The Daily Unusual

Between 2011 and 2013, I kept a kind of journal.

Several canvases sat around my basement studio. Every so often, I’d paint a moment I’d witnessed, remembered, or felt.

I wasn’t a painter. I was a dormant photographer. A writer in progress. Still, I felt the need to process what struck me as strange.

Over time, the small scenes began to press together, then overlap. If I hadn’t packed up and moved cross-country, each canvas might be smothered by now.

I found them recently.

Like an unearthed diary, some moments came back vividly. Others—not at all.

That discovery led me to a folder buried deep on a hard drive: a set of corresponding images. Crude memories, spliced with bits of digital ephemera.

These moments came from everywhere—public rooms, private ones. Some became one.

From there, a box of cheap, handmade zines emerged—more of these moments, organized into a flimsy literary shape. I called it The Daily Unusual.

I couldn’t have imagined the deepfake potential of A.I. fifteen years ago. I don’t think “fake news” had been said out loud yet. But I knew about edits, filters, and Photoshop—the ease of rearranging reality until it meant something else, then sending it out into the world.

I was a photographer—originally a documentary one—but I had begun to doubt the accuracy of everything except the smallest gesture, rendered with primitive tools.

Meaning didn’t matter. Expertise didn’t either. Nor did an audience.

I was a caveman, drawing a bison on the wall with a piece of burned wood.

For no one but me.