Loose Leaf Notes

1. I was thinking about getting my daughter-in-law a birdhouse for Christmas but then I remembered she had three cats.

2. I once started a collage series of self-portrait photographs where I cut out a space between the top of my head and a hat, maybe as a way to put image to my fragile brain chemistry or to make room for imagination. See HERE.

3. “Writers are like cooks, they keep everything in the refrigerator and put it in the casserole. What doesn’t go in for dinner tonight will go in next Sunday.” – Joyce Carol Oates

4. “The desire at the start is not to say anything, not to make meanings, but to create for the unwary reader a sudden experience of reality.” – From Waiting for the Story to Start

5. “According to Western Apaches, a person who speaks too much – someone who describes too busily, who supplies too many details, who repeats and qualifies too many times –presumes without warrant on the right of the hearers to build freely and creatively on the speakers own depictions. With too many words, such a speaker acts to smother his or her audience…Persons who speak too much insult the imaginative capabilities of other people, blocking their thinking…” From Wisdom in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache

6. Did the above explanation on speaking too much, speak too much?

7. You said, “I’m right here / I’m not going anywhere / I’ve been here for thirty years / in case you haven’t noticed” / I laughed out loud / like a baby cries when it’s born / and has no choice but to let its life / be held in someone else’s arms – Read For the First Time in its entirety HERE.

8. “When Dan e-mailed me about Jimmy and him coming to visit, he said, “It might be the last time this can happen like this.”  When they did come, my impression was that Danny was too sick to be traveling.  Two weeks later, when he flew to Massachusetts for Jim’s funeral, it was clear to all of us that he was too sick to have made that trip, since he had not recovered from the first one.  But Dan felt he had attend Jim’s funeral, even if it was the last thing he would do, which it turned out it was.  He cried when he saw Jim’s body and said about their trip together, “Those were supposed to be my last memories, not Jim’s.” Then he made us laugh when he touched Jim’s body and said, “So this is why they call it a stiff.” Excerpt from chapter 5 of The Jim and Dan Stories, which I’ve been posting chapter by chapter each week to make it available online. More HERE.

9. Who can resist Nikola Tesla’s portrait made of household appliances HERE?

10. Some people say ‘home is where you hang your hat,’ but I say it’s where you hang your bathrobe.

12. I love bathrobes so much that I even wrote a poem about one of mine in 1994. It’s called The Blue Bathrobe and starts: The taffeta of terry cloth / The royal of blue collar / The going to the opera / of staying at home… More HERE.

13. Jesus wears a bathrobe and reads the obituaries / He has a long braid like Willie Nelson’s / He drinks his tea black / leaves the cap off the toothpaste / and never uses an ATM machine – More from Jesus Paints Graffiti HERE.

13. Other People Have Cats HERE.

________Thirteen Thursday / Our World Tuesday