Loose Leaf Notes

1. Driving my Honda CRV/SUV is like using my PC, the way driving Joe’s low to the ground Honda Civic/Compact car is like using my non-standard keyboarded little Netbook with no Adobe Photoshop.

2. Four-year-old Liam to me:  Your car smells old.   Me:  That’s because the windshield leaks and the water makes it smell musty.  Liam: It smells like an old man.  Like Hopa (Joe).  Like Hopa’s grampa.

3. I like any blogger that has a dog named Dorothy Barker, a cat named Ferris Mewler, and a blogger friend with a chronic illness to contend with who has a blog named Damsel in a Dress.

4. “As one who strives to take responsibility for my own happiness, I investigated why I felt out of my element and what ‘being in my element’ might mean. Routine, comfort, familiarity, safety, and periods of solitude all came to mind. But it wasn’t until I spent some time alone at the beach, snapping pictures and writing that the full answer came to me. Whenever I’m engaged in my own creativity, that’s when I feel at home.” – More from a 2008 post titled Who Am I Now? HERE. 

5. As a documenter/reporter, I’m like a musician who likes to perform live more than in the studio.  I like to cover live events and work off the energy of the experience, rather than write at the computer something from an interview and research, almost from scratch.

6. I recently asked a friend if she wanted to go to the book “launch” for an art/literature journal that we both have poems appearing in.  She misread my invite and answered, “I can’t make it if it’s for “lunch.”

7.  Broken pots turned into fairy gardens are pretty cool, but there must be something wrong with me because they still look like broken pots to me. See HERE.

8. Jon Stewart on leaving The Daily Show: “I’d covered an election four times, and it didn’t appear that there was going to be anything wildly different about this one,” and, “If Oprah can leave and the world still spins, I honestly think it will survive me.”

9. Listen to Nikki Giovanni rip into Bill Cosby and call for him to be hospitalized seven years ago HERE.

10. The word “ride” is in the word “drive.” It’s the same word with the letters mixed up, except that “drive” has an added v, probably to give more vroom (which is a real word/onomatopoeia).

11. I shook a poem out of morning like loose change from a pocket. It made me want to look under couch cushions to see if I could find more.  – See what happened next HERE.

12. Don’t underestimate / the weight of a petal / What we see / and what we don’t / is equal.  – Read the rest of this poem called Be Hold HERE.

13. Thoughts from Wendell Berry on Earth Day:  “We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman happens to the human. What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world … Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.”  – Read about Wendell Berry and his time in Floyd HERE.

_________Thirteen Thursday