Loose Leaf Notes

1. I was recently thinking how everything in my life comes down to pace and that the best way to pace myself is to give myself space between activities. Now I’m wondering if space is the mutant plural of pace, like slow is to low and slight is to light, with more pace equaling more space.

2. Growing square watermelons is one thing. Now kids in Japan are actually wearing them. See HERE!

3. Weirdest find of the week (besides kids wearing watermelon): The mimic octopus. Discovered in 1998, it’s the first known species to take on the characteristics of multiple species. It can copy the physical likeness and movements of more than fifteen different species, including sea snakes, lionfish, flatfish, brittle stars, giant crabs, sea shells, stingrays, jellyfish, sea anemones, and mantis shrimp. See it morph HERE.

4. “I don’t want to know what I know. I want to know what I don’t know!” ~ Line seen on Dan’s Canvas blog about looking at art, but I think it applies to about everything.

5. Dan’s blog was also were I found Jerry Seinfeld’s very funny online on-the-road talk show, in which he interviews other comedians while driving, and then over coffee.  Watch an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee HERE.

6. I like the way comedians think. There’s a fine line between them and poets. Both are writers who read or perform their work. They both deal with sound, rhythm, timing, exposing truth, telling a story people can relate to, finding a strong set-up and a conclusion the can deliver a punch. And both comedians and poets have a lot of angst.

7. Some of the similarities of writing poetry and jokes are inadvertently revealed by Jerry Seinfeld in a New York Times video about his writing process. Writing a bit about Pop Tarts, he points out that the word Pop Tart is fun to say right up front. He talks about how the invention of Pop Tarts was like chimps in the dirt playing with sticks (also funny). “They can’t go stale because they were never fresh” took a long time to write, Seinfeld says. “You count syllables … it can’t be too long… It’s more like writing a song.

8. Kids are funny like comedians. When my 5 year-old grandson Bryce and I were looking at a spider web, I told him my eyes weren’t very good and that he should look at it because his eyes were good. “Yeah, that’s cause I don’t get them dirty,” he said.

9. I wish a mood elevator was as easy as pushing a button to the top floor.

10. I posted the above on my Facebook status but used the word “were” instead of “was” and then had to comment that having the wrong tense in a sentense makes me tense. Spelling “sentence” wrong on purpose? Not so tense.

11. Writers need time alone to write, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. About half of the 13 Thursday lines and wordplay I use come from real time or online communicating with others, the way much of the material many comedians create (like Chris Rock but not George Carlin who wrote everything beforehand) happens while they are adlibbing stand-up on stage.

12. I feel very suspicious of a word that has two u’s (like the above vacuum). I can’t help but feel there’s a touch of onomatopoeia going on, and to wonder if anyone has ever used vacuum in Scrabble and then kicked themselves when they later got a Q.

13. Poetry is a street fighter. It has a sharp elbow and can take care of itself.  ~ David Whyte

_________13 Thursday