Another journal

I was cleaning up tabs today, not in a way that would result in a satisfying tab cleanout post, but because once more I’d opened up my browser in the morning and encountered a bunch of things open about a topic I’d apparently looked up before going to bed. I do this, finding a series of rabbit holes to burrow down when I’m between reading books or otherwise just looking for a lower-investment bit of reading.

This round was about sumptuary laws–opened because I’d looked up something briefly while working on a Flash Fiction February entry. It’s silly to be looking stuff up when I’m trying to keep each day’s time below 45 minutes (I’m averaging about 30), but the laws around patent theatres that restricted speaking roles were part of the mix that created pantomime and well, I got distracted.

Previously to that, I woke up one day and found my phone browser was full of things on the St. Francis Dam disaster and the California Water Wars. That made sense as I’d rewatched Chinatown in the background while working on something.

Anyway, I do this a lot. The most notable was the time I found a bunch of tabs open on Punch and Judy. Why? No idea.

I made a post about this on Tumblr, because two years later (and an innumerable mornings finding gluts of tabs open on pantomime, or clowns, or commedia dell’arte) I had checked out The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian by Andrew McConnell Stott.

I’ve since become the kind of person who notes that actually it was Grimaldi’s son, JS, who inspired the character in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers that was the tinder on which the fuel of “scary clown” fire fed. I will bring up how Regency theatre was still so close to its riotous history that many stages still had spikes on the edge of the stage from previous generation’s crowd control.

You know they had a sea battle shows, in the theatre? We wild out on the Romans filling the colosseum with water but damn, they were doing it too, and had dogs starring in the shows.

So, I’ve become The Clown Guy. The kind of person who wakes up in the morning sometimes and opens their browser and sees they’d been searching for “clown schools near me,” who has a dedicated tag on Tumblr for clown vibes reblogs. Noting, btw, that apparently I started populating the tag in March, 2022. What the hell happened in March 2022 that had me looking up Punch and Judy and posting clowns.

And who knows when that will happen again, I wake up one day and find the detritus of a previous night’s search, within it a kernel of a new obsession. Well. Such is life.