Scratch Pad: NY(C), Diploma, Block

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ I was in New York for the past week — a few days in the city, then out on Long Island for family time — and thus I posted very little to social media. Back in San Francisco now. I’ll catch up with some items in the coming week.

▰ If keeping a journal is a struggle for you, I can’t express how much it helps to make a list of topics at the end of the day, just before bed — a list of words or phrases (events that occurred or ideas on your mind) that the next morning you can flesh out into brief (or not so brief) commentary. I will either jot these down or record myself stating them as they occur to me.

▰ This is the paragraph from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography/memoirs that focused my thoughts on what eventually became the Disquiet Junto music community:

▰ Always looks like a record album to me:

▰ I’ve been reunited with my high school diploma, which means I’ve been reminded of the ever so slight distinction between how the r and c in my first name are depicted. And no, despite this typeface’s appearance, I was not raised in Germany during the early 1800s:

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep by Lawrence Block, several of whose Matthew Scudder novels I read recently. This one, while also the sort of crime story that fits in a back pocket, was more whimsical. The conceit that the main character can’t sleep didn’t seem to matter much to the story, except as a way to explain on occasion why he happened to be able to be awake, but made for occasional interesting asides. I may read the sequel.