runway to men like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and throwing residents of an established trailer park out of their homes, should have triggered flowers.

For my eyes to stop rolling, I’m gonna need these things built in Beverly Hills or Hyannis Port.

The Post contacted developers and their lawyers for comment, and none responded. Either because they have no response that won’t sound terrible, or in their hubris have decided that we don’t deserve one. For whatever reason, the article didn’t ask Governor Shapiro what he thought about Archbald’s fight, nor did it reach out to McCormick or Congressman Rob Bresnahan, the town’s DC reps. Bresnahan, who enthusiastically backs data center development in the state, was just publicly named to a “Most Corrupt Politicians” list by the anti‑corruption group End Citizens United in April 2026, which I mention merely in passing because some may find it… you know… interesting. McCormick’s wife is the President and Vice Chairman of Meta, so at least he doesn’t have any clear conflicts of interest.

Whatever. The Post deals with this sort of slippery slope of privilege all the time, and maybe they got bored with it or had space constraints. They didn’t even see fit to mention former pugilist Marty Flynn, our State Senator. Flynn is a political weather vane, and depending on his audience comes across as either pro or anti data center. “This is how it works,” he recently told Scranton Times columnist Chris Kelley when discussing the seeming rigidity of NEPA Democratic politics. “I didn’t set the rules, but I play the game… And if you don’t like it, too bad.”

Not sure how that might look on a campaign poster, but that’s not my lane. It’s worth noting that while Flynn has accepted thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from data center developers, these men may simply be Boxing/MMA fans.

I’ve called Archbald home since 2006. I was a Dunmore boy. Change comes hard for Dunmore boys. But one day I heard myself say “Archbald” when somebody asked “Where are you from,” and what sounded so strange then I say with immense pride now. My kids were raised here. This place is nothing like what CBS News or the Washington Post expects it to be. I’m not sure what our most prominent buildings are, but they sure ain’t where we wake each other. More likely they are where we gather as friends and neighbors to raise glasses and circle the wagons. Where we gather to BE Archbald.

Archbald and the surrounding Valley towns are used to what’s become institutional condescension. But do not mistake resignation for acceptance. Our home is just as important to us as yours is to you. If I came crashing into your backyard, I would not expect a warm welcome. CBS News and the WaPo seem shocked that we might feel the same way.

But at least they’ve taken notice.

Let’s hope others do as well.

Because this ain’t over. My hometown is just getting started. And this is a fight that needs to be joined.

In a bit…

—tf

I don’t like driving. I especially don’t like driving at night. I do both things but I don’t like them. The glare at night is especially bothersome. When that hits I can’t see shit and seeing should be a prerequisite for driving. Lucky there are very few places I actually want or need to go, so I’ve been able to make it this far. Earlier this week I had to make a 250 mile round-trip and was pretty aggravated the entire time. Relentless construction and an endless sea of trucks threatening to run me off the road and then it got dark so it was construction and an endless sea of trucks threatening to run me off the road with me muttering to myself “where is the yellow line?” and “where is the exit?”. In the midst of all this I have a playlist of bangers playing as a distraction, and I’m secretly hoping it doesn’t start to rain because rain exacerbates the glare to the point where I might be driving in some farmer’s field thinking I’m still on interstate 81. Anyway, this is my cross to bear and I bring it up only to remind myself that I’ll be 60 years old this summer and I don’t really give a fiddler’s fart about optics anymore. If I don’t want to do something I don’t do it and the people who love me are just like “yea whatever he’s weird but we love him too” and that’s that. I wish you these people.

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