Scratch Pad: Eileen, AirTrain, Autumn
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
I’m posting this halfway through a JetBlue flight home to San Francisco from New York, where I was visiting family.
▰ It’s a lesser-known Gen X superstition that if you happen to walk by an establishment that’s playing “Come On Eileen” before 10:30am, it’s gonna be a better than average day
▰ When I hear the robotic voice repeat “stop, look around” on the JFK AirTrain, I want a Kraftwerk version of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound)”
▰ ”The thing about being in Art Blakey’s band was staying in it long enough to have one of your songs recorded.” —Frank Lacy (March 31, 2025, at Smalls in Manhattan, leading his septet during the 9:00pm show)
▰ Imagining that by the time I’m due for hearing aids, people will be muting words in everyday conversation like it’s possible to do currently on social media
▰ The quiet after the dishwasher after the rain is a particularly quiet quiet
▰ Not bad. It’s April 3 as I type this, and I’ve been in New York since March 27, and I haven’t heard Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, or Bon Jovi once. Let’s see if I can make it to Saturday, April 5, when I fly home.
▰ Finished reading two novels this week: Ali Smith’s excellent Autumn (2017), a beautifully fractured story about the emotional and intellectual connection between two people toward the start of life for one of them and toward the end of the other’s, and Joan Didion’s even more excellent Play It as It Lays (1970), a bleakly fractured story about the lack of connection between a number of people, and now I want to read any novel that dares to use a quote from the Didion book as its epigraph. Also read a short little graphic novel by Rich Tommaso, In the Garden of Earthly Delights (Floating World Comics, 2024), which I picked up at the excellent shop Escape Pod at the recommendation of its proprietor, Menachem Luchins. That’s on Long Island in the town of Huntington, which is also where I lived in the same house from when I was about two weeks old until I left for college. I’m a sucker for small comics, and comics written and drawn by the same person, and heist stories, and comics that include depictions of art, and this is all of those. I’m also pondering print formats for small comics, given Hannes Pasqualini and my ongoing Frame by Frame series, and this one was informative.
