Loose Leaf Notes

1. Last night Joe called me Frank Sinatra. When I asked what he meant by that he said, “You like to do things your way.”

2. I call taking a bath “a dunk,” the way he calls playing golf “taking a walk,” which I guess in both cases translates to, “This won’t take long. You won’t even notice I was gone.”

3. Sometimes I write because on a good day my pen is like a dousing stick that finds a well of meaning I can drink from. Other times I write because it’s something I can do lying down.

4. Restaurants, hotels and movies are rated with stars. My days are rated by how many eggs the hens lay. Yesterday was a 3 egg day.

5. Artists never cease to amaze me. HERE is a honey.

6. Best quote of the week was by Tom Robbins on Timothy Leary: “There are those who have condemned Leary as a liar, a sellout, an opportunist, and most of all, a raging egomaniac; but the truth is, he was simply Irish.”

7. The Irish legacy is one of paradox. The luck of the Irish is super-imposed over Murphy’s Law (if something can go wrong it will), just as my passion to write and share my writing is super-imposed over my self-conscious public shyness. – Read more about why when I went to Ireland in 1997 to visit my grandmother’s hometown, I learned more about myself there than I could have in 10 years of psycho-therapy HERE. 

8. Buy Your Own Pizza and Be Yourself: It sounds like a life philosophy but it was also part of a Dogtown birthday invite that my friend Triona sent out to friends. Watch a video clip of Triona and some young friends dancing to Happy on the Dogtown stage during her birthday party HERE.

9. I can swing a little poetry but I can’t wing it. – Comment I recently made on a thread about public performing.

10. Writing Roulette: I spin the alphabet wheel / hoping to land the right letters / the ones I can add to the others I have / for a winning combination / If I’m lucky I’ll score a whole verse / in an unbeatable streak of right words / for the pay-off prize preferred by poets / the rave reviews of critics

11. Best news picture of the week HERE.

12. Telling time after losing an hour to daylight savings time is like being time bilingual. In our bedroom the clock reads the new time and in the kitchen it’s old, and no matter where I am when I look at the clock, I have to translate one time to the other.

13. Best psychedelic spin HERE.

_________Thirteen Thursday