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From the desk of Tom Fasano

Recent Postcards via Postcrossing & a Jimmy Breslin Comic

posted Feb 2, 2026 by Tom Fasano

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Saturday brought a great haul of postcards from Europe. Joining Postcrossing has been such a joy. I’ve tried other pen pal groups before, but this one is really active. It’s simple: you send a card, and you get a card back. The whole process is random, which makes it fun.


And the stamps! I love seeing all the different international stamps. They definitely put my plain American ones to shame.

Jimmy Breslin

Years ago, I started a comic strip called “Crazy Mad Poet.” The original idea was to feature famous writers, poets, and philosophers. It never really gained much traction back then, but I’ve been working on a revival lately—this time with a heavy emphasis on typewriters.

In case you were wondering what the famous journalist Jimmy Breslin looked like.

Mini-Cassette: 1981–83 Audio Diary

posted Sep 12, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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I’ve always loved a little serendipity in my life. Recently I purchased a mini-cassette recorder on eBay. It shipped with an old cassette tape from the early 1980s, and it’s less a found recording than a time capsule. Between syrup shipments and invoices, someone breaks into song, then drifts into football commentary, then back to business notes. Later, the voice recounts California walnut groves and farmland swallowed by freeways. It’s messy, mundane, and hauntingly human—an accidental archive of a few years, preserved in analog fragments and hiss.

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Blast from the Past

posted Aug 29, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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Rig of Choice: Royal Safari
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Sleepwalking Nocturne

posted Jul 30, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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Typed on a Smith-Corona Electra 120

What’s interesting about this typewriter is that it can type umlauts and accent marks. For example, type the umlaut and the key strikes, but the platen doesn’t move. It waits for you to type the proper vowel to sit underneath the umlaut. Same for accent marks.

Tale of the Tape

posted Feb 28, 2025 by Tom Fasano

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So, yes, here is the tape rolled across my driveway. And, Yes, my yard needs some cleaning up after a few rare winter storms in my neck of the woods.

The poem unspooled from the Phomeme thermal printer like an EKG readout of a dying dream, line after heat-sensitive line, until the machine itself whispered the inevitable: a spectral blue strip, the color of an old lover’s veins. That was the ending, foretold by the medium itself — an apocalyptic omen baked into the banal mechanics of a cash register’s entrails.

And then my wife (Sandy) and I did what any two prophets of the mundane would do: we took that serpentine scripture, my holy writ of impulse and thermal imprints, and unfurled it in a madcap relay, watching it slither across the driveway like a tape measure of fleeting genius. It was a ticker-tape parade for two, a celebration of nothing and everything, as the wind attempted to edit my masterpiece, scattering syllables like the last words of the dying.

I used a plastic bucket to catch it as it emerged from my Phomeme thermal printer.