Loose Leaf Notes

1. The weekend was all about the birthday cake, eating cake, trying not to eat cake, taking care of the cake, taking pictures of the cake and sharing the cake.

2. Sign seen on Facebook:  Every child had a heartbeat before being shot dead in school. Where’s that righteous Republican pro-life rage?

3. Two sons and two tracks / across the width of my abdomen / is a tender trust hidden / by stretch-marked flesh  / They’re sliced side-by-by side / but in some places they join together / They don’t reveal the internal / twisted tissue that clings …  Read the poem Not a Birthmark in its entirety HERE.  

4. Joe gave me a Four-Disc Collection of Joni Mitchell’s songs for my birthday.  It’s called “Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting to be Danced” and is her personal collection of remastered songs from her 40 years of recording.   At first I thought of it was a love song to  her fans, or maybe a swan song, but then I started thinking it was a trick to get us to listen to the more avant-garde songs that we didn’t like the first time around.  She mixed them in with her Blue/For the Roses/Court and Spark hits. 

5. After watching some youtube interviews with Joni and reading her liner notes,  I realized how much I projected onto her and other musicians I liked, or put them on a pedestal, feeling that they were peers or leaders of our generation when, in reality, we probably didn’t and don’t have that much in common.

6. I’ve been watching Saturday Night Live in real time since the ‘70s.  One of the highlights from the season finale on Saturday was Leslie Jones Weekend Update bit when she put up a picture of all the Alabama white male senators who voted to make abortion a crime, saying, “This looks like the mug shots of everyone arrested at a massage parlor.”

7. I lie about my age by a year. I call it buffering.

8. This week’s “While Other People are Watching Cat Videos, I’m Watching This” is HERE.

9. Pronouns: I try to speak for myself and put things in my own words because too often using “we” is pontificating, “you” is projecting and “they” is assuming.

10. Check out the recent meditation flash mob in Floyd HERE.

11. My birthday flower used to be lilac but now it’s iris. Is that climate change?

12. How sweet is your slice of life?

13. Thirteen Slices of Thursday HERE.

___________Thirteen Thursday