Old Tweets

Man I went through my old Tweets, and none of them were racist or anything, but they were terrible!

If you don’t look back on your old writing without disgust you’re not growing, so healthy enough I guess.  But you’d think for something I spent so much time doing I’d’ve come up with some better ones.

Here are the only ones I felt like might be worth saving, putting them here as much for myself as for my small but influential readership.

When I don’t like writing it’s usually because it’s too writingy.

The Biblical story of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream: first case of a Jewish psychiatrist?

If there were a restaurant in LA that sold angel meat, Jonathan Gold would eat there.

Today’s surprising Supreme Court Fact: Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a high school cheerleader.

Whenever I’m in New York, I visit this little shop know, down in the Flatiron, and have my shoes professionally tied.

Addition to Hely’s Great Things: When an old person says “blankety-blank” instead of swears.

An airport? A state forest? An interchange? All fine things to have named after you. But only Melba has a peach thing AND a toast.

One thing I’d like to see is a giant eating baked potatoes, one after another, like grapes.

Ate a piece of gum today that was in stick form, instead of hard, candied pill form.  It was like visiting Old Sturbridge Village.

If I’m gonna see a play, by the end the stage better be a MESS.

What real-life show is “Game of Thrones” the porn parody of?

The taste of a drop of air conditioner water landing in your mouth. #mynewyork

There’s only one political issue I’m deeply passionate about: colonizing the moon with convicts. I’m opposed.

Let’s argue!  I’ll start!  All jazz is perfect.

my favorite cob food? corn, no brainer

It’s unreasonable of Don Cheadle to expect the other members of Ocean’s Eleven will understand his ludicrous slang.

Most of my money ($660) comes from my 1992 dance hit “It’s OK To Dress Up (When You’re The Birthday Girl)”

I think I could sell idiots salted coffee.

“Fine, FINE, we’ll just name ANOTHER one after John Muir, then we can all go home.” – another tense meeting at the US Forest Service.

In this age of baby carrots it’s such a power move to eat a regular carrot.

If you’re into immutable laws you pretty much have to go with physics, right?

TRIVIA: What is the most spilled beverage in the world?  Give up?  It’s water.  (Trick question because I was counting waterfalls.)

Vali rolled with it admirably when he came back to our seats at the Arclight and found me telling the history of IKEA to a stranger.

Was bowling invented so teens of different genders could examine each other’s butts?

“I like your shirt!” = “I noticed your shirt!”

LA etiquette: it’s rude to point out that someone’s production company has never produced anything.

The most important ingredient in any recipe is money.

Movie pitch: Fuckboi Academy

Nothing pisses me off more than when some fuckface in my Instagram is having a nice vacation

My best hope for Olympic glory would be as the falling down guy someone helps in a true display of sportsmanship

What did the TV writer say when he arrived in Hell?  “How’re the hours?”

You know what sounds terrible but is actually perfectly nice? The stall in the bathroom of the Yucca Valley Walmart, where I wrote this.

What is moral?

Goya, Death of the Picador

How do we decide what’s good or bad, right or wrong?

A interesting question obvs.  One every person answers for themselves somehow.

But how many of us can articulate our answer?

Would you come up with something like “not harming anyone else”?  Living with honor and honesty and compassion?

Really, I doubt most of us bother to articulate a moral philosophy or definition of morals.  We sorta just go with what feels right or wrong.

Right?

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

This is a quote attributed to Hemingway.

One thing I think is wrong is quote sites that don’t include the source or context for the quote.

(Brainy Quotes has the nerve to suggest how you can cite Brainy Quotes itself as the source.)

As always, hunting the source proves enriching.  Hemingway said this in chapter one of his book Death In The Afternoon.  

Back up just a few pages.  Here’s how Hemingway starts the book:

In Hemingway’s day, what was most repugnant about bullfighting was the suffering of horses.

Horses (this is described in the book) would get gored and have their entrails hanging out and trailing like grotesque ribbons.

At what bullfights remain this problem has been mostly eliminated, I believe, by armoring the horses.  At the only bullfight I ever saw in person, the horses were unharmed, though nine bulls were killed, one of them especially tortured because of the incompetence of the matador (lit. “killer”). (This video is upsetting if you don’t like seeing bulls hurt, but you can see how horses are now protected.)

Hemingway continues, justifying why he got into bullfighting even though he likes horses:

I was trying to write then, and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.

A theme Hemingway came back to frequently.

He mentions Goya’s Los Desastros de la Guerra.

Plate 44: Yo lo vi (I saw this)

Hemingway continues:

       So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself.  I thought they would be simple and barbarous and cruel and that I would not like them, but that I would see certain definite action which would give me the feeling of life and death that I was working for.  I found the definite action ; but the bullfight was so far from simple and I liked it so much that it was much too complicated for my then equipment for writing to deal with and, aside from four very short sketches, I was not able to write anything about it for five years — and I wish I would have waited ten.  However, if I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it.  Certainly I don not say that now ‘ every year I know there is more to learn, but I know some things which may be interesting now, and I may be away from the bullfights for a long time and I might as well write what I know about them now. Also it might be good to have a book about bullfighting in English and a serious book on such an unmoral subject may have some value.

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very fine.  Also, I do not mind the horses; not in principle, but in fact I do not mind them.

Just thought is was interesting, this succinct definition of morality came in the context of why it shouldn’t bother us to see horses mangled during the ritual killing of bulls.