“Barely awake. House dark, coffee poured, page blank.
“Quick first thing each morning, start writing. Keep the pen moving on paper, shoot for a paragraph or two, or more, no thought to where it’s going, or if it will lead anywhere or be worth reading, or embarrass you. Better it does. The last thing it should seek to be, in any sense of the word, is good.
“Type it up with minimal edits for preposition and punctuation. Generally there'll be a word or two you can’t read and have to take your best guess at.”
Nog called these short bits remnants, likely a reference to the dream artifacts of REM sleep. No surprise we too eventually would quietly on our own get up early to give them a try. These below are drawn from forty successive mornings beginning on the first day of Snippets 2021, as an experiment in spontaneity. We’ve sprinkled in some from Nog’s own notebooks from when he was conducting his first 5 a.m. longhand short-form experiments.
Bry — March 18, 2021, 6:12 am
BERN AND I got talking last night about the moral outrage around the “canceling” of Pepé LePew and Dr. Seuss’s Scrambled Eggs Super (a magnficient and memorable book, but for the depictions of blacks on page 17, that was on the shelves of probably no more than half a dozen bookstores across the country). The main objections seem to be that it’s absurd to think such innocent images could influence children.
Bern recalled these same people (Fox & Friends being the loudest) holding Fred Rogers largely responsible — with him two years dead and unable to respond in his patient fashion — for creating “these entitled millennials who think they’re special.”
“CRAZY GUGGENHEIM” appeared on the old Jackie Gleason Show in a weekly skit with Joe the Bartender. His character’s walk-on always began with “Hello Joe. Hello Mister Dunahee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee.” He was meant to be a lush, but really he appeared more to have brain damage or a developmental disability. The studio audience roared.
I grump a I read statements by grumpy older standup comics lamenting how we’ve become too politically correct; edgy jokes that got big laughs 15 years ago get you lambasted today. I think the reason is more of us slip quickly between an awareness of comedy and tragedy. We’re not so much “sensitive” snowflakes as we are of aware others’ possible pain. The adult in the room at a children’s birthday party keeps an eye out for the one who’s off in the corner clutching his hands. It’s what adults do.
Bry — March 16, 2021, 6:12 am
ALL THE appliances in his house had been chosen not for performance or dependabilty or appropriateness to decor but rather for their insistence on having faces. The dishwasher had two small dials that were well-spaced eyes above a low grill like a grimace of orthodontia. The oven with its minimalist controls, ordered from Japan, looked sagacious and deeply content. The washer and dryer both were caricatures of surprise and astonishment. In the basement, the water heater was hilarity itself.
“CABABANANANOIDS,” his father said, and laughed, his eyes dark and set deep, a pair of commas fallen on their faces.
“It’s cannabi… canna… canabinabanoids. Shit!” Hingstrom giggled as he passed the joint back to his father.
A thump, as if the ski gondola had hit a speed bump, and then another. They were coming to the top of the mountain.
Where two snowmobiles and two unmistakable Pitkin County sheriff deputies waited for them.
melba! Rhumba!
Bry — March 14, 2021, 6:19 am
ALL THE appliances in his house had been chosen not for performance or dependabilty or appropriateness to decor but rather for their pareidolia value — their insistence on having faces. The dishwasher had two small dials that were well-spaced eyes above a low grill like a grimace of orthodontia. The oven with its minimalist controls, ordered from Japan, looked sagacious and deeply content. The washer and dryer both were caricatures of surprise and astonishment respectively. In the basement, the water heater was hilarity itself.
Bern — March 13, 2021, 6:12 am
Whistling “Singing in the Rain,” Wish took himself along Oak Street because the oaks would be full still. They weren’t. Their leaves swirled at the cross-streets as if circling the drain, and the stripped branches made the sound of waves on a beach running up and sinking back. Setting off up Fifth, he thumped his chest with his fists and buh-buh-buhhed “Seventy-Six Trombones” until he arrived downtown, still worried about his dog.
Bern — March 12, 2021, 5:07 am
SHE TELLS HIM her father is Albert Singer, and that all along they were both working for the Ádhraím Thú, the Irish Secret Service. Her accent switches mid-sentence just like that.
“Go on, there’s no such thing as an Irish Secret Service," he says.
“We’re that good, aren’t we.”
Bern — March 11, 2021, 6:12 am
THE DISINFORMATION GRAPHIC has its beginnings in nonverbal mythic scaffolding models that were first posited by theoretical diagrammarian Jeannette Dutarde. Ms. Dutarde’s seminal work defining infauxmation would later inspire works such as the justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Bry — March 7, 2021, 6:09 am
A DRY MORNING so I’ve fished this out of Bern’s wastebasket — as he cuts his novel like mad:
Up and down the avenue, the asynchronous flickerings of the city’s lamppost globes, scores of them, served as a nightly tribute to the town’s previous purchasing agent, who had taken payments under the table to accept shoddy first-generation LEDs, and who left town in disgrace shortly after his misconduct was discovered. Wish felt bad for the man, whom he’d liked, and who year-in year-out would volunteer for the Rotary Christmas tree sale, manning the lot alone on the coldest nights. He’d had a son with special needs even the city’s health plan hardly began to cover.
And yet with all that, the display never failed to cheer Wish. He liked to pretend the flashes were the lamps excitedly exchanging messages of affection and invitation, like lightning bugs.
Bern — March 6, 2021, 5:12 am
I'VE JUST had to cut the word “mayorally” from the novel draft. This is painful, first because it is exactly the word that describes how Wish Bernum proceeds into a room after a crowd shouts surprise at his birthday party, and second because I haven’t yet been able to find it in any dictionary, which argues powerfully for keeping it.
Bry — March 5, 2021, 6:01 am
POST-DIVORCE, Billy Black is slow to grieve, and to help his young sons grieve, the household.
The three of them sit one side of a booth in the diner.
Demonstrating with the mashed potatoes and gravy, he tells the boys about the Dutch who build great dikes to hold out the sea, that they may build their best paradise in a safe place. He thinks, but does not say, sitting on the beach just contemplating the huge waves isn’t going to be nearly as effective, not by a long shot.
But I am ahead of myself, he thinks, as he cuts up his younger son’s pork chop. I’m the boy with his finger in the dike. I’m not building. I’m hardly really even contemplating. Right now it’s everything I can do to reassure the two little boys beside me, holding their fingers to the holes in their hearts.
Bern — March 4, 2021, 6:12 am
THE SAGES OF THE AGES (garage band!) exhort us to be reborn. And this morning, listening the bluejays’ chatter after last night’s rain, I see how my lifelong conditioned awareness of myself and my world need to give way to an inner, original conception of who I might be if I live from my desires.
This is what is actually meant, Father de Plüm explained to us last night, by the NT stories of Good Friday and the Resurrection. And this is the potentiality and promise that awaits us all — not this going through life stuffing ourselves, as he put it, from economy-size bags of store-brand Easter candy in weak and sickly colors.
Bry — March 3, 2021, 5 am sharp
WE’RE OUT of practice as regards civic participation in the presence of our fellow citizens. Mail-in voting has been the standard here for several years. The county hasn’t seen fit to put us on a jury. We never made it down to Denver for the BLM marches. So it’s a long time since we’ve found ourselves amongst strangers sharing in a mood of civic common goodwill.
Yesterday, we drove to Good Sam Medical Center for our vaccine shots. Standing in line we all looked a little like survivors of a maritime disaster, dazed by what’s happened, grateful to have made it to safety, in need of a shave. Clutching our forms we stood well-spaced along a hallway until a relief worker took us one by one to a chair, where a nurse spoke to us clerically but kindly, getting down our name and birthdate, then administering the shot. After that we went to sit in a chair by the wall for fifteen minutes in the unlikely event we had a reaction.
Sitting there, in quiet celebration for having made it to this stage, happy too for these others as they exhibit shy smiles of relief, or effusively thank the healthcare workers and volunteers for their service here today — we experience a reaction. We feel the same coldness in our gut just like the one we felt at the long shuddering collision. Then we are flushed, the blood going to our head, as we think of those who remained at their tables in the dining room complaining about the poor service, and of the band directed to play on, and of the captain, who kept insisting, from his lifeboat, there was never an iceberg, that it had been placed there by his enemies, and that anyway it had melted away just like that.
Bry — March 2, 2021, 5:02 am
I'VE JUST had to cut the word “mayorally” from the novel draft. This is painful, first because it is exactly the word that describes how Wish Bernum proceeds into a room after a crowd shouts surprise at his birthday party, and second because I haven’t yet been able to find it in any dictionary, which argues powerfully for keeping it.
Bry — March 1, 2021, 5:47 am
MY FRESHMAN college roommate calls to recount a line he remembers Goldie Hawn delivering on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In over three decades ago.
“If Tuesday Weld married Frederic March II, she’d be Tuesday March the Second.”