Jonny Sun & The Fandom of Everyday Life
Sometimes I sit around, lazy and bored, in my home full of electronic devices. I search for something to stimulate my senses, so I mindlessly roll across countless tweets.
I wait to stumble on something to get excited about. One day about 8 years ago I came across a tweet that did just that.
“he died doing what he loved: nothing“
It was written by someone called “Jomny Sun,” I started reading his tweets almost compulsively.
Bieng a intrnet person-a
All his tweets were misspelled on purpose, it made them feel sloppy enough to be texts from a funny friend, but profound enough to come from an accidental poet surfing the web.
“som days, i look at myseblf in the miror and think: how the heck was i the first sperm to get to the egg”
His profile picture also looked a bit like an alien.
“being a introvert is wantimg to be on stage!!! evry second of ur life!!! singin songs & doin dances!!! but only in a completly empty theatre”
I could relate a lot to his tweets.
“i took the "which peanuts character are u" quiz and i got linus's blamket: u provide quiet comfort to sombody who will evemtualy outgrow u”
They were funny but always had a deeper meaning.
“look. life is bad. evryones sad. we're all gona die. but i alredy bought this inflatable boumcy castle so r u gona take ur shoes off or wat”
What was beautiful about Jomny-tweets was that they took tweeting so seriously. We all expect internet content to be funny, but Jonny also brought to it what any good writing and art needs. Meaning, vibes and something that make it feel completely human.
I think tweeting is seen as something kinda scrappy and un-prestigious for writers. A tweet is usually a joke or a junky meme, often forgotten a day after it appears. But Jonny proved that with enough thought and care, even tweets can turn into something lasting that linger in people’s minds.
Moving on from the internet and becoming a different writer
His tweets were so good that he could use them and his persona as the basis for his first book “Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too.” (hate to admit that I haven’t read it yet)
I’m not sure exactly when, but after “Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Alieb Too” got published, Jonny started to write differently. He didn’t write the same types of typo-tweets anymore. Instead he put out a new book called “Goodbye, Again.” No typos this time and it’s not trying to make me crack up.
Instead it’s a collection of thoughts, essays and short stories from his life.
“I was just going about my life and every so often, whenever I had a thought, I was like, “Oh, I need to write this down or else I’m going to forget it.” I did that for a while and then I had 200 or 300 little iPhone notes on my Notes app.”
Most people pull out their phone to take a photo when something special happens. I imagine Jonny pulls it out to make a note. Some things can’t be expressed as easily in a photo as in a few well chosen words. Which Jonny does so well. Sometimes I struggle to see the significance in a moment or an object.
“Restaurant t-shirts, to me, are what I imagine band t-shirts are to other people.”
From this simple observation Jonny turns an object that is usually considered to be kind of trashy into something precious.
It sounds a lot like mindfulness what Jonny is doing, but I don’t think it’s exactly the same thing (or maybe I just don’t like the sound of mindfulness). I’m sure nobody would say being a fan of Marvel-movies is mindfulness. Much like fandoms explore every intricate detail of their imaginary universes, Jonny does the same with his real universe. In each installment of his last project, “A small list of knowable things”, he took an everyday object and reflected upon it, as if it was a lore-ridden artifact from Lord Of The Rings.
He continued on the train of thought from the restaurant t-shirt…
”…if the local corner store had merch, if the magnolia tree down the street had merch, you bet I’d be wearing that merch, too.”
It makes me think of him as a nerd who’s really into a video game or a TV-show. But in his case, the nerdy subject is just everyday-life-stuff. This is probably what gives him such a keen and observational eye.
I envy this appreciation that he seems to have, but despite that, Jonny constantly shows me how much everyone is alike, and how much he’s like all of us. In one essay from Goodbye Again he revealed something about his own relationship with electronic devices.
He used to be on his phone until it was out of battery, almost every night, because he couldn’t put his phone charger close enough to his bed.
“I did what any sensible person would do, what felt like the compromise, which was to stay on my phone in bed until my phone died, at which point I would get out of bed to charge it because I could no longer be on it.”
While moving out of his apartment, he discovered an electric socket had been hidden behind the bed.
“I thought by living here, I knew everything about this space. I leave it wishing I’d paid more attention to it.”
Jonny knows how to zoom out and show the significance of small moments. Even something like discovering an electric plug. He can be just as distracted as me. Electronics dictate so much what I pay attention to, it’s as if I can only be a fan of things that appear on them, I forget to pay attention to the things around me. So much so that it even impacts my enjoyment of the stuff that’s going on in my phone. (such as failing to notice a thing that would help keep my phone alive)
The real reason things on the phone are fun, is because they reveal something about real life.
The perfect blend of funny, personal & observational
In my teens I used to write and draw a lot of comic strips. For one comic I started, I emailed Jonny to ask if I could use one of his tweets in a panel that had the main character scrolling twitter.
A classic Jomny Sun tweet in the top right
My comics usually lacked in meaning. I could think of cool concepts, such as an endless maze of rooms that everyone was stuck in. But it wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe I thought by putting one of Jonny’s tweets in there I might give it at least a bit of meaning.
I sent Jonny an email to ask his permission to use that tweet in the above panel. He said “WHOA” and “Yes” and was so nice and supportive. But I had no idea where I was going, so I dropped the comic. Maybe I was too afraid to say anything meaningful or I wasn’t paying enough attention to real life stuff.
I resorted to drawing more funny comic strips, but it’s easier to make meaningless puns and shooting in the dark than actually looking and searching. But then I ended up feeling like my worth lied within my ability to make jokes. This crippled my ability to say anything that wasn’t funny. On the internet, and especially on twitter, I have this constant feeling that whatever I say needs to be at least somewhat funny to be valid.
Maybe Jonny felt this way about being funny too. With time he dropped the “Jomny Sun” persona and became simply Jonny Sun, his real human name.
Eventually he swapped his alien profile picture for a picture of his actual face.
His writing continues and evolves, but always manages to feel like a continuation of his previous work. In my favorite piece of his, “#26 Restaurant t-shirt” - he talks about wearing merch from his favorite restaurant proudly.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about identity and the idea of wearing what you love as a way to signal who you are. And I love restaurants and food and I love how repping merch from my favorite restaurants feel super local — it feels specific to a place, a neighborhood, and to other people who live there or who have visited there and who might know and love that restaurant too.
I like to imagine going to a restaurant as a fan of that restaurant, the same way one goes to a concert as a fan of the artist, wearing the restaurant’s own merch as a way to show how excited I am about eating there. And I imagine if I have to run to the bathroom, that on my way back to my own table, someone at another table might stop me, thinking I worked at the restaurant, and ask me a question about the menu. And I’d say “oh, I’m sorry I don’t work here, I’m just a fan.” And they’d look at me, all confused, like, why are you wearing a shirt with the name of the restaurant on it then. And I’d understand their confusion and say, “…but as a fan, I can definitely still talk to you about the menu.”
It’s the perfect blend of his good old sense of humor and the type of profoundness that he always possessed. It let’s me see the world through his eyes for a moment. Good writing could be about anything.
It’s so easy to get distracted by things we are told to like and obsess about. Ads and social media tell us what is worth spending our attention on, the new season of show X or the news that ruffle everyone’s feathers this week.
Jonny makes me want to be a fan of normal stuff, of everyday life. To chose myself.
Maybe I’m putting words into his mouth, but I think Jonny is a fan of life. And as a fan, I think he can definitely tell us a few things about it.
