Expansion on Notes

The Golgi Apparatus

Is a part the animal cell which I remembered from Biology in high school. I thought it would make a great band name. Like a jazz band or something.

One day the man sat on his porch and prayed for his sanity

At the time I was working on a series really short stories, like 2 pages each, pretty closely based on events of my life. That night, I was having one of the most intense panic attacks I've ever had. Top five for sure, with a bullet. So I went outside and sat on the front step, and tried to breathe, and tried to control my racing thoughts, my overwhelming fears. I was terrified. I was scared I was going to lose the only edge I felt I've ever had- my ability to think. I'm not a religious man, but all illusion of pride or intellect was gone from me, and so I prayed. I begged God to let me keep my wits, to let me stay me. To not let me lose it completely. As it ended up, looks like we met somewhere in the middle. Or maybe God plays a long game. I don't remember when, whether I settled down and went back upstairs, or I took out my phone and typed in the words right then, because I knew I wanted to remember them. Whichever it was, I knew this would make for a good episode for my work, and I didn't want to lose it.

Sex with friends' girlfriends, for practice.

I was thinking about a character for a novel, or like a buddy comedy TV show. He's not a bad person on purpose, he's just really thoughtless. Things that upset other people aren't a big deal to him. The idea that crystalized this for me was the only one I wrote down about the whole project, which is his revelation, to the shock and indignation of his buddies, that he occasionally had sex with their girlfriends, so as to not be out of practice in case he met somebody and they really hit it off.

Meaningful and Expressive Error

I was driving somewhere, home probably, and it was night time, and I was listening to the radio, something on NPR. I don't remember it all the way, but basically what was happening was somebody did a study, where they took classical music and they had a humans play the music, and then they had a computer follow the sheet music of a classical composer exactly, and they found that people liked the human-played music better. And the thing the researchers took away from that was that we as humans find beauty and catharsis in the slight departures from perfection. The notes that were played almost imperceptibly longer or sharper than the exact notes on the page, the only discernible differences between robot and human, were the ones that caused a piece to resonate with a human listener, to stir an emotional response. Hearing this idea expressed on the radio was kind of like an epiphany. It put words to something that I feel like I had been trying to express for a decade or longer.  I needed to remember what I heard, so I could talk about it later.