Loose Leaf Notes

1. While talking to my Asheville Potter son Josh in China via Facebook audio on Christmas, he said people keep asking him if he’s eating a lot of Chinese food.  “Yeah, but here, they just call it food.”

2. It was the first time Josh hasn’t been home for Christmas, the first Christmas full moon since 1977 and the warmest Christmas of my life.

3. I’ve missed Josh for many reasons, but one in particular is that I know he would have talked us into seeing the new Star Wars movie instead of the one we saw, Joy, which would have been a good video watch, but fell short for a theater movie.  The acting and filming were good, but the story was too melodramatic and milked to the point that I thought Bradley Cooper’s role was a waste of time.

4. Everyone in our family looks forward to the traditional Christmas stockings that Joe fills every year with buffalo jerky, chocolate, gingerbread, clementines and lottery tickets.

5. When I scratch a lottery ticket all I can think about is the mess it’s making and that it sounds too much like fingernails going down a blackboard.

6. I thought I was getting nothing done on Monday, but by the end of the day I had discovered a new way of taking Jackson Pollack-like photos with my camera and put a new collection of poetry together, called “Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife.”

7. When it comes to New Year’s resolutions I’m a “bah humbug.”  Although when the New Year comes around, I do like to review the previous year.  I like to brainstorm, set intentions for life directions and weigh what’s been meaningful and what has not.

8. But I have been known to sometimes make some untraditional resolutions, like my 2012 resolution to stand up straight and not lean into the sink when I’m brushing my teeth. In 2009 I resolved to write more legibly.  In 2008, I simply posted, “2008 rhymes with great” and in 2007 I said that my only goal was to sit back and be present for whatever life brings my way.

9.  I often feel somewhat depressed after the holidays, as this 2011 New Year’s poem attests to:   A soggy lament / weeps in drips / melting ghosts / and sugarcoats / exposing every / telltale line / and wasted time / that pools like soured / Christmas cream / and drowns me / in clichés / and sorrow.  – Read the poem, which was published in Floyd County Moonshine, in its entirety HERE.

10. Speaking of Christmas stockings, THIS cheers me up.

11. I haven’t been able to bring myself to delete all the emails I’ve gotten from Sandy Hook Promise – a group trying to raise money to prevent gun violence – because it feels like to do so would be like not valuing the lives of those children who were murdered all over again.

12. Some of the questions my 5-year-old grandson Liam asked his Uncle Josh in China:  Do they have Santa there? Do they have candy, the regular kind with the red and white stripes?  Josh told him that they don’t have candy canes in China, but they have candy and that he’ll bring some home, to which Liam replied, “I hope I like it.”

13. We haven’t seen any of THIS in a long while, maybe because the North Pole is about to rise above freezing in the middle of winter for only the second time on record. That’s 50 degrees hotter than average: It’s usually 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero there at this time of year.  More HERE. 

________Thirteen Thursday