Loose Leaf Notes

1. Because of fungus, insects, disease and raccoons, we had the worst garden this year in all the 27 years we’ve lived on our property.

2. But at least our potato harvest has been bountiful.

3. My Facebook update yesterday: Winning? Trump wins Guinness Book of Records for Most Lies told by a President

4. Scam, sham and shame and all parts of the same.

5.  Also in the news: “Artist Banksy destroys his own painting after selling for over one million dollars with shredder built into the frame” – “Banksy, the anonymous U.K.-based street artist best known for his public stunts (such as when he managed to mount his own art pieces in museums while completely undetected) is back at it, and this time he’s taken aim at the ever-inflating art world. On Friday evening, he put one of his best-known images, titled Girl with Balloon, up for auction at Sotheby’s, where it was sold to an art collector for $1.4 million—only, moments after it was sold, half of the spray-painted canvas then slid through a shredder embedded at the bottom of the frame, emerging out the bottom in strips. Banksy acknowledged the stunt on Instagram, captioning a photo of the horrified faces of art collectors with, “Going, going, gone . . .”

6. Over the weekend, I heard a new local rock-and-roll band made up of young people from the Music Lab.  The 13-year old guitarist/singer sang a song by the Vernes called Fcking Drones. I don’t know how to pronounce that.

7. When my son was young, our homeschooling consisted of living life and following interests.  It didn’t look like much “education” was happening, but when I wrote down the day’s events in my journal, it was as if we were using a top-notch curriculum.

8. Same thing with my life and this blog as a record.  When I document my life, it can sometimes seem more interesting in print than it actually was to live it.

9. Spot on or on the spot?

10. I feel around for the curve of their bodies/ wiggle them loose like teeth / Born into my hand / without the sharp edge of a shovel / more than twins / more than quintuplets … More from my poem about digging potatoes called A Sweet Labor and written sometime in the late ‘90s HERE.

11. Snopes (fact checking site) has the word nope right in it.

12. It’s like writing a poem / every night from scratch / I don’t know how to do it / or believe it’s going to happen / but every night it does – More of my poem Sleep HERE.

13. “Let me tell you, I don’t go anywhere in the 9th district without people telling me about their Republican neighbors, their conservative co-workers and farmers down the road who have Flaccavento signs in their yards who would never have a Democrat sign before.” – Read about our Floyd town hall with candidate Anthony Flaccavento that I covered for The Floyd Press HERE.

________Thirteen Thursday