Crochet noodles

Meadering, shaggy dogs and rabbit readers

After my last post more than a few of my readers said they liked my digressions, my meandering thoughts and my stream of consciousness way of writing - and hearing that made me so happy and I felt seen and heard!! Thank you !!!

One of my goals with this newsletter is to “be a human thinking outloud but with whimsical drawings”. Kind of like a loving aunt who's puttering in a kitchen, cooking something yummy, while you're both rambling and chatting straightforwardly, thoughtfully, and honestly about anything and everything. That kind of gentle conversation can feel as nourishing as the food.¹

One of the attributes of being human is the ability to combine different thoughts and come up with some new insights². A mash-up of thoughts often occurs within rambling conversations or in meandering free-write sessions in a personal journal. This mental free-range activity is part of the human ability to extrapolate, to ponder, to wonder, to imagine, to infer… these are non-linear non-literal ways of reading the room (whether the room of your own mind or a room in the external world), of perceiving and responding to the real-world. Humans, when left in the wild so to speak, tend to roam around mentally. And that roaming is practice for responding, on the fly, to life as it changes and flows. The mental-roaming process is messy, it doesn't conform to optimized productivity metrics, it's not quantifiable, you can't tally it on a profit/loss balance sheet. It's living human flourishing life! It just looks a lot like daydreaming or even boredom³! Often such daydreaming is called “creativity” when adults do it or “playing” when kids do it but whatever it's called it's normal, necessary, human behavior.

I believe humans crave connections to ourselves, to each other and to our human spirit. We crave connections that are honest and reciprocal, that aren't merely transactional, demanding or preachy. We need creativity and play regularly for our mental health's sake because we are human beings and not linear/literal machines. We need real, evidence based, information with which to extrapolate, imagine, infer and then (hopefully) make good decisions.⁴

So it seems like an act of resistance to just talk/write and draw stuff without expectations, allowing for free-flowing wandering in one's own mind and heart. It seems radical to try to speak and write in pragmatic fact-based ways that also allow for introspection, inference, imagination and interpretation. It seems revolutionary to contemplate that trustworthy boring mundane life (and relationships) might actually be what's most valuable.

Especially nowadays such gentleness is something I want more of, I want quiet non-flashy real-ness that doesn't ignore or deny the real-world but also doesn't make matters feel worse. I want boring things that work well and are unstructured, slow and gentle.

Besides gentleness I want color and beauty. I want humor too. Perhaps I want humor most of all. Laughter really is the best medicine!

Speaking of medicine: as my longtime readers know I had covid back in May and had complications from that, then those complications had complications. Thank goodness I was vaccinated but, yes, ugh! I am recovering … it's just slow.

Anyway, this week I've worn a heart monitor which will send my doctor emails. So I've had a fun time imagining the emails my heart might send… “Dear Doctor, today your patient, Clancy, is loving drawing with grey-blue ink, her heart raced joyously while she looked at the trees and then she got a bit over excited about one of the novels she's reading …”

My meandering thoughts remind me of string. While working on one of my paintings in my current exhibit at Burnt Bridge Cellars one of the mundane magical things whose history I studied was hand knitting.

The ability to make clothes, and other items, using only string and a few needles was a large milestone for human flourishing all over the world⁵! The ability to make cloth via knitting has contributed, literally, to the ability of humans to physically survive as well as be comfortable. The repetitive qualities of the actions of knitting, like many of the other art forms which also involve repetitive acts, serve to calm the knitter… and a calm knitter can help calm the people around them… this spread of calmness, too, has helped humans survive and thrive.⁶

Yep, it's boring stuff all that surviving and thriving - but without it… well….

Anyway, here's my painting…

Crochet Noodles
By Clancy
4 feet tall, 13 inches wide
Acrylic on flat canvas

While reading about and pondering the history of knitting multiple tangential thoughts were swirling in my head: I thought about two friends who have cats and one of those friends avidly crochets. How do they keep the cats out of the yarn? Or, do they? I thought of long spaghetti and how it's always intertwining with itself when I try to scoop it. I thought about comedians and shaggy dog stories⁷ and the ways the jokes and stories twist and turn. I remembered one of our cats who was often caught trying to eat strings wherever he found them (he loved shoelaces). All of those thoughts and feelings inspired my painting “Crochet Noodles”.

My exhibit at Burnt Bridge Cellars continues through the end of July and it's been up since June 5, 2026. The Caplan Art Designs gallery is still representing my exhibit (and my work in general). Which means the exhibit reviews, so to speak, are coming. In the beginning of my work towards this exhibit (a year ago) I'd wanted to do an exhibit series that was bold, cheerful and in celebration of humanity, what's helped humans flourish.

So imagine my delight to read these comments … there were many more similar comments made privately (and selfie pics posed with my art that friends sent!) but these comments were posted publicly by SuddenlyJamie and Sacred Healing Remedy and I thank them wholeheartedly as I share their kindness here:

If you want to see my “banned art” details as well as the rest of my exhibit here's a link.

Burnt Bridge Cellars also wrote something nice…

I really liked the “…cheeky, fun and vibrant…” description! So nice!!!!

Here's some of my sketchbook pages from this week:

A rabbit…

…and a shaggy-dog… of course 😁

A shaggy-dog story I've reread more than a few times because it's such fun: Fortunately The Milk by Neil Gaiman (link here)

Thank you for being here! I hope that you have some fun stories to read, that you feel healthy, that you have lots of love in your life and can take some time to mentally roam free today.⁸

*BTW - this entire newsletter is handmade - no a.i. was used - I used an ink filled fountain pen on paper for the drawings and paint on canvas for the artwork. I took the photo of the featured book with my phone. Also on the phone I typed every bit of text with the index finger of my right hand. My wife J. L. Sullens proofreads what I pecked out with my finger because I make mistakes. I make mistakes especially with commas and apostrophes despite having paid close attention in English classes throughout high-school and college. Also I have entire bookshelves dedicated to books about writing and grammar which I consult often. But grammar and punctuation mistakes still happen despite my best intentions so I listen to my wife. If you see more errors than usual it's likely my wife was busy and didn't have time to proofread. Anyway, because there's so much a.i. slop floating in the pool nowadays I thought I'd mention that this newsletter is 100% handsqueezed with fresh lemons. I work all week to squeeze the lemons and then publish the lemonade every Friday A.M. around 8:13.

1. Trust and discernment still matter - and are a resistance to enshittification as well as a practical way forward:

The Shape of Enshittification.

2. For more details about the combination of different concepts as a creative thinking process here's a link: https://www.skillsbuilder.org/global/universal-framework-steps/creativity-step-6-combining-concepts

3. "What they had, and what we have mostly lost, is something I stumbled on this week and have not stopped thinking about: unstructured time. For almost all of human history, boredom was not a problem to be solved but a doorway. It pushed the brain into what scientists now call the default mode network, the kind of background processing where we consolidate memories, imagine other people’s lives, dream up ideas, and slowly assemble a sense of who we are. Staring out a window, waiting for a bus, sitting at the table after dinner with nothing to do, the mind was doing some of its most important work. Boredom, it turns out, was the engine of the inner life."

The 1970s: A World We'll Never See Again

4. Why honest evidence-based information about the world matters:

The Speech We Have Needed

5. About the history of knitting:

https://knitlikegranny.com/knitting-history/

https://kcguild.org.uk/preserving/history-of-hand-knitting/

6. My friend Kathryn Vercillo has a wonderful post about knitting and repetition as a way to soothe…

Fiber Artist Letting Go Challenge: The Swift Creation

7. A description, with examples, of shaggy-dog stories: https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-shaggy-dog-story-definition/

8. “When the mind is not occupied with external noise, it can explore, dream, and create freely.”

The Psychology Behind Why Some People Love Staying Home