Tyler Fugazzie

• Cut more material from the Google Docs
• Reformatted material to be single lines per bullet point, likely to do one line per slide
• Wrote new material while visiting MoMA – though more inspired by the space than any particular piece
• An idea to do this as a public Google Slides that I add to on an ongoing basis
• FEEL is for people who view memes as art and enjoy reading thoughtful comments online
• FEEL is just the placeholder name for the project right now. Feel Like is another possible name
• Updated the Google Slides with some inspo
  • FEEL Slideshow PDF as of October 21, 2017
• Should I add some GIFs?
• 3:48 AM and story ideas are coming to me. What if this was the story about a young man who loses his ability to identify his feelings?
  • After a freak accident, Ray Tungsten loses his ability to identify and express his feelings. He goes on a search…
  • Superheroes with specific feeling-related abilities?
• “Hiding in plain sight” is an interesting idea that may have a place in this project

I need to see this as more step-by-step, even if it’s a nonlinear step-by-step. You can’t go right to love. Before love is a relationship. Before relationship is a date. And before a date is a conversation. Before a completed project is a set of pieces. Before a set of pieces is a piece. This doesn’t seem to make as much sense to me. I’m of course bringing this back now to the Feel project since that seems to be my current obsession. It’s messy right now. Looking to untangle and find a clearer direction. But maybe this is the bewildered lost stage before finding something else. Maybe I need the mess to find something better than the mess and better than the parts making up the mess. Intentional messiness to make sure I don’t miss anything. But I will miss things. That’s the nature of doing any creative project. I will miss things. I must focus on what is rather than what’s missing. I think if I look through older journal entries, it will help me find realistic source material to use for this project. And I shouldn’t feel like it’s cheating because even if it’s not writing something “new” it’s finding things I’ve already written, recognizing that they would work in the context of the project, and bringing them into the project. But I don’t want to bring “past” feelings into this because shouldn’t this also serve as a documentation of this period of time in my life? Maybe the scope of this is too broad. FEEL is a really wide net. But I don’t want to get too narrow. I’m also wondering how to fit in or not fit in other things that are inspiring me. I’m on a cyberpunk kick right now and I don’t really see that fitting in but maybe.

I feel fake.

This is Part 8 of “Feel” Project Behind-the-Scenes Blog.

I started a slideshow on Google Slide and put some placeholder images and text for different layouts along with some notes and variations for designs and font choices. Can’t think of a good font. I may use my handwriting. BuzzFeed tells me it’s “stupid easy” to turn my own handwriting into a font. Calligraphr is the app to use.

Trying out some possible colors. I’m using this tool Cymbolism which “attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect” to explore some colors that can work for this project. I like this tool because it allows people to vote for associations rather than relying on accepted wisdom.

The words I explored: amusing, authentic, creative, cute, ecletic, imagination, magic, mystical, personal, playful, and surprise. Two common top results among these were:

Fuchsia
#ff00ff

Yellow
#ffff00

Which is interesting because I was thinking of using a pink with regards to this project.

Here’s a recent meme expressing a similar idea I wrote about in Hool, my first published work of writing.

“Temporary tattoo”

Sweet glass machine
full of black curly borders, gorgeous designs
for only a quarter.
Reach into my pocket, change kept in knickers, only one dollar
for four tattoo stickers. Make my deposit and hear clink clink clink,
turn around the knob
to get ink and ink and ink. Bring up my collection,
so proud and happy.
They stick to my body like a tooth full of taffy.

Disappointment.
My arms feel too bare.
I must go back,
I need more things to wear.

Ten, twenty, thirty tattoos,
I suddenly grin.
I can’t wait
til these all cover my skin.
I start cackling
with my crazy amount.
I’m an old passport,
more stamps than I can count.
But the store closes
and decides to kick me out.

Cloaked by the darkness,
I sneak back inside.
Nobody will stop me
from covering my hide!
My hand breaks the glass
and the machine opens wide,
on my nose, toes, and eyes!
Red and blue sirens
pierce through the night.
I baptize myself
with a childish disguise.
Nothing can stop me now!
Until much to my surprise,
cuffs around my wrist,
a new temporary prize.

Here’s another meme, this one related to the idea of someone missing a feeling.

Here’s another meme showing someone missing a feeling, and this one was some synchronicity for me because I read about this case only two days prior and planned to include a link to an article about it in one of these posts. Some meme creator must’ve been on my wavelength.

And here’s an ad expressing a feeling and someone expressing a counter-feeling using their hand.

I haven’t produced any new raw material but I cut some material from the Google Docs. I deleted all the material I had for the following:

• Feeling some type of way
• It’s an abstract kind of feel
• I feel like I feel
• How I feel about how I feel
• How do you feel? (I feel you)

I think my interest in this is moving beyond explicitly having “feel” phrases as all of the pieces. It’s proving to be too gimmicky and doesn’t have or inspire much gold. I also just don’t have any material for some of the titles I currently have set as the pieces. With this excess cut, I think I’m going to hone in on the glimmers I have.

This weekend I plan to explore some some unpublished writing I have that might fit with the project, look through my Evernote, try to get some more raw material to work with, as well as exploring the viability of doing this as a slideshow.

I don’t have or want a plot. I don’t have an overarching theme outside of feelings. I don’t have a world built for this. I don’t have a tone or style. It’s still very early. What do I want people to experience as they read this? What do I want to experience as I write this? Who am I writing this for? Why am I writing this? Do I want this to be 50/50 verbal/visual? Do I want more verbal or more visual? Is there any strong reason to do this? Should I give up on it? Do I need to quiet down the blog and step away from this for a while? What is it about this project? Where are the glimmers? Where’s the gold?

This is Part 7 of “Feel” Project Behind-the-Scenes Blog.

Here’s a PDF of the project: FEEL (October 18, 2017 Version)

I would consider this a very early stage. This period of time is about sifting for the gold, the right tone, the right words, the right feeling. I don’t know where the gold is in this but I’m getting some glimmers.

How do I know when I’ve found the gold? It’s almost impossible to tell. Sometimes there’s fool’s gold in the mix. Sometimes something that looks like garbage is actually later revealed as gold in a different setting or time. I try to catch glimmers and follow them.

Here are the pieces where I see some glimmers:

• “I just feel like”
• “So many feels”
• “That feel when”
• “There’s no better feeling”
• “You don’t know how it feels”

These are all like list poems. A lot of TRAPPED IN DEJA VU TV felt like lists of one liners even if there was a cohesion to them thematically, and something of a story buried within. Also reminds me of a piece from better by foot called jaywalking leads to:

Even though this additionally had a gradual increase in scale and scope with each line. Maybe this is my poetry voice? Maybe it resembles the fractured, frenzied, collective economy-of-words of a tweetstorm or rattling off a bunch of chat messages in a row. It’s hard to create and be a critic.

“So many feels” is a piece I want to highlight because:

• I generated the core feeling word combinations by intentionally mixing words from a list of pleasant feelings with words from a list of unpleasant feelings.
• I am trying to replicate this particular mixed emotion/contradictory emotions Spotify playlist someone posted and discussed on a somewhat major blog I had found a couple years ago and found really interesting. I’ve been unsuccessfully search for what that particular combination was or even where it was posted. That feel when you can’t find something you’re looking for! But to shout out something from The Book of Human Emotions as part of the entry for Bewilderment, “It is reminiscent of the old homily: lose something, and you might stumble onto something far better while looking for it.” I feel like I’m stumbling onto my own thing searching for this. This is a glimmer.
• I love contradictions, paradoxes, mixed feelings, polar opposites coexisting.
• I am fond of some particular passages I’ve added for it:

is it shamefully lucky like the sole survivor?
is it powerlessly fortune like their family?
is it miserably thankful like their family?

is it courageously doubtful like a stubborn juror?
is it energetically uncertain like an adderall-addled adolescent?
is it liberatingly indecisive like a retired CEO dining in Cabo?
is it optimistically perplexed like a bored scientist stumbling on a phenomenon?
is it peacefully alone like a seasoned novelist working on part ten?
is it comfortably fatigued like a bodybuilder collapsing in bed?
is it pleasingly useless like a disgruntled employee zoning out in a meeting?
is it vulnerably clever like a college freshman attempting a rebuttal?

is it bravely aching like a celibate at a strip club?
is it heartbreakingly challenged like the most desirable love?
is it wrongfully hopeful like a naive boyfriend?
is it impulsively tearful like a manipulative girlfriend?
is it painfully sure like an exhausted friend?

is it hatefully interested like every enemy ever?
is it offensively receptive like an enemy engaged?
is it irritatingly understanding like a supposed enemy?
is it hostilely reliable like a former enemy?
is it insultingly easy like forced friendship through shared experience?
is it discouragingly joyous like people living values you despise?
is it repugnantly festive like those celebrating a win you can’t share?

is it hesitantly impulsive like an up-and-coming starlet?
is it embarrassingly provocative like a starlet past her prime?

is it despairingly certain like someone who know what they must do?
is it frustratingly relaxed like someone who did what they had to but can no longer define themselves by what they must do?

is it disinterestedly warm like the greetings of service workers?
is it suspiciously fascinated like a tip-motivated service worker?
is it anxiously intrigued like the person eating alone?
is it dully considerate like well-socialized patrons?

is it frighteningly curious like someone with a badge knocking at your door?
is it worryingly engrossed like someone ignoring the knock?
is it achingly brave like someone who answers?

is it crushingly eager like the preteen spirits?
is it tormentingly keen like the hormonal teen?

There’s some poetic stuff in here. There’s wisdom. There’s meaning. There big stories told in a short span. I also really enjoy the wordplay I achieved with that final cited line above. The rhyme of “een” sounds, the rhyme of “orm” sounds, the consonance of t’s, l’s. And there’s meaning to it, along with its relation to the line above and my nod to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Do I spread out all the content from “So many feels” into the whole thing, making that the meat of the project? Maybe the real title is “What is this feeling?” and the whole thing is, much like this blog, about the journey and not the destination. There’s no neat and tidy resolution at the end but there would be many exits along the way, different feelings people can relate to or discover. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. With every sleep, with every word read and word written and thought thought and feeling felt, the glimmers become more apparent. Keep sifting. Keep producing raw material to sift through. Though I should consider that it can’t just be gold after gold after gold. Sometimes you need a little garbage around to make the gold stand out. And give everyone a break. Though there’s something divinely enticing about making a solid gold work. Or whatever metal is your sin. Platinum, silver, titanium. Pick your metaphor. I don’t remember anyone sifting for these though.

Standing in my kitchen, swigging some water, and zoning out around three AM. As I focus, the microwave settings are in my line of sight and I see “warm hold.” I focus in on this because warm registers feeling, hold registers feeling, it almost looks like it should say “warm cold” but is a fake out, and is a novel word combination. I. Ducking. Love. Novel. Word. Combinations. Beginning and end of story.

I think some people seem to express their feelings on social media with regards to a certain event or situation that’s happening and they say it’s empathy but maybe it’s moreso how they feeling and not them feeling how the others feel.

Visions of doing this as a slideshow. Can arrange text in many ways. Can arrange photos in many ways. Can use my Photoshop technique for the photos. Can do things like: photo on right and text on left, leading into a slide with three photos like a comic movement thing. Almost like a digital picture book. A picture book! Holy Shiraz.

This vision flash happened on my train ride home from work. It was a welcome flash after wallowing in my sleep-deprivation induced irritability. I’ve thought of doing a slideshow art project in the past, TRAPPED IN DEJA VU TV was vaguely like that but not quite. I was working on a presentation deck (PowerPoint) at work this week and that likely made this top of mind.

This is Part 6 of “Feel” Project Behind-the-Scenes Blog.