SayJay
Joined Atlas Obscura in 2016
I've been asking people about their schedules lately because I need one. My friend L. said, "I don't have schedules, I have intense obsessions." My friend J. said, "I don't do schedules, I do habits." So far in this life my schedule has been unsharpened pencils, cluttered desks, a confusion of confidence and inadequacy, and the persistent idea that moving quicker (and I do move faster in my head) will get me caught up on all my plans. I make plans only in opposition to other plans; I write lists and schedules so I can lose, forget, or resist them. I prefer parataxis to hypotaxis. It seems instead of a schedule I'm just going to keep slacking off, loping towards Outsider Art, potato museums, old neon, UFOs, ghost towns, closed amusement parks, kites, weather gauges, metal detectors, magicians, the numbers 5 and 13, boxy fonts, uneven kerning, mermaid true believers, wind vanes, books with foxed pages and smudged inscriptions, letters still sealed for sale on eBay, bassoons, cryogenics, mobiles (bamboo or hanging chimes), prose poems, EDM, corn palaces, and dragging a Fischer-Price turtle through a spooky motel that has plywood nailed all over its broken windows and grass growing in the rooms. (It's been done.) Boarding houses that have been condemned, a 1967 faded booklet of sewing patterns rippling in the wind outside in the grass. I don't make any of this shit up.
