Loose Leaf Notes

1. These days our knights on white horses are the local farmers on tractor plows coming to plow us out.

 
2. In light of the Supreme Court’s recent vote not to limit corporate campaign spending, I think THESE new robes are well suited.

 
3. I recently became interested in the poetry of Haitian born poet Michele Voltaire Marcelin after seeing her read on the PBS Newshour. I was happily surprised to notice as she read that her poetry is un-punctuated like mine because models for un-punctuated poetry are hard to find these days.

 
4. I drive like I read and write poetry. I override blinker signals if what the car is actually doing is counter to them, like I stop for line breaks even if there is no period there.

 
5. Last week I posted a quote by the late J.D. Salinger – “I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy” – which started a comment conversation in which a reader introduced me to the word “pronoia.”

 
6. Curious, I did a little research and discovered that the word was only recently coined and that there is a whole website devoted to it. The first modern use of the word pronoia I can trace occurred during the psychedelic 1960s and 1970s -. Grateful Dead lyricist and grizzled veteran of both Millbrook and Haight-Ashbury defined pronoia as: the suspicion the Universe is a conspiracy on your behalf. ~ from http://www.pronoia.net/

 
7. I need to get out more: Between the bad weather and a bad cold, I’ve been spending too much time indoors. This was brought home when Joe returned from being out and said: I saw some kids sledding,” and I answered by saying, “Tyra Banks did a show on women with two vaginas.”

 
8. With all the snowstorms this year it’s like the winter’s been sick and keeps going into relapse.
9. I’m a loud sneezer. I learned it from my dad who not only sneezed loudly, he cursed as he did it. Instead of AH-CHOO, he said AH-SHIT.

 
10. “Life is split at the seams. No one knows the exact number of the dead. They were ours. They were yours and mine. Yet, we let them die. So, I will write a poem, and you will write a letter, and he will send some money, and she will say a prayer, but we will forget, as we have forgotten before. We closed our eyes, covered ourselves up, when this island without secrets, this island caught upside-down, spread open by the great storm, went belly-up, exposing memories and guts. Disaster on disaster, mud on mud. Life is split at the seams.” ~ Michele Voltaire Marcelin (punctuated by Newshour transcribers.)

 
11. In last week’s Thirteen Thursday I posted a lost and found notice about THIS missing purple wool beret. I also posted a notice about it on Facebook and in the Museletter (our community newsletter). On Monday I got a call from Sally at the Café del Sol saying my beret had been found.

 
12. “She’s an empty vessel ready to be filled by ideology she doesn’t understand.” ~ Chris Matthews on Sarah Palin after she suggested that Obama could play ‘war card’ and declare war on Iran to win reelection. Listen HERE.

 
13. I think the word sneeze sounds like a Dr. Seuss character, especially after learning that a sneeze can expel irritants out of a nose for up to 100 miles per hour!

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