I sometimes sew weird litems and specifically prefer 100% wool felt. The mushroom is based on an animated meme I once saw in which a lady plucks a mushroom from the ground and it ends up having an unsettling little face on its stem. I guess the meaning of it was you never know what to expect.

At the time I made this cardboard typewriter, it looked to me like a badly rendered birthday cake with collapsing fondant sidewalls but looking back, it’s not so bad. Like most things I make, I later destroyed it.

It’s a Smith Corona Sterling, my first high school typewriter.

I was going through some difficult times years ago and processed this partly by drawing and coloring many ordinary objects with highlighter pens. My mother once possessed a large paperback reference tome called Worst Pills, Best Pills 2: The Older Adult’s Guide to Avoiding Drug-Induced Death or Illness.

Pill bottles are one of my top three drawing motifs surpassed only by cigarettes.

For exactly two consecutive years I had a personal annual tradition of making a headpiece costume for Halloween only with junk I had lying around the house.

This is Bubo the Owl, a robot bird character from Clash of the Titans (1981), a film I had never and still have never seen. I have no idea why I thought of this or tried to make it.

I painted this based on a Dollar Store tin container thing I once bought - this was easily 20 years ago or more - that had this creature on the cover, accompanied by the word SWEEK written in tilted, fun-house lettering.

For me this creature’s expression captured an anxious horror, impossible to resolve. Existential perhaps. I can only guess that SWEEK hints at its pain.

For a time I loved the Paper drawing app on ipad (which Bending Spoons later bought and destroyed) because unlike most fiddly drawing apps it just gave you like one pencil and a paintbrush instead of a bunch of menu decisions.

I used Paper to draw a lot of round headed guys doing everyday things with flat-mouth expressions, some of which I included in corporate slide deck presentations for some reason.

These are stickers I drew based on the impassive expression of a Bye-Lo baby doll head. I once found one at a thrift store, just the head and hands and a set of instructions for sewing and attaching a sort of burlap sack body form.

The head and hands on their own look like a sort of bored infant spectre rising from whatever surface you display it on, I keep it on a Smith Corona Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter and imagine that this is what Ernest Hemingway saw on his drinking binges.

I made these dot-sticker scenes in the mid 2010’s to express the stresscore of working at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park.

It was like a city aquarium where swarms of glinting sardines swam in formation toward meetings or shuttles or group photos under jumbotrons announcing hackathons while corporate propaganda posters shouted menacing productivity slogans at you in sherbert colored risograph ink. You always had a stomach ache although everything you could possibly want to eat was right there for the taking.

I am growing weeds on purpose because a few years ago I took a foraging class and such is my estrangement from the natural world that it actually shocked me that there were edible things out there right by the side of the road. Miners lettuce is the cutest of the edible weeds, with its pair of smooth spade shaped leaves and tiny bunches of flowers, while stinging nettle is the most vengeful and sawtoothed. It hurts like a hornet sting is what I remember from the foraging class. In a backyard planter mixing accident I can’t recall committing they’re growing together in one pot, which makes no sense at all.

Bin books are gadgets and as such must be lashed to your corporeal being ready to receive the infinite scroll of your senseless thoughts in written form. And so, attach it to yourself. Tape a safety pin on it, stab a keyring through the duct tape binding. Whatever works.

When you are in the company of distasteful people be like Harriet the Spy and write something unfiltered and disparaging on one of the bin book’s grocery bag pages. Because offline, no one can hear you think.

Basically, you take some leftover paper nonsense, and make it into a book. I recommend that it be around the size of a cigarette pack. What you’re going to do with it is this: tape junk into it, write inscrutable things, tack on useless accessories like strings and paper clips. It’s a field journal of Actual Reality which is a long non sequitur of half baked observations and gum wrappers that no one but you is really aware of.

Once you’ve taped enough band aid wrappers to your bin book, filled it with enough senseless thought fragments, it will take on a shine like sea glass from the churning surf of your aimless additions. You will need to know where it is at all times.

That’s how it works.