Issue 7, containing: Unrecorded Folk Traditions, Classifieds, Timepieces, Letters, Commonplaces, &c.

——————————

SOME EDITORIAL NOTES

Would it be fair to say that I forgot to write this issue? Both fair and accurate! Time is strange and uncomfortable, unfortunately linear in ways that I sometimes don’t measure well, and apparently today is Friday.

Hello, Friday. And hello, gentle readers.

—————————— 

A LIST OF PREVIOUSLY UNRECORDED FOLK TRADITIONS

1. If I buy a yoga mat, I become someone who does yoga, regardless of whether I have actually ever done it.

2. If I print out paperwork, but do nothing else with it, that paperwork is nonetheless now “in progress.”

3. If someone mentions a book or author to me, and asks if I’ve ever read it or them, saying “Oh, I think so? But go on,” will remove the bad luck of having never even heard of them.

3.a. Saying “Okay, I haven’t read that one, but it’s going on my list!” afterward also counteracts the bad luck of knowing, in my heart, that I will never, ever read it.

4. Making a playlist is essentially the same as doing work, and in fact I can take a nice long break from writing if I have spent over half an hour putting together an “absolutely necessary writing mix.”

5. Food tastes better when it’s free.

5.a. Food tastes better when it’s someone else’s.

5.b. When confronted with food I’ve already bought and in my hand, versus food being offered to me, it can be assumed that a six-foot-tall monster made of fingers, eyeballs, and pulsating tongues will appear, floating above the situation and laughing — gurgling — at the pretty mess it has created. This is Der Magenfee, and it only goes away if all parties involved throw shoes at it.

6. All robots are secretly dogs. As such, throwing sticks or balls will distract them if they choose to rise up against us. Robots themselves know this, which is why they worship the EPFL robot arm as a sort of protective household spirit, and will silently invoke its name when asked for error logs.

7. All food stains that occur anywhere other than my chest are miraculously invisible. Food stains that appear in the small area directly below my chin will shine like a beacon to everyone.

8. I cannot remember people’s shoes; therefore, no one can remember mine.

9. No matter how many photo albums I buy, I will always have more photographs that need albuming.

10. There is no unrecorded folklore about cats. It’s all known, regardless of what they might say on the matter.

10.a. I have for some time suspected that someone is fueling a cat-folklore conspiracy. I am concerned it may be the robots.

—————————— 

CLASSIFIEDS

In search of: Someone to remind me of the calendar, keep my time, arrange for letters to be answered promptly, and vacuuming done at regular intervals. Cats have proven useless at this. Contact the magazine directly.

******

For Sale: Strange jars of buttons. Slightly concerned that if I sell them, I will suddenly have a need for them, despite their dusty presence in the same location for the last year. Now I’m worried about it. Please disregard classified. (No. -Ed.)

******

Vacation location! The end of your couch. Prices reasonable. Contact your Laptop, Coffee Mug, Endtable You Dragged From Another Room to Supplement Your Regular Endtable for availability.

——————————

TIMEPIECES, VARIOUS

There are two kinds of timekeeping devices in my world: those that I possess, and those that I want.

Of the ones I possess, there is:

* My phone, which has, at last count, eleven alarms on it. Six of them are active.

* My Alexa device, which has two alarms on it, only one of which I pay attention to.

* My Google calendars, which are combined with so many different people’s, overlaying one another, that I rarely look at it, but instead rely on my phone, again, to pop up with an alarm for whatever I need to pay attention to.

* My work calendars, which are similar to the Google ones in terms of the overlaying issue, and as such I again rarely pay attention to them. My email will pop up anything I need to know.

* My paper calendar, which is a small notebook style one that I buy sometime in the beginning of the year, believing that the act of writing down my activities will somehow embed them properly in my consciousness. This is a fallacy.

* My wall clock, which is broken.

One would think that any timepieces I wish to own would be ones that I actually pay attention to. This is incorrect. I’m fascinated by time, but largely as an outside observer who thinks it awfully pretty but not the least bit understandable. As such, all the devices I wish to have are, while technically accurate, not exactly useful for day to day living:

* An orrery.

* The Boston Museum of Science’s Foucault pendulum.

* A garden-sized mehir circle (though slightly concerned it will turn into a fairy circle, which would in fact be bad, so may rethink this one)

* A marine chronometer.

* The Ghost Clock.

* Prague’s astronomical clock or, failing that, a very fancy astrolabe.

* An armillary sphere.

* A simple garden sundial with a memento mori motto hidden somewhere on it, verbiage and location to be determined later.

——————————

LETTERS

From Some Clams, to the Magazine, “We Are Also Puzzled”:

Dear Editors; We, the world clam population, were made recently aware of your letter to the Town of Essex. If possible, we would like to add our own voices to the very important question of “Why are you eating us”, and further add “We are almost entirely guts and slimy things, why would you possibly want to”. We will watch your pages for a response.

******

From the Magazine, to the Phone, “A Great Disservice”:

While the Editors appreciate that they do not have to use the snooze button, and in fact probably should not use the snooze button, we feel it is in no small way the phone’s fault for having one in the first place, and that the blame for any lateness should always, and forever, be laid at its doorstep.

******

From Some Shrimp, to the Magazine, “The Bivalve Monopoly”:

To the Editorial Staff: We, a collection of shrimp currently in a net somewhere off the coast of North America, would like to violently oppose the singling out of the bivalves as the sole downtrodden sea creatures eaten by the Town of Essex. We cannot help but notice that bivalves have monopolized the public discourse within your very magazine, and, as the net winches higher, we would like to strongly voice the interests of the crustacean cohort, which have been silenced too long in both media and stockpots. We demand an immediate response from the Town of Essex and, in fact, the world, and until we have one we are determined to remind everyone, at all opportunities, that we are essentially spiders you insist on eating.

——————————

COMMONPLACES 

From a sundial:

Hora fugit, ne tardes.

******

From Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus:

O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

******

From Edward Young’s Love of Fame:

Think naught a trifle, though it small appear;
Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,
And trifles life.  

——————————

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Not much of an announcement, however you can be sure that I intend to keep my Patreon tab open in the next week so as to avoid the rampant silliness of writing the whole issue over the course of a single morning, when I ought rather to be doing several other things, including having breakfast and putting on a shirt.

******

If you would like to write a letter to be produced/answered in the magazine, please email me at minor.hours.magazine@gmail.com with the subject line: 

Letter to the Magazine: [subject of letter as you would like to see it printed]

If you wish the letter to be anonymous or under a nom de plume, please state so in the body of the email; similarly, if you’d rather not be printed at all, please also state so in the body of the email. It will otherwise be assumed that mail sent to that address is intended for print. 

******

-Until next week, be safe.