Loose Leaf Notes

1. Someone at the mushroom cultivation workshop I covered this weekend asked one of the workshop leaders to identify a “brown mushroom.”   “That’s like trying to identify a person in a tie dye at a Grateful Dead concert,” I said to my neighbor.

2. I woke up with a poem titled “Joe snored last night.”  I never got beyond the title because I didn’t sleep well and was too tired to write it.

3. My friend Spencer just posted on Facebook: I dreamed I was awake all through my nap.

4. Explorers:  You go ahead / I see you off / Your eyes already closed in a rainbow arch of lashes / You track a dream / It floats across your lids / too far away now / to tell me the meaning / I chart my own course / and wonder if we’ll meet / in the eight hour journey / off the deep-end of sleep / – Poem I wrote in the ‘90s

5. I just read a press release for a band playing at The Floyd Country Store called The Farmer and Adele!  Of course, I had to check to see if it was “the” Adele before I got the joke.

6. I woke up from a nap on Monday and felt hungry and had to ask myself ‘was I hungry in the dream or am I hungry now?’

7. Cool words recently seen online: whirligig and throttlebottom.

8. Our past Governor and now Senator Mark Warner has been in the news lately for his work on the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russia’s interference in our election and the Trump campaign’s Russian connections and possible collusion.  Over the weekend I posted a “That was Then, This is Now” picture of me and Warner, taken at a past Floydfest after he was Governor and before he was Senator.  I thanked him for his work.

9. Speaking of work, that’s me (center) at work in the above photo, covering the above mentioned mushroom cultivation workshop that was held on my friend Ruth’s property, which is where she snapped this. A story is coming in this week’s Floyd Press.

10. Politicians running for office come to Floyd like Boston weathermen go to Scituate when there’s a storm. Mark Warner, Senator Tim Kaine and Jim Webb have all come to The Floyd Country Store to campaign.

11. I also covered the Floyd Community Theatre Guild’s production of Deathtrap.  It’s a play abut a play with a lot of murder and mayhem.  After a while I didn’t know whether I was documenting slapstick murders or something like a snuff movie.

12. It seems that every other person I know is going to Iceland. There are the Northern Lights, but there is also this:  Afraid that their enemies might pursue them, the early settlers of Iceland sent word back to Norway that their island was actually an ice-land, but that another island — more distant, larger and indeed covered by ice — was inhabitable green-land. And so the green island became Iceland, and the icy island became Greenland.

13. And Then the Sun Came Out HERE.

________Thirteen Thursday