virtual scrap paper
My friend Mindy gave me a space pen for my 22nd birthday*. I didn’t really need a pen that could write in space and had the ability to withstand extreme temperatures. BUT! I could put it on my keyring, and it could write while wet or at any angle.
It was a thoughtful gift. I was often bumming pens off of friends so that I could write notes on whatever scraps of paper I could find - receipts, envelopes, bar coasters, napkins. I filled them all with funny anecdotes, ideas for short stories and art projects, albums or books I wanted to check out, random thoughts, etc.
All that to say, my notes app serves the same purpose these days, and I’m organizing it right now.
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“Tessellated skin”
I wrote this down because of an idea for a drawing. I’ve been thinking about using some kind of isometric tessellation for crosshatching instead of regular shading.
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Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. - Immanuel Kant
This in relation to the incongruity theory as an explanation for humor, i.e. sometimes incongruity itself can be funny. I think the quote stuck out because it made me think about the aforementioned zucchini video.
I’m reading Planet Funny, a book M recommended a couple of years back when we were up late drinking. Cory left the room for a moment and came back to find us deep into a discussion about joke density. I ordered the book the next day but only recently started reading it.
While I’m on the topic of Planet Funny, the first chapter contains a sentence that is two and a half pages long, and contains 234 commas. Yes, I counted.
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King Krule - “Comet Face”
I can only guess I wrote this note is a reminder to myself that I am completely in love with Archy Marshall’s voice? This is a song which hadn’t previously stood out to me, but then all of the sudden I couldn’t stop listening to it. “Stoned Again” is another excellent track off of this album.
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“Trust – learned, unlearned, relearned. Earned, lost, restored.”
skating party 7/1/2004
Not sure why I wrote this note. Maybe nostalgia while re-reading old entries from my mid 20s? Wanted to revisit this train of thought?
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“Neurodivergence, failing up, lack of supports, gifted kid burnout, first pancake with young (outsider) parents.”
Pretty sure this was a writing prompt for myself. Something I’d like to expand on later.
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“Is subversive humor more acceptable if it’s intellectualized? Versus, for instance, meme culture?”
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“Working through the inferiority complex brought on by reading the Wikipedia articles of new/old friends/acquaintances.”
Would not recommend, but doing it because of a writing project that will probably go nowhere.
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The passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others.
- Thomas Hobbes
In other words, otherness=humor. Much of this type of humor is falling out of fashion because it is rooted racism, misogyny, etc. But I think the humor born of quirks in character will always be present. Jane Austen knew it. So did the creators/writers of The Office. I’ve got some more thoughts about how this ties into neurodivergence, but I’m not going to get into right now.
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A list of words I have recently read and love: harbinger, weltschmerz, assuage, laconic, saturnine, sonorous, mercurial
A list of words I have recently read and hate: sluice
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“Moby Octopad and ‘Little Selves’”
A Yo La Tengo song and the title of one of my favorite short stories? This may have been related to something I was writing? Totally lost trying to figure out what these two things have in common.
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Cory’s youngest brother called us at 11pm last Wednesday. He was drunk which, unfortunately, is not all that uncommon. “My wife is mad at me because I bought a boat. Ha! Next summer I’m going to buy TWO boats.” So I guess Andrew will have a small fleet by next summer, Keely be damned.
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*The night Mindy gave me the pen was the same night we went to see The Appleseed Cast at Rubber Gloves. We got dinner before the show and saw a guy wearing a naval bicorne hat for no discernible reason. I don’t know why I still think about that 20 years later.
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That’s it. Sometimes I embarrass myself with this shit. By ‘sometimes’ I mean always, and by ‘this shit’ I mean pretty much everything I write on here, do, say, or think.
4:52 p.m. - 2023-06-29