Simone's weekly newsletter #3
Welcome to Ditties in Beta!
Dear Reader,
It’s August! I smell like a fire-pit and my keyboard is sticky with watermelon juice.
This week I’m providing a bit of backstory on the name that I chose for this newsletter.
I bet that all of your Notes apps are filled with a peculiar combination of the deeply intimate and the deeply mundane. That’s how it is for me, at least. There’s a mix of:
Grocery lists
Book/music/movie/restaurant recs (perhaps the subject of another newsletter?)
Humiliating text drafts to crushes (perhaps the subject of another newsletter?)
A folder titled “ditties”
The ditties folder began in 2016. This was long before I felt brave enough to write creatively, and before I even really knew why I was jotting these notes down to begin with.
What’s inside this mysterious virtual vessel, you ask? Ditties are usually not more than a few words. They are, simply, little ideas. Tiny glimmering images. Poems, I guess. Juicy niblets, if you will. They’re life, jotted down in a hurry, with the screen dimmed all the way down on the F train.
Today, my iCloud storage sags with the varied and bizarre build-up of nearly ten years of ditties. They include:
Drafts for @SparkyBonilla’s captions and @SuppertimeLover’s tweets. (Ex. Eczema is a little kiss from a vampire)
Vague promises to myself (Ex. Visit that little store down on Raymond and north ave.)
Creepy dreams (Ex. hellish labyrinth in Florida but under the subway stairs.)
Ticklish quotes (Ex. “Happiness isn’t happiness without a violin playing goat” - Notting Hill.)
Private laughs (Ex. the sexual tension in a seminar)
Private anxieties (Ex. Mom bruise)
Sticky images (Ex. Baby teeth box)
Do they make sense? Often, no. Do I freak myself out with the weird little words my brain chants at me? Sometimes.
It took me a while to realize that these little ideas wandering around my head could actually be useful creative fodder. Not always. (Ex: Camp Cheugy: Day Camp For Utter Cheugs.) But every now and then, these ditties have become stories. “Scooping up a handful of baby snails at low tide and humming to make them come out” turned into a scene in one of my first pieces of short fiction.
The ditties folder has become a subtle way to check in on myself over the years. My Notes app was largely ditty-free during a difficult first year in New York City. (With the exception of this depressing one, “Every silver lining has a cloud.” followed by “I need to go to the zoo.”)
Sometimes, looking at my ditties folder makes me spiral. Will these silly little lyrics forever be works in progress? Do I have the audacity to turn life’s moments into the scenes of a play, to transform strangers into main characters? I’m not sure. But I don’t want all of my life’s ditties to float right past me into their haunted Apple purgatory. I’m trying to build at least a few of these morsels into something.
Here and there, an entry in the ditties folder provides me with just enough juice to kickstart a few hours of writing. And for now, all I can really do is just roll with those instincts, and see what comes out of them.
So, I’ve created this newsletter Ditties In Beta, to acknowledge to myself that little ideas can be the beginning of something bigger. They’re in beta because I’m trying to treat this Substack as a safe little testing phase, like software engineers do with their newborn baby apps.
To close, please enjoy this disturbing line up of ditties from the archive.
“I am wearing Crocs high heels in a fancy restaurant right now”
“The tickle epidemic”
“Olive the other reindeer, used to laugh and call him names”
“what’s going to be in the Guinness book of world records 100 years from now?”
“ I need to invent a board game and a palindrome before I die”
“Toilet bowl full of tapeworms”
“who are the therapists for astronauts”
“me 🤝 Jason Mraz
Spending way too
long checking my
tongue in the mirror”“Putting a frozen spoon under my pillow and wearing my PJs inside out every night until I have a gay son”
“Pet families… Dewey has his own puppy family so he sees us as his friends.”
Love,
Simone
Hehe the things I’d do to get into your notes app - you will never see mine