Scratch Pad: Pessoa, MacGowan, Lynch

From the past week

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.

▰ Annual heteronym joke: Fernando Pessoa died on this day in 1935 — taking with him dozens of others

▰ “Fairytale of New York” will hit extra hard this year

▰ I would have recorded the intense Lynchian HVAC drone of this roadside fast food establishment’s restroom but the piped-in holiday music would have been nixed by copyright bots. (Side note: yes, “roadside fast food establishment” suggests there’s a roadside fast food underground.)

▰ [Rapidly scrambles for mute button prior to sneezing]

▰ Me years ago: This is a nice wallet, especially because it has no logo.

Me now: I need a new wallet because my old one is falling apart but I have no idea what company made my old wallet.

This feels like a broader metaphor about some life lesson that’s been evading me.

▰ C B7 C A7 D7 G7 C G7 — pretty much all I’ll be doing on guitar the next few weeks is cycling through these chords, and variations on them in various voicings, while working on fingerpicking

An Account

Lauren Oyler's autofiction

I dug Lauren Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts. She has a keen sense of the micro-interactions between people, as well as those between people and technology, and especially those between people when technology is what is between them.

I’ve been joking with friends that it reads like Bridget Jones’s Diary as if recast so as to be adapted for film by David Fincher. And the manner in which it ends feels, in a way, like a realist standoff between the Joker and a Harley Quinn.