This transcript was generated from an audio file by AI, and may contain inaccuracies.
Transcript
I said, do you know how to read dates? And she said, I don't know how to read at all. Hello, and welcome to episode 177 of the erasable Podcast. I am Tim Wasem here on hosting duties, and I am joined by the second and third sheets of my morning pages, Andy Welfle and Johnny Gamber. Hey, guys. Hello.
Hey.
Hey. Which one of us is number two and which one is number three?
You're definitely a number two.
Thank you.
Yeah.
On the pencil podcast, you got.
You got one. You got number two written all over you.
That's a top village.
Yes. How have you guys been? Pretty good last couple weeks.
Yeah.
Yeah. 2022 has been fun so far.
Yeah. Yeah.
Death threats, impending war.
Yeah.
No interesting new stationery until today.
Get the bingo cards out, folks. Yeah. Yep.
Yeah.
Bingo. That could always be on there, though, couldn't it? Yeah. Tonight we are going to talk about something that if you run in stationary circles, which Johnny has claimed is his band name, you have probably heard about morning pages before. We've talked about them here and there on a race bowl, but, I mean, it's mostly in passing or kind of mentioning. I know we talked about it last time along with journaling or, like, our month, like what we're planning to do with our. Or not. Sorry. Not journaling with our planners in the year to come. Johnny and I had both mentioned doing some sort of morning page kind of thing, but tonight.
You were. I think maybe you thought you were muted when you're not in your microphone, was making all sorts of creaky sounds.
Oh, sorry. I just.
All right, I'll just hit lessons. Tonight we're going to take a deeper dive into the practice. Talk about where it came from, talk about how we use it or how we've adapted it to our needs and how we think it's nothing short of fundamental for a lot of creative people, or not really think it is. We just are commenting on it because it's something that when you listen to podcasts and you explore the lives of writers, it pops up all the time. So. But before we get there, let's do our thing and let's check in with what we are consuming and writing with. Andy, why don't you start us out?
Sure. Just a couple things for media I've consumed. I watched a movie over the weekend. It's on HBO Max right now, and I think it's in some theaters. Has anybody here heard of Kimmy?
No.
No.
It is a psychological thriller and it takes place in Seattle. It this Woman, Zoe Kravitz. Her character is a, like, a quality software engineer who works at a company that isn't entirely unlike Amazon. And they have, like, a voice assistant called Kimmy. And her job is like, she. She listens to, like, failed queries on Kimmy. Like, if somebody's trying to get Kimmy to do something and Kimmy doesn't know how to do it, she, like, listens to it and then, like, codes, like a new solution or new way that it works. And she is doing this and she witnesses. She hears a murder on a Kimmy in a recording. And so it's basically kind of like, about how she follows up with that. And to kind of like, make matters worse, she's agoraphobic and it is the pandemic, and she doesn't, like, leave her apartment. She has this, like, very, like, moody, like, loft in Seattle that's really cool. And it's a little. It's a little Rear Window and it's a little bit like. Like some sort of, like, a tech thriller. It was pretty good. It's like 90 minutes long. So it's a nice short movie.
I didn't know they were allowed to make those anymore.
I know.
It had to be 2 hours and 45 minutes now.
Yeah, no, this one was so short, I just was very surprised. But it also, like, it seemed like they. They like, cut some things out. Like, there are a few threads that, like, the movie had that they never really seemed to, like, follow up on. So I wonder if there was more. It was. It's a Steven Soderbergh film. And I wonder if they, like, left some of it on the. I don't know, you can't really say the, like, the cutting pile on the floor or whatever, but the editing room floor. But whatever you do with, like, old clips now that you edit movies digitally,
it sounds like they did them in the Macintosh recycling bin.
Yeah. Yeah, they just threw it away. So, yeah, that was pretty good. So HBO Max. If anybody wants to watch it there. I also finished. I cannot remember. Did I. Last week, Did I talk about the Ministry for the Future?
I think so.
It's a. It is a book by Kim Stanley Robinson, who is a. Like a. He's like a sci fi writer. But it's a lot of, like, speculative fiction. And this one takes place in the, like, slightly near future when, like, global warming is just getting, like, extra bad and there's just, like, weather disasters happening all over the place. I mean, a lot of it really hits close to home, but it's it tells a story over 20 years about kind of how the world reckons with climate change and how it just sort of like fundamentally changes economies and incentive structures and how the world works in order to. To like, account for it and how to like try to reverse it. And it's like this book was maybe like 200 pages longer than I really wanted it to be. Like, I stuck it up till the end, but I was just like, okay, come on, let's, let's go, let's go. But basically, the way, the kind of the way that it. I think, I don't think I'm giving much away when I say that everything is kind of. It's kind of launched by a giant heat wave that happens in India that kills like 20 million people. Like, it's. It takes a huge, bigger than we've had now kind of like climate disaster to like spur things into action. And even then it just takes a long time for things to actually happen and people to commit to it. And it was a, it's a. It didn't. It was very much like, don't look up. It just didn't feel that fictiony and that's uncomfortable. But it was pretty good. Kim Stanley Robinson has a lot of like these kind of books where he really dives into like climate science in science fiction. And yeah, this was pretty good. It came out I think late last, like mid last year. So that is, that's it for books. I. I'm excited. So my birthday was on Sunday and.
Happy birthday. Thank you.
Some friends got me a biography of Stanley, like an autobiography of Stanley Tucci that's like told told in stories about food and recipes, which is extremely. Yeah.
Whoa.
I'll. Next episode maybe I'll have read that. It looks really good. Stanley Tucci's fantastic and I know he has a lot to say about like food and things, so I'm excited to read that.
Very cool.
Yeah. And I'm writing with a. Pulled out my Hallomino golden bear, my blue one. And I'm writing in my trusty orange bear and fig confidant. How about you, Johnny?
I just read a book called how to do Nothing because I'm having a lot of.
You don't know how to do that. Did you learn anything?
No.
Any personal growth happened over there, Johnny?
I thought it would address some of my like, it's 11 o', clock, why the hell am I binding books problem. But instead it was about resisting the attention economy. And it was just like if you write a book about attention and don't mention an obvious disorder that affects millions of people that's kind of ableist and stupid. And it was written like she herself has very raging ADHD and so did her editor because the book is all over the place. So it sucked so bad.
But I actually bought that book on like Kindle Daily Deal or something and haven't read it yet. And dude, now don't. I'm not gonna. Yeah, now I'm gonna just punt that $99 I spent on it.
Yeah, there was a part in the beginning where she talks about what you can afford to resist and talks about privilege for like a two sentence paragraph. And that's it. I'm like, okay. Mentioning it doesn't make it okay. This is still like the most whiny California thing I've ever read.
Hey, is it. So is it about like, like social media and like not getting, not fracturing your attention on social media?
That's what it sounded like it was going to be about. It was just kind of like a weird diatribe that, I don't know, it sound like a 200 page blog post that no one edited it. And I finished it so I could come on the podcast and say it sucks. And I read it to the end so I know it didn't get better. But balancing that, I read a really good book called the Art and Craft of Handmade Books, which was, I GUESS it's like 20, 25 years old. So the technology was a little different and the Internet wasn't web2.0'd yet. So everything is very like, this person does this thing and no one does that, and this person does this thing and no one does that. So I enjoy that. And I got a new recipe for wheat paste that I want to try out because my last one was. Okay, not that great.
What if you can't eat gluten?
Sounds delicious.
You can make it out of most vegetable starches. But I forgot that we had unbleached flour, so I went to use mine and it was light brown. I'm like, oh man, it's spoiled. And tossed it out. And like, we don't have white flour. It's not supposed to be white. So I wasted a lovely jar of wheat paste that cost me a half an hour and a nickel, but I didn't feel like making more, so I will. And have you guys been watching around the World in 80 Days on Masterpiece?
No.
Oh, it's so good. So David Tennant plays Phileas Fogg, and he directed it or produced it or both, but it's really good. Like, I'm surprised by how ridiculously good it is.
We've been looking for something to fill the All Creatures Great and Small gaps.
So, yeah, it's more harrowing than that. But, yeah, still, there's. I mean, the central character does good things and he's a good guy. So, yeah, apparently they did a season or they locked in a season two before it even came on because the reviews were so good. But I don't know what season two is going to have because this week they arrive back in London. Oh, no, this week they're in New York. Anyway, it's super, super good.
And be around the world in 78 days.
Let's do it again.
It's a little bit faster.
The guy who plays his name escapes me. The guy who. That he makes the bet with, who tries to sabotage his journey, he's played by this British guy who is like an unnamed villain in everything he's in. He's really good at it. So the casting is great. It was so good. David Tennant is so funny without trying to be funny. Yeah, that makes sense. Like, I'm laughing really hard. He's totally earnest. And the one in California was really cool, full of shootouts and stuff. That's fun. And I don't know if you guys watch Father Brown, but the guy who plays Flambeau plays a disgraced Southern gentleman after the Civil War.
That was funny.
Got some very unenlightened views on people.
I can't even imagine what you're talking
about, but he plays the part really well. I love that guy. He's really cool.
So is it set in, like, the. The Jules Vern days? Like.
Yeah, yeah, it's.
What are they? They're in a carriage and they're in a crappy train. Now they're getting on the train to run back to New York. So the one stop in America is like, well, the west is scary. Okay? New York. I mean, that can sum up most of America today.
Yeah.
Go to the west and they write whiny books about Facebook and tell you not to get off Facebook. Oh, my God. I mean, you could hate read it if you already have it. Maybe you could come up with a social network that isn't monetized, but someone is willing to pay for and maintain and people are willing to. I didn't quit Facebook.
That book is like a ultimate example of a great title. And it looks amazing. Like, the book itself is, like, very pretty. It was so enticing. I was like, oh, man, it's going to be, like, deep. It's going to have stuff about old philosophers in it or something. I don't know. Not so much.
It's sort of like the. The minimalists. Like, when you talk to them more, I'm like, you're obsessed with stuff. Just like a hoarder. You just want, like, that one nice black shirt. Like, what's the difference between you and the person with 20 crappy black shirts? Aside from space? Jeez. Okay, I'm gonna stop before I get started.
Yeah.
So this evening, I'm writing with a very short barrel, Morado number two. This was, I think, from the 80s when they had that really cool block printing on them. They're so very pretty. And I'm writing a book I made that has parchment that is so nice for pencil and fountain pen. I don't know if I sent you guys anything with this, but I'm gonna get some more and make some stuff with this because it's fantastic. Obviously, it's not real parchment. No animals were skinned in the production of this.
I was gonna say that doesn't sound very vegan. Very vegetarian.
Vegan.
Yeah. Yeah, That's. That's my rant for the evening.
It's just Tuesday. Zine preview.
I stopped publishing those because I told the guy to stop writing them. And Charlotte is, like, so pissed. She wants to take over.
Oh, please do. Yeah, please, please let her step in.
Yeah. I'm like, okay. And you can use those words. I would do that. Then you can't do it because that's not funny. How are you going to title them? I. I effing hate minimalists.
It doesn't have the punch, doesn't carry the same weight.
Yeah, you need all the weather, all the letters. Don't. Don't minimize.
Nice.
On that note.
Yeah, I. I'll jump in. I've been reading a good bit of poetry recently, and that's like a quick plug for, like, your aunt's favorite poetry collection. Because it's just what it feels like whenever I see these. But they're very good. And now I've bought all three of them. But Garrison Keiller from. What was it called? Prairie Home Companion. And he does that. He used to do that thing on npr, the Writer's Almanac. He has these collections that are basically just the poems that he wrote on. It's called. They're called Good Poems, and there's Good Poems for Hard Times and then Good Poems. American Places. It's all like spots in America. Anyways, they're great collections. And I'm not going to talk about those. But through those collections I discovered a new poet who I'm kind of obsessed with right now, new to me that is Stephen Dunn. I had never come across this poet. He's been around for a long time and he actually passed away last summer, I found out on his birthday, oddly enough. But I've been reading a lot of Stephen Dunn. I've got some collections of his from the library that I've been reading and one is called. One of the book that I'm reading right now is called Whereas and he's a really interesting story. He's really kind of in like the Billy Collins vein of like writing about very ordinary things and very. It's kind of has a conversational tone to it most of the time. And he comes from a really non literary family which reading his bio, which is also really interesting. Grew up in Long island or something like that and went to college to be a. To play basketball and then played pro basketball for like a year and then quit playing pro basketball to move to Spain and write a novel as you do. Sure, yeah. It's just quite a jump. And then decided that he sucked at writing novels. But a friend of his encouraged him for his poetry and then his poetry took off and he has like 25 collections he's been. But I was going to read one of his poems. Yeah, this one's called Propositions. Anyone who begins a sentence with in all honesty is about to tell a lie. Anyone who says this is how I feel had better love form more than disclosure. Same for anyone who thinks he thinks well, because he had a thought. If you say you're ugly to an ugly person, no credit for honesty, which must always be a discovery, an act that qualifies as an achievement. If you persist, you're just a cruel bastard, a pig without a mirror. Somebody who hasn't examined himself enough. A hesitation hints at an attempt to be honest. Suggests a difficult. A difficulty is present. A good sentence needs a clause or two interruptions set off by commas. Evidence of a slowing down, a rethinking. Before I asked my wife to marry me, I told her I'd never be fully honest. No one, she said, had ever said that to her. I was trying to be radically honest, I said but in fact had another motive. A claim without a but in it is at best only half true. In all honesty, I was asking in advance for forgiveness. So yeah, that was I like. I heard him read that one in a video and talk about it. I really like that one. Yeah, so I've been reading a lot of Steven Dunn. Highly recommend him. I also, I mostly listen to the Alchemist. Have you guys ever read the the Alchemist?
Yeah.
So it had been on my shelf forever and finally read it and don't have a whole lot to say about it. It was okay. It wasn't as like life. People make it sound like it's this sort of like uplifting positive fantasy novella kind of thing. And it was interesting and maybe it's something that demands a rereading, but it's just about this young shepherd boy in Spain that goes on a long journey to become an alchemist. And so it was good. It was worth reading and I probably will reread it sometime. The audiobook was really well done too. But the author's name is Coelho Paulo. It's one of those books that's kind of been haunting me and I finally haunting me because I've been meaning to read it forever and I had picked it up because I thought about teaching it, which I now am not going to do. So it was useful. Jane and I just finished watching Reacher, which is the. I've talked about Jack Reacher on here many times before, but the new TV series that's on Amazon prime, that's based on the first novel in the series and it was just. Go back to a previous episode where I talk about his books and how they're like popcorn and it's entertaining and whatever and that's how the show was. The show's great. It was a lot of fun. I mean if you're.
We're.
I've talked about how we're into crime shows and spy shows. It's a good one. It is definitely a. The body count is ridiculous. So for a small town conspiracy they're trying to solve, it's like a lot of people died if this happened in real life. And then like is the end of the. This is the end of every book. So I'm not giving anything away. But at the end he just kind of walks away and moves on to the next town to like keep wandering around America. It's like if this book happened in the real world it would be on every national news channel, like everywhere it would be. It's such a big scope and like 35 people die in this town. It's like this would be everywhere. But it was a good show and they do a much better job of casting the character of Jack Reacher because last time they did Tom Cruise and he is 3 foot 11 and Jack Reacher is supposed to be 6 foot 5. And
it's Jim from the Office, isn't it?
No, he is Jack Ryan. Also on Amazon prime. But yeah, that's the. This is. Yeah. Jack Reacher. This guy is.
I think I thought they were the same.
Yeah, that's fine, that's fine. They're not too far off. And then last thing I'll mention, which I talked a little bit about last time, but the album is finally out. The new Big Thief album. Big Warm Mountain. I Believe in youn is perfect and I love everything about it. And I'm not gonna say anything else. Just go listen to it. It is so wonderful. I've. It's been a long time since I found an album that I basically listened to nothing else for well over a week. I mean almost two weeks now. It is so good and it's huge. I mean it's a long album. It's a definitely a double disc. I think it's like 22 songs or something like that.
Oh wow.
I love it. Love it, love it.
Have you listened to the new Mitsky album?
No, I have not. Yeah, Mitsky Writing this down.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, nice. I'll check it out. Yeah, I am writing with a UniBall 1 pen. Have either of you guys tried these yet?
No one.
You sent a picture. They look cool.
Yeah, they are very cool. They and very striking looking there. I had heard the Take Note guys mention it at some point and looked it up and was like, wow, those are cool. But I didn't want to do like a whole Jetpens order yet. I wasn't ready for it. And then I stumbled across them at Walmart of all places and bought a pack. They're a little on the expensive side. I think it was like four for six, seven bucks, something like that. But they're. It's. I think they call it. It's a gel ink but it's a pig like a pigmented gel ink. Is that a thing? I think is how they described it. I have to look it up. But it has a. Definitely a really vibrant line and there's. There was something on the package that said like that this ink makes it brighter but also darker at the same time or something like that. Like it makes the darks look darker and the bright inks look brighter. But yeah, it's some kind of pigmented ink. But it's really cool. They look really good. Which is probably the best part.
Which green is that? You have. You had the lime.
You said. I have. I got. My pack just had black, blue and green or black Blue and I'm using the blue.
They have a. They sell a green black, which is relevant to my interests.
Yeah, a lot of colors and they're a white pen. They look very good. They write really nicely. Getting all the people at work sold on them. And this was, this is reassuring to you because it was for me. They don't get dirty. So they're so like they don't attract weird dirt or hand stuff. Like I've been using them a lot and they look nice and bright and shiny.
Can't attract that hand stuff.
Nope.
Keep.
Stay away from the hand stuff.
On Jetpens, they have some of these with a black body.
Oh yeah.
I have seen Amazon too.
Yeah.
I have seen as they call them, the. Oh, never mind.
This is something else.
The spectrum. The hell is that? Sniff out and pens. And there are all these gel pens you never heard of.
Whoa. Let the cycle continue. Yeah, cycle back to gel pens, then back to pencils and then back into fountain pens.
Open up some paper options.
Yeah. So yeah, I'm using that UniBall one in blue and I'm actually just writing on my 4x6 note cards that I talked about last time that I've been using a lot. That's me. Guys want to do some fresh points? Yes.
Yeah.
Andy, tell us about what's holding your ceiling up in your new house.
If you're following the continuing saga of the extremely boring life of Andy Welfle that I was agonizing for months over buying some floor to ceiling shelves in my office. I really wanted something to just like be just lots of shelves to hold my books and various like scene collections and a couple other things and then also allow me to curate my video conference backdrop for some conferences and talks that I do. So last time I think I mentioned I purchased the. The Atlas shells from Inside Weather, which is a. I don't know, like an online furniture brand. They just have some nice. It's like a high end ikea and the shelves are really nice. They're so sturdy. They're just like. I don't know, they're these like big like kind of manufactured plywood shelves that are very nicely curved out and they sit on just four metal poles and I have two of them that are about six and a half feet tall. This is, this office is. Has a pretty short ceiling. It's seven feet tall. So it just sits right almost up to the ceiling. And I have. Has like six shelves and it's like 38 inches wide. So I have two of those. And then I have a smaller one in the middle and I can, like, hang a poster behind it. So I have almost all my books up there that I have. I have a couple little displays. I have a few, like, places where I've put some pencils up and I have, like, some of my zines. I have some plumbago and 404 magazines displayed. I have an old. I have an old gold Enterprise model, like Star Trek Starship Enterprise up there. And one thing I teased earlier that I'm trying to figure out how to do is just how to just sort of like, nicely display all of the zines that I've purchased or collected or have been given, namely all of Johnny's zines.
It'll take up a whole shelf itself.
It has designate a wing of the house exactly like shadow boxes.
Like the. Like, the vault is just full of Johnny. It's like Scrooge McDuck. You can just go swimming in Johnny zines.
Watch your staples.
But I have so many, like, little tiny ones, like the Tuesday zines that Johnny distributes and just some of the other, like, little ones. And I can't figure out how to just like, sort of nicely put them on display, right. Like, I can't set them up without, like, I putting them between some bookends. And they're just not, like, what am I trying to say? Like the bookends to sort of swallow them, right? Because they're just so small. I just need, like, little tiny but heavy bookends, I think. So I need to look into that. But it's mostly set up.
I'll need like a Rolodex or something.
Yeah. Ooh, that'd be fun. A xenodex.
Yeah. There you go. That would be cool.
Yeah. Come on, Johnny. Put this together.
This could be a binding method for this.
We know you're just sitting over there doing nothing, Johnny.
Yeah. How to do nothing, Johnny. Build a Xenodex. So I'm.
A binder would be kind of cool.
That would be a good idea. I'll post a picture of just my. From my, like, webcam. Just a picture of my background right now. I'm pretty. It's. It still has some way to go. I still have piles of books on the floor that I haven't kind of made my way through yet. But I. It's a work in progress.
Aren't we all?
Yeah. Aren't we all?
Yeah.
I think that is about it for my fresh points. I don't have a lot of things going on. Oh, Johnny, just put a Link the book on the bookshelf. What is this?
It's a book by Henry Petrowski of the pencil book fame about bookshelves. Oh. And it's also about books along the way, so. So the first generation of the ones at the Library of Congress looked like the ones you have in your office, but they like, held the floors up. They were like the structure of the building. So cool. Yeah, it's a big nerd dive.
Yeah.
If you're looking for a pretty short and a very nerdy book.
Interesting. I like short, nerdy books.
Yep.
My bookshelves are so heavy. I'm afraid they're. So this room was constructed in maybe like the 60s or the 70s as part of the garage. And it has like a raised floor and I'm just afraid that it's just going to just go through the floor. Like we'll see if that happens. But yeah, that's been my fear. Yeah. This is great. I will check this out. So that's it for freshpoints for me. How about you?
My only pencil related freshpoint is that my son has become the neon pencil dealer at school. It's really funny. So, like, he told me a story today of a kid in his class who said, henry, give me a pencil. And he said, you have a pencil? And the kid threw his pencil on the floor and said, no, I don't. And Henry picked it up, gave it to him and said, yes, you do. Broke it in half and growled, oh, Lord. So I bought him a bigger pack of. Of Ticonderogas to take to school and share with his pals. He's like, when they ask, I can't say no. I'm like, okay, they're just pencils. Like, make somebody stay with a blue pencil. Go for it. So evidently, like Pullen Park Elementary Middle School is littered with stubs of neon Ticonderogas that my son is responsible for. But that's good because it could be worse. Could be littered with other things that more is littered with sometimes.
Yeah.
The only other.
Sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that reminds me of my, like one of my favorite things that I've heard about recently. Have you heard about this town in Sweden that is training crows to gather cigarette butts?
Yes, Crows. Put it in a. In like one hole of this machine and a treat comes out of the other.
A single peanut comes out for it. And they're trained to clean up. Yeah, to clean up cigarette butts on the street. I just thought that was.
But now they have a crow problem. How are they going to get rid of that?
Yeah.
Like the birds.
Ravens.
Yeah. Then they got to get a larger like a hawk to take care of the.
Now we have an ostrich problem. How do we get rid of those?
Shotgun.
Few lions running around.
Yeah.
So apparently they. They tried to train ravens, but ravens are too smart and they just started smoking the cigarettes. So they started. Crows.
They started selling like the half smoked cigarettes to people. Yeah.
I don't know if you guys have ever watched YouTube videos of ravens solving problems, but they're allegedly the smartest thing on earth next to humans.
I want a pet raven so bad. I've thought about this. They are huge. Yeah.
Some of the noises they make would keep a normal person up at night. I can't do the croak.
I feel like if you had a pet raven, you would absolutely need to move to Baltimore. Like there's no other place you could live.
I'm gonna train mine to fly to Johnny to like deliver things to him in Baltimore. Like he'll go to his ancestors.
Save a lot on shipping. Yeah.
Absolutely sick.
He gets them for delivery.
A zine raven.
A zine raven.
That's a raven.
My gosh. A zine raven.
The postal service has some raven stamps out now from raven story from the Pacific Northwest. Indigenous folks that are like really cool looking.
That is really cool.
Paused and say that I love that they put out the catalog a few times a year and always put out new stamps. So we live in a country where that happens. So that's good.
That's cool.
Yeah. And that's it. That's all I got that's remotely related to anything Pet slicker. How about you, Jim?
Yeah, I was just going to bring up the new. We actually have some black wings to talk about that were just announced today. And as of today day, which is 22222 Tuesday, which is cool. I had to explain how dates work today so that I could explain to Lila how cool this is. I said, do you know how to read dates? And she said, I don't know how to read at all. So I explained to it. I wrote out like her birthday. I was like, this is your birthday and this is today's. She's like, it's all twos. I'm like, I know. But on 222 22, Blackwing has released a new labs pencil, which is a black one with a gold feral. It is. Has a red core. They describe it as being a type that's loved by people who are maybe copy editors or tattoo artists. Or teachers, but that's not allowed anymore. No red. I'm just kidding. That's just the thing they say use green or use something that's not as like harsh. But Yeah, I think it's.
Sometimes you just have to like break down a child's spirit just exactly, you know where I'm coming from. Thick Redding.
Yeah, yeah, lots of it. Fountain pen. Like. Yeah, like diamine red dragon just exploding off the page.
That is good.
They, but they're very good looking. They're. They are half natural I guess the grip and like the part where the start of the pencil the bottom and then it's red towards the top and it says Lab 02 22.22.
So these look a lot like kind of design wise they look a lot like those non photo blue ones they did last year and those sold out. But they got like a pretty, I feel like they got a pretty lukewarm reception just because there's not like a huge use case for like the non photo blue pencils.
Hey, if you bought them and you find yourself not using them, send them my way.
Yeah.
What do you use them for, Johnny?
Zine layouts.
Nice.
They don't copy in black and white. Yeah, I mean actually this one does if you do it very darkly. But if you give it the most nominal erasing it won't show up. So actually Charlotte uses them too. She lays out a feral head in non photo blue. Because of course my child has a selection of non photo blue pencils.
Of course. Yeah, yeah.
What kind of father would I be?
Yeah. Standards are high, Johnny. You gotta keep them up. But it's cool they're still available at this point. That could change by tomorrow. Oh wait. Oh, nevermind. Yeah, they're still available. Breaking news, their website on the Blackwing website, their add to cart button is not colored, it's white. It's gray by default with gray text. And so to me when I see that I think oh, the button's disabled. And then you put it over and it like explodes into blue. So they do have them.
I, I ordered a box so I'll send each one if you don't pick some up yourself just to see what it's like.
I don't think I'm going to put my computer away without falling into that trap. They are very pretty.
They look really good.
And if the core is as good as the non photo blues, this could really be a sweet red pencil because those were a really nice waxy like juicy core.
I feel like the writing sample pictures look Great.
Yeah, it's orangey red.
Yeah. Like a coral or something. Yeah. Or, you know, dig it.
So the website says. The copy on the website says that red core pencils are a favorite among animators, copy editors, tattoo artists, teachers, and more. Johnny, do you. Are you familiar with the tattoo artists using a red pencil?
I know that they used to use indelible pencils because it could wet the paper and transfer, but I've never heard of red pencils.
Yeah, like. Like that purple, like almost like ditto machine kind of thing. Like thing that they lay over when they do the, like outline.
Yeah. That's weird.
Yeah.
I have to ask Hunter about this now that things are calming down and might go see him soon.
I'm also interested to see how erasable this pencil is going to be just because it has an eraser. But red colored pencils just so. Just are not. Just not very erasable.
Just seem a lot of pigment.
Yeah.
Yeah. Cool. You guys want to get into the main topic?
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's do it. So, yeah, we're talking about morning pages. So this is something that, like I said earlier in the show, has come up a lot on the show. We've referenced it many times, but we've never done a dedicated episode to talk about this practice. So maybe if somebody does them, maybe you've heard your friend talk about them or you've given them a shot yourself. But morning pages are a prescription for getting out whatever creative rut we find ourselves in so that we can free the artist within us. It's. I describe it to my students because I have my students do these. I'll talk about this more later, but as a. As just like a brain dump. Or like, I like to use metaphors like clearing the cobwebs out of your brain in the morning before you move on to the important work you have for the day. And the idea came from Julia Cameron, who's the author of the just hugely famous book the Artist's Way, which came out in 1992. And she has. I don't mean this to sound bad, but she has milked an entire career out of morning pages. I feel like she has written 17 books that are essentially just her re explaining morning pages.
She's truly the writer Carol of her time.
She works at 9th. She has other stuff and she has a lot of other good stuff. Like, I really like her book, the Right to Write that Johnny Yu shared with me. I really enjoyed that. But she always works it back in there because. But I think that's. I make Fun. It sounds like I'm making fun, but I think she is doing it because she believes in it that much. I think for good reason. But the short version of what they are is that morning pages are three pages of stream of consciousness writing that you put on paper right when you wake up. You're supposed to do them every single day, and they're supposed to be unfiltered. She tells you not to worry about things like, even, like, paragraph breaks. And if your mind changes the definition of stream of consciousness, if you're writing and your mind jumps to something else, follow that and just go as far as it wants to go. And then if it jumps somewhere else, follow that. I always say that one of my favorite things about morning pages is that I. I don't know if I ever do them. I don't think there's ever been a time where I've done them and not been surprised where they've ended up. Where they've ended up. You always end up somewhere you weren't expecting to get to in your brain, which means that it was in there somewhere, just kind of waiting to get out. So I think we've all tried it or have done it for periods of time, but we thought we would kind of explore this more deeply. Got a few questions here to kind of lead us through the discussion. The first one, let's just go around and talk about basically your history with morning pages. Have you tried them and how did you first hear about them? So, Andy, you want to start us out?
So I have to admit, I've never read this book, which maybe makes me a bad pencil podcaster, but I will read this or the Right to Write. Okay, do you have a recommendation about.
Let me stop you there.
Yes,
with the Artist's Way. I have not read the entire book. I've read it, and I've got a good, decent way into it. And it just kind of got to a point where I'm like, I get it. Okay? I get it, I get it. I get it. Now, the one thing you can do and that I would recommend this to people is that there's an ebook on Amazon that's cheaper and it's just about morning pages. Ooh, interesting. And so I've read that whole thing. I think it's just about morning pages and then her, like, companion activity, which is called An Artist's Date, which is, like, setting aside, like, I think she says, two hours or something every week to go out and do something unexpected, like go somewhere you've not been, even if it's just going to a new coffee shop and sort of like people watching or anything like that. So I would recommend that ebook as a starting point.
Is it. Are you talking about a book called the Miracle of Morning Pages? Yes. Okay. I will 100% buy that and read that.
Yeah.
Okay.
So sorry to cut you off. You do not need to feel bad about not reading this because Jane actually came, like she heard it, she heard about it somewhere totally different. Was like, we need to get this book, the Morning Pages. I was like, I actually have this book, the Morning Pages. And she's like, I want to read it. I'm like, I don't know if you do or not. You can read parts of it. That's just me though.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So I, I have off and on, done like versions of this. Like I. I think one of the kind of most notable times in my life where I've done morning pages was I was. I was living. It was probably like mid year 2014 and I was living in Fort Wayne, Indiana and working at that web development agency. And I would. We worked a four day work week and we worked 10 hours a day, four days a week. And it was great because I. It was hard to do. But I went in really to kind of like I made up my extra two hours in the front end. So I went in. I was at work by 6:30 and what was really great is I could just sit down and drink a coffee and it was quiet because it was really early. And I had a field notes. I had a shelter wood.
It was.
Shelter wood was perfect for it. And I would basically just sort of journal and I was, for me, I was sort of facing. It was right about when I was interviewing at Facebook and really we were traveling for like family reasons and I was really just trying to come to grips with like potentially making a big move in my life and was just a little freaked out by that. And I worked through it there and I was also kind of scrapbooking with it too. I would try to like every day have like some sort of a visual that I would print off and cut out and paste in. My nephew, both one of my nieces and my nephew were reborn like within this period of time. And so I had a lot of pictures of them to put in there. I had a. I got a new cat, got Rupert. This was all happening. Had some pictures from California when I went and interviewed there. So it was. I was just basically just trying to process a lot and I was trying to kind of get lost in the act of writing and get it out while I. Like, while slowing down and just spending an hour each morning to do that. And it was great. It was fantastic. I helped a lot. Helped me process a lot. I think I still now have it. And sometimes when I'm just, like, trying to get a perspective about where my life was versus where it is now, I'll go back and reread it.
Sounds like a really cool life artifact.
Yeah, it's really cool, and I'm glad I did it. And I. For some reason, I do not know why I just didn't stick with it. And I finished it up until I think. I think I kind of checked back in a little bit after I had moved, but that I just really didn't stick with it. And I've been trying to kind of figure that out why. To figure out why. And I think it's because I, in that particular moment, kind of resolved what I needed to resolve. Right. Like, I did get busy. Like, things happened. My schedule was kind of, like, overturned. Things changed. But definitely I. The sort of, like, premise of that was like, oh, my gosh, do I just sort of uproot everything and, like, move halfway across the country? And apparently the answer is yes, and I did. But, yeah, I. I really appreciate going back and kind of seeing where I was at that point in my life. I also did it in a slightly, like, less healthy way, I guess, at the beginning of the pandemic when we were just all starting to work from home. So, like, March 2020. I think I've talked about this here before, but in my Leuchtturm red dot notebook that I was using, I was trying to, like, have a page each day. And at the top of the page, I would have, like, my TO DOS and the work things I was trying to do at the bottom of the page, I would keep track of, like, how many Covid cases there were and how many COVID deaths there were both in the US and in the world. And it was, like, interesting and useful to track it back when you could track, like, like, oh, we've had 200 Covid cases in the US today. And it quickly just became like, oh, wow, I can't track this anymore. Like, these numbers are beyond sort of comprehension. And so I sort of stopped doing it there, which wasn't really morning pages, but I also tried to give a sentence or two about, like, how I was feeling and how I was kind of checking in. And, like, as more things were. As things were just getting worse and worse, like, just Trying to like keep track of my anxiety, my thought processes. So I think the trouble is, is I don't think things got better. I think we just all normalized it and yeah, that's certainly what I did.
Yeah.
So, yeah, those are my kind of like two most profound recent experiences with morning pages. I will say also that I've done this a little bit. I'm not on paper. But with Day one, which is a Mac, a Mac based. I think there's now a Windows version 2 journaling app, which is just a really pleasant app to use. And I will say that I think that it's been more cathartic when I've been doing it on paper, but I also have just to move fast and get things out fast. I've also done it online or on a. On an app. Yeah. How about you, Johnny? How have you kind of, how do you do morning pages?
So I've gone through periods where I was very strict about it and it was a good way to sort of like shrink my stash of composition books. Because you see a cool composition book and you buy it and then you're like, wait, the paper sucks. Like it's floppy, whatever.
But tell us. Yeah.
Oh, I never buy composition books without reading her website anymore.
Yeah, that's a good call.
So I don't know, I think I heard people mentioning them for a long time and I didn't realize that it was a thing in a book. I was. I just thought it was some kind of cool esoteric thing I didn't know about and I was too embarrassed to ask anybody what it meant and apparently never dawned on me to just Google it. But yeah, I first started doing it as sort of. I don't know, I was. If it was a very anxious period of my life. And I think I thought that writing these things down in the morning would somehow get them out of my brain and not just train my brain to think about them for the rest of the day. So often I would, I would find they were kind of self destructive and lay off for a little while. But I don't tend to do that these days.
I can identify with that, that there have been periods of time where I have found the act of doing this. It was like, sorry, yeah, self destructive a little bit. But basically because I was writing about the same anxieties over and over again. And what I ended up kind of realizing is that morning pages was just telling me like, hey, you really need to deal with the things that keep coming aboard. Yeah, like, like morning pages aren't the issue, like the act of this is just because your brain's constantly saying like, hey, you're still not doing the obvious stuff you need to do to make yourself better or that you need to like deal with just day to day life kind of things.
Yeah, I mean, I, I. Speaking for myself, I fell into the trap of thinking that writing was magic and that it would solve practical problems, which it can help you identify a practical solution, but it's not going to fix stuff. Yeah, unfortunately, I think what you said is good. Like that if I had been a little saner at the time, would have been a good way to be. Like, you need to really do something about this because you're spending an hour every morning writing about the same thing and like you have a pile of dead gel pens. You're killing the planet doing this.
I think I found out about Morning Pages, the Artist's Way. That actual original book came later. It was around 2015. And I think what I was doing is I was trying to get more of like a structure or a regular practice in how I was journaling. And so it started googling things. And that's how I actually ended up with that Miracle of Morning Pages ebook of hers. I bought that in 2015 and I started doing them off and on. And honestly, it's hard. It's always been a little bit of a challenge to do them as a teacher and also having young kids because I'm already up so early and so getting up and doing it the right way hasn't always worked. But I've kind of cheated by incorporating it into my class so that sometimes I get to class and once or twice at least. Usually it's about twice a week. My A block. My first class starts with Morning page and the students love them. Like, students will say, like, why Nobody's said, like just to hear when I say to them, like, you write and you don't filter yourself. It's not for my eyes. It's not for your eyes, it's not for your friend's eye. You don't have to be funny and make your friend like laugh about what you wrote about. Like, I'm not going to read these. No one's going to read these. And at first I was thinking like, oh, they're just not going to do anything. They do. They always just dive in and they write the entire time, which is really cool.
And I love that idea. It's like you're setting the habit for them, which is like the hardest part, right?
Yeah. There's low Stakes writing. And there's high stakes writing, and this is sort of low stakes writing where you're writing for the sake of writing and not because you need a grade on something. And so we'll. And sometimes we'll do, like, activities with them too, where I'll. We'll. I'll have them go through all of their morning pages and underline, like, sentences that they really liked. And then they'll pluck all of those sentences out and kind of rearrange them into this, like, wild poem where, like, nobody's gonna be able to figure out what they were actually writing about.
Man, Tim, I wish you were my teacher in high school.
You can always go back and start over.
I mean, that's true.
Can audit my 10th grade English class.
Hey, I could use it.
Yeah, but it's something. And this year I've been doing a better job of doing it every day. Doing it first thing in the morning has always been kind of tough, but that's just because I have to get up so early and I'm in the car at 6:45, driving. Driving to work. But Henry has started doing his own little version of morning pages in a really cool notebook that Johnny sent to him that he loves. And he's been taking it to school and writing in it. And he asked me, actually, as I was putting him to bed tonight if we could get up and write in our notebooks together in the morning. And I was like, that is the best thing ever. And, yes, I will wake you up. And we will do that. I'll have our coffee. My coffee. He does not need coffee.
Don't give Henry coffee.
That's the last thing that kid needs. Yeah, cocoa, that'll be good. Before we move on, I thought I might, because since we've talked a lot about, like, the. I think maybe we've missed or we haven't maybe said enough about some of the particulars of the actual, like, the mechanics of it. And so I thought one thing we could talk about, and this is a question we're gonna talk about later. But, like, what do morning pages look like on the page? Like, we. I mentioned the three pages thing, but that's kind of fuzzy. And she doesn't explain it in a very specific way. She just says, you write three pages and. Yeah, so I know, Johnny, you've got thoughts about that. Like, what do you.
Oh, I found one instance. I think it was in the right to write or in the writing diet where she said, 8 and a half by 11 is a page. I'm like damn, that's a lot.
Her handwriting has to be huge because there's an article that I'm going to link to in the show notes that was in that I read. It was actually just a few weeks ago that I read. I mean it came out two years ago, but I just read it a few weeks ago in the New York Times and she talked about how doing her morning Pages takes her 20 minutes.
Yeah, like do you have big writing?
So she must. I mean maybe she writes, but she doesn't give those particulars because most of the time mine actually don't make it that far because I'm writing right now. I do mine in a Leuchtturm notebook. And three pages in a Leuchtturm notebook would take me like it's ruled too. Like a ruled Leuchtturm. It would take me forever. I would be doing it for yeah, an hour. So I usually do it more like a time like 15 minutes non stop. And then however long I make it usually does the trick. And she. It is a really freeing sort of writing. So like once you establish your own idea of what that three pages is going to be, whether it's going to be literally three pages, you're going to skip lines, whatever's comfortable for you, you know, to do within your life. I'm going to read a couple quotes out of the artist's way that I had underlined a long time ago. But one of them, she says there's no wrong way to do morning pages. These daily morning pages or daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art or even writing. I stress that point to reassure the non writers working with this book. Writing is simply one of the tools pages are meant to be simply the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid or too weird to be included. And she talks about the idea of the censor in your head. That one of the benefits of writing like this is to have a practice every day of censoring the censor. And you're like pushing the sensor out of your head. And it makes me think of that the book the War of Art by I forget the guy's name. But it's all about like dealing with the resistance in your brain that like you're training your logical brain to. To get out of the way for a little while.
The War of Art is a fantastic title for a book.
Yeah, it's a really good book. I've read it multiple times. I forget the guy's name who wrote it, he writes these, like, novels, these historical novels about ancient Greece and stuff. Forget his name. And then I was going to read one more quote, which is, anyone who faithfully writes morning pages will be led to a connection with a source of wisdom within. When I'm stuck with a painful situation or problem that I don't think I know how to handle, I'll go to the pages and ask for guidance. That's a little hippie dippy, but I think it checks out. So she was married to Martin Scorsese. Really fun fact. Yeah.
She made her name during screenwriting long time ago.
Yeah.
Now she's made her name writing this book over and over again.
She's the most prolific author that you've never read anything that she's written because she always says, like, I'm a novelist and a songwriter and a poet. I'm like, I've never read any of your novels or song songs or poems in the book. She definitely cites this as something that is not just for like the whole. And Johnny, you can correct me if I'm wrong because he read the whole book. But her idea is that this works for artists, but in some way we're all artists. That if you're starting a business or you're a. Because I know these are very popular with business types as well. It's not just poets and novelists. People do this across the board no matter what you do. And there's benefit in just kind of unlocking the creativity in your brain to use however you choose to use it. So like when you guys think about morning pages, what is the goal in that creative sense for you? Like, what are you hoping it unlocks for you?
Well, that's a good question.
I think for me, like you were saying, there's a. It just can surface things that you didn't know were in there. And if you're kind of successfully stream of conscious writing, you can just bring that up or see where it takes you. And I think that can help reveal some things. I also think it just gets you. Get you into a. I don't know what to say. Like a communicative mindset. Like, I. My day is spent writing or meeting or talking to people, and sometimes I just don't want to do it. I just want to like, curl in a ball and take a nap under my desk or something. I think this really helps kind of like gently bring you up to speed. That and caffeine. I think that helps too.
But yeah, yeah,
so. So that's Kind of what I see out of it. I. I definitely don't. Don't see a lot of, like, writing in there that I look back on. Like, oh, that was really good. Or that was really insightful. Like, I just don't have a lot. I. I don't see a lot of, like, good writing come out of it or things that I'm surprised by that way. But I definitely think it can help kind of, like, unsurface. Unsurface surface things in my thoughts.
Nothing's too petty, too silly, too stupid, too weird.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You haven't read mine,
so I don't
think I'm necessarily trying to unlock creativity so much. Mine's wrapped up in mental health issues a lot. Like, my morning pages are like, today I'm going to be able to use as much of my brain as I can to do the things that I need or want to do. Because if you grew up with adhd, you always have this sense of not firing on all cylinders. So I find if I fire on all cylinders, I can make two zines and bind a couple books in a day and, like, not lose my mind doing it. So, yeah, it's. I don't know, it's more like a setting up my brain. That. That little creative part in there that can stick to what it wants to. There's some resources behind it that makes sense. It doesn't sound, like, synthetic.
Yeah, like, not at all. Of course not.
Coffee, Adderall, morning pages. I'm like, let's do it.
I think for me, it's like, it's tied up in just, like, proving to myself that I can use language.
Because you can write, right?
Yeah, I noticed that it. As I've been like. I've talked about how I do a lot of songwriting these days in writing poems that maybe turn into songs or stay as poems and things like that. When I'm writing in a way that I'm not worried about who's going to read it. I'm not worried about it being good. I'm not worried about any of that stuff. The sensor's off. That there are some kind of electric phrases that end up popping up throughout a diamond amongst a whole bunch of crap. So it's. That's. So it's when I do it and I do it long enough and it is successful and I'm not just ranting about some of the problems I need to deal with. Like, Johnny, you're saying, like, with mental health stuff or daily stresses and things like that, which is also useful for that I think it proves to me that I have something to say, I guess, and that there are things in me that are. And I. That I'll prove to myself that I. I do work hard to be good at describing things and I work hard at searching for things that are worth thinking about and writing about and all that. And a lot of stuff kind of bubbles up when I do that. Like proving to myself that I have ideas and proving to myself that I can find a way to. To bring it to life, I guess. Yeah. And that's a helpful thing. So hopefully it keeps doing that. But yeah, there are some times where I'm just like, I'm doing it. And I'm like, I'm just so sick of talking about myself. Like, I am so sick of talking about myself. And it's okay too. And I try not to like, push myself away from it too much if that's what I need to write about. Sometimes I do. Maybe. I don't know if this is cheating, but I'll push myself to try to write about other, like, things outside of me, like just what I'm seeing and hearing. And it actually makes me think of it. There's a. I've got the right to write in front of me. And there's a quote that she loves quoting other people. Fills more pages for more books, of course too.
But she has a really dictionary morning as.
But she has a really good quote in here that I had underlined by Henry Miller and about not like focusing on yourself too much and like self mythologizing. And the quote is, develop interest in life as you see it, in people, things, literature, music. The world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. So it's nice when it helps me forget myself. I really love that quote. That one went into the old commonplace book.
Do you. Do you find yourself throbbing?
Throbbing with ideas, new experiences? Yes. I'm in a. I teach high school. There's all kinds of throbbing. So much throbbing in that building. I think a perfect place for us to wrap this up is to get real nerdy and talk about the tools. We've kind of hinted at them here and there, but gear wise, what do you guys. What do you guys find works best? Or maybe what do you want to try? Or what doesn't work.
Oh, man.
And I can start while you're thinking, like if. But I'll just jump in and say that. I mean, Johnny, you mentioned composition notebooks and that is what I've really used the most of. And my favorite Composition notebooks are like silly ones that I've used. And I've talked about this before from the books, writing down the bones. She talks about using cheap notebooks so you don't take yourself too seriously. And the first time, the first notebook I ever used for morning pages, which was back in 2015 or 16, was like a Finding Nemo composition notebook. And I filled that up immediately and just blew through it. It just had. I didn't care about the paper and at that point I think I was using gel pens mostly and just flew through it. But I love composition notebooks. Like right now I'm using a Lichterm, which is a great notebook, but it's. I kind of miss having the bigger pages and being able to just kind of swirl around because it's a ruled notebook. And sometimes I feel like I'm having to write smaller than I usually do, which then makes me think about the writing on the page more than I probably should. So I don't know if that notebook will stay as my morning pages notebook. It'll just become more of a journal or something like that. But. But I jump around all the time and what I'm using for it, it does depend on the notebook. When I was using those composition notebooks, I wasn't using a lot of fountain pens because it was just annoying. It was bleeding through the paper and all that. But I did one that was in a decomposition notebook and I think I used just pencil in that one, which was fun.
Hmm.
Which is something I might revisit. But yeah, you have to have a few sharpened and ready to go.
Yeah. I think my, my favorite that I've experimented with is I. I think still, I think it's those field notes I
definitely haven't like easy to get your three pages.
It's easy to get through three pages. I mean it makes you feel like you're making progress. Right. Like you're just right a bunch. And I really love like the. The shelter woods of the America the Beautiful and the ones that have just like nice big wide lines on them. I think those really are good. And what's nice is, yeah, you can just stash them away and bring em back up again, read em later. And yet you feel like you're making progress. And for people like at least like me, not gonna speak for anybody else, I have so many of them. It helps me like actually feel like I'm not just hoarding field notes, I'm actually using them also write note but not write notepads, although those would be Good too. But the word notebooks are also good for something like this. Yeah.
You have pretty small handwriting too, don't you?
I do and it, it definitely like encourages me to just get like a little bit bigger and because I, I have small handwriting and then when I like write fast it just gets like so completely illegible. So I need to just like, like literally like loosen it up and slow down a little bit and like get a little bit bigger so that I think is really useful. And then pencil wise, I, at that time, I think that's when I was starting to really like get into the test scoring 100 pencil. Like it was not the most comfortable to hold, but it was good point retention for how thick. How thick it was writing for me. So I think that was a really good pencil. I also think that like a semi hex or a sear point would be a really good pencil too. Just because they're just so nice to hold. I think that's going to be really important.
Yeah, I like the, the. Yeah, that's. I think pencil wise. I think my favorite for this kind of thing would be like the Blackwing natural. I really like, like that one for this, I gosh. I think for my next one I'm going to use one of those maramon notebooks that we talked about.
Oh.
Huh. Recently, I think I'm going to use one of their spiral bound, maybe even like a graph paper. Just something that lets me kind of write as big as I want to.
Yeah.
And maybe try to do it in pencil.
That's a good idea.
Might try that.
Yeah.
What about you, Johnny?
So when I first started doing morning pages, I was using composition books to sort. I had a pile of composition books. Like, this is not important writing. I'm going to use these. And then I started doing the same thing with moleskins because I found a lot of us have a stash of those around. Started using them up. And then I've come to realize that having a separate notebook means I probably am not going to do it. And also, I don't know how to say this without sounding on mystical, but if I'm like, I'm going to use this trash notebook for this like, like I'm telling myself it's not a valuable activity.
Trash in, trash out.
Yeah. I think it's easy to conflate the whole it's okay if the writing is trash thing with the activity not being worthwhile. So now I just do them in whatever journal I'm working on. And lately I fill up a different 11 true writer with something seasonal and just go nuts. Because that celluloid is very nice in the morning when for some reason my hands are slippery, which could probably be from handling coffee beans.
Cellulose, I love. So nice in the morning.
I love the feel of cellulose in the morning.
Cellulose.
Celluloid. Celluloid. I'm sorry.
You said celluloid, I think, didn't you? I hope.
Yeah. I mean, I have one called Carnival that I'm. It's sitting out and ready to rock for next week for a Fat Tuesday.
But that's good. Is that the diamine?
No, the pen is called Carnival.
Oh, I have the diamond Carnival ink, and I love that one.
Ooh, I did try Red Dragon after you recommended it. So I have half a notebook full of that. And then I got into Wild Strawberry, which is my new favorite Valentine's ink. Oh, it's so pretty. But, yeah, these days. Plus, it's easy to pawn off notebooks. I don't want to. My children, like, they love a composition book, especially if your choice is this crap thing from Walmart or Target or this really cool composition book daddy has in the closet that's got, like, stripes and a star and just.
It looks cool.
But yeah, I have not been using pencils lately for morning pages because slows me down. And I guess that's kind of BS because I'm looking right at electric pencil sharpener, so maybe I'll do that tomorrow. But, yeah, I am. My. My biggest switch has been to just using whatever I'm writing when. And not using a dedicated notebook.
Yeah. Cool.
Nice.
I have one last question for you guys. These morning pages get pretty ugly. I am horrified at the idea of people reading my morning pages. If I die and they find a bunch of these notebooks because they're going to see the center of my soul and all of the, like, petty things that I'm frustrated with. What are you going to do? What do you do with them when you're done? Like, do you burn them? Do you. What do you do? Do we need to have some kind of, like, pact where you're going to, like, fly across the country to my house and burn all my notebooks?
Burn all your morning pages?
My friend Dan and I have a pact for that for our journals. Whoever dies first burns the other one. But that's only gonna work for one of us.
Guys better not drive together in a car.
Oh, my God. But I have books of morning pages that I've lost, which, like, freaks me out because my name is in them. And all sort of ugly things about the world and myself and people. So don't do that. Don't lose them. Don't write your name in them. Yeah. I mean, I definitely plan on destroying all that before I die and having something else that I can leave my children that'll make them think untrue, healthy things about me.
That would be like. We should do, like, the next meetup we have, we should do a big, like, notebook burning. And, like, people who are, like, listeners can send in their notebooks and we'll just do a big burning. Wow. All together.
And we can start.
We definitely won't read them. Everybody. Don't worry.
Definitely not blackmail.
Start the fire with some pencil shavings and a sparker.
Yeah.
Which works freakishly well.
I've two minds about this. Like, on one hand, yeah, like, I. It'd be. There's a lot of, like, stuff in there that's embarrassing or petty or something like that.
Personal.
Yeah. And very personal. But on the other hand, like a. I'm dead, right. Like, it doesn't matter to me. I also, like, I don't have children, so I know that, like, if it's something where, like, a descendant will see it, like, maybe it'll be my niece who knows me but doesn't. Isn't like, a child of mine. And I love reading, reading stuff like that. Like, I think it might give them some entertainment. So I'm glad.
He was crazy. Wow.
What a giant asshole.
I.
Mom, he's got some stuff about you in here.
You better come over here. Like, my. It's not quite the same, but, like, my. My great grandfather, Hugh Stevenson, like, I've talked about that. This on the show before. Like, I. My mom sent me a little notebook that he had that was like, from, like, literally a hundred years ago from, like, 1921, early 1922. And it's less morning pages and just more sort of like, recounting of activity and sort of what's happening throughout the day. So it isn't, like, intensely personal, but there's stuff in there where it's just like, yeah, he's definitely, like, giving some opinions or sharing something like that. And it's. That's fascinating to read for me. So there's some, like, ego part of my brain that's just like, oh, yeah. Like, definitely. People are going to be fascinated by what I have to say, like, for sure. So.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's a hard one to answer. Yeah.
Food for thought and. Yeah. So send us your morning pages, everybody.
Give you an average not read them.
We will definitely not read them and
make a massive zine out of these.
Yeah, they will not show up in a zine.
Yeah. Morning pages burning. That'll happen after a morning pages scanning party. That will run in Johnny's factor either.
The corner of my bedroom, my much belabored printer.
We'll just. Yeah, you send us your morning pages and randomly we will mail you a page from your morning pages. You open and you're like, oh, my
God, I'm a Patreon member. If you do not wish this to
get out in public, we'll send you a picture, a page of someone else's morning pages and you can guess who it is.
That's good. That's good.
Will trade you one.
It'll be like, send me a book.
I'll send you a book.
It's like the pencil swap thing. Like it's just a bundle of papers and you have to. You have to pick one page of morning pages out and then put one in and then send it on to the next person.
That would be a crazy, exquisite corpse.
That would be.
That would be a good. Are you all familiar with Mortified, that podcast and live show?
Yes.
Yeah, I feel like that's kind of a exquisite. It's a mortified corpse. Yeah, that is.
Yeah, totally. All right, on that note, let's wrap this thing up. Where can people find you on the Internet, Andy?
I am @andy. WTF? Or on Twitter and Instagram as awelfly. How about you, Johnny?
I am@pencil Revolution.com on Instagram and Twitter at Pencilucian and on Etsy at Pencil Revolution.
Etsy.com find me on Twitter @TimWassom and on Instagram TimothyWassom. You can head over to our website to erasable US 177 for show notes if you don't see them in your podcast app. And you can also go to Erasable Us Patreon and become a Patreon supporter of the podcast. We really love our patrons and are so thankful for them. And if you sign up, there are perks you get throughout the year. Sometimes a piece of merch or zines that we make or access to our pen Podcast Indelible that we do occasionally that we need to do soon. And you can follow us on Instagram, Twitter Raceable Podcast. You can come to our Facebook group, which is facebook.comgroups erasable. And you can like our Facebook page@facebook.com erasable podcast. And if you have a second, we'd appreciate if you'd rate and review us on itunes so that we can remain the number two pencil podcast on the planet. And we'd like to thank our producer level Patreon supporters Matthew Shaven, Tara Whittle, Ida Umphers, David Johnson, Phil Munson, Donnie Pierce, Bill Black, Miriam Bokout, Diana Oakley, Tom Keakley, Andre Torres, Kyle Paul Moorhead, Jamelia Stephen Fanscale, Aaron Willard sorry KP Millie Blackwell, Chris L Hunter McCain, Bob Ostwald, Michael D', Alosa, Jacqueline Myers, Tana Feliz, Ann Sipe, Joe Crace, Measure Twice Michael Hagan, Chris Metzkus, Bill Clow, Random Thinks Jason Dill, David McDonald, Mary Collis, Alex Jonathan Brown, Andre Prevost, Kathleen Rogers, Bobby Lutzinger, Andrew Austin, FourthLetter, Kelton Wiens, Scott Hayes, Hans Noodleman, Jay Newton, Chris Jones and John Wood. Thank you so much. Thank you to our producer level patrons and we will talk to you all in a couple weeks.
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