Scratch Pad: Journal, Tabs, Sugar
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.
▰ If you have trouble keeping a journal, write down the most mundane aspects of your day. The things we take for granted are often the things that, down the road, experience a change that is otherwise hard to track back in retrospect — or foresee in advance. Just noting those items, duties, processes, and instances can cement thoughts and provide a foundation for something to linger on and write about.
▰ Yow, 30 MPH gusts are something else
▰ The Punisher does a bit of time-sensitive acoustic deduction in the first issue of the new run (with a new title character) by David Pepose (author) and Dave Wachter (illustrator):
▰ My guitar teacher, looking further ahead in the score: “And you know this chord.”
▰ Me not recognizing the chord but, yes, seeing it later in between where I have gotten so far and where he is currently: “I think you mean I will have known this chord.”
▰ The funny thing about practicing “Easy Living,” the Robin/Rainger tune, in guitar class so as to learn more about 7th chords is that life is thus not particularly easy
▰ A day in which both the Connections and Strands games in the New York Times have the same word (“aioli”). I’d always wondered if the editors kept an eye out for such things, or weren’t concerned. Either way, both puzzles were fun (earlier this week).
▰ Halfway through episode 5 of the Colin Farrell show Sugar I said something out loud — something that turned out to be the case in the episode 6.
(And just as a side note, the whole thing looks like an Ed Brubaker / Sean Phillips jam. I’d swear the storyboards must resemble one of their comics.)
▰ The café has played Lucinda Williams, the Kinks, Sam Dees, and Pavement, and I’m easily twice the age of anyone apparently employed here. Everything will be fine.
▰ For every 10 browser tabs I have open, at least one will be for some esoteric-to-me guitar chord
▰ There are days when I’m not even sure which is my default web browser, and so I find a link in an email and click on it to remind myself
▰ According to my notes, I finished reading three books this week (while juggling more than I usually do, and adding several more in the process), a novel and two graphic novels. The novel is The Return of the Solidier by Rebecca West, about which I can’t say enough. It’s fantastic, and it sent me subsequently to The World Set Free by HG Wells (with whom she had a long out-of-wedlock relationship that early on yielded a son, the writer Anthony West); I’m just over the 50% mark on that one. Also In the Sounds and Sea by Marnie Galloway (a wordless comic with a mythical, Odyssean narrative) and the first volume of a new, ongoing Blade series, written by Bryan Hill and drawn by Elena Casagrande.
