Loose Leaf Notes

1. So, I wrote a poem with the term “stream of consciousness” in it. Curious, I did some research on its actual meaning and learned it was first used for a literary technique by James Joyce when he put a microphone in his character’s heads and showed how they think. Eventually, I ended on a site that talked about how the mind thinks and the art of introspection, “giving careful, extensive and probing attention to the initially obscure transient and complicated thoughts and feelings that swirl around in our minds.”

2. The site, The School of Life, gave words to what I practice with their description of “philosophical meditation.” “It can be hard to find the mental freedom to look deeply into our more confused and unedited caverns when onlookers are waiting for something sensible or simply normal to emerge from our mouths. We might be lying in bed or sitting by a window. We’d ideally have half an hour without interruption, with paper and pen to hand to seize ideas and feelings as they emerge from the mental undergrowth. With the patience of ornithologists, we would be out to catch the mind in its most fleeting, tentative, furtive moments.”

3. That’s the way I write poetry.

4. This is the part that hooked me and explained my mistrust of overused platitudes and buzzwords that keep us from thinking deeper and putting things in our own words: “Some of the content we hold in our minds is coherent and very easy to grasp, but it suffers from a marked draw-back: it isn’t really ours. It’s second-hand, stale and a derivative bank of ideas and plans. We have certain notions in our heads that come, not from our deeper resources of feeling and intuition but from what we have sucked in uncritically from outside from what we’ve read in the newspaper or heard about from parents or friends. These are: our received ideas. We don’t need to think hard at all to regurgitate them. They’re just waiting in prepackaged form in the reception room of our minds. And yet, it’s only the thoughts and feelings that are originally unprocessed that come from the caverns in ourselves that are the ones richest in information.”

5. When I wasn’t researching on the internet (or going to Halloween parties), I was watching THIS, not your mother’s fashion show and way more interesting than a cat video.

6. Here’s what one reviewer said about the designer’s fantastic art sculpture clothes: “Writing about Iris van Herpen, one can find oneself mired in the technicalities of her creations. There’s computer programming and physics and alchemy behind each one; they’re complicated to make and just as difficult to explain. Better is to think of her work as art pieces, with each dress a canvas and the model who wears it the frame on which it’s stretched. This season van Herpen collaborated with American kinetic sculptor Anthony Howe, whose pieces are powered by the wind.

7. Buzzwords are shortcuts that make sense to people informed of the context, but can become co-opted into general speech and lose their usefulness. Buzzwords also feature prominently in politics, where they can result in a process which “privileges rhetoric over reality, producing policies that are ‘operationalized’ first and only ‘conceptualized’ at a later date.” The resulting political speech employs language exclusively for the purposes of control and manipulation… Wikipedia

8. I don’t generally like buzzwords but idioms – word combinations that have a different figurative meaning than their literal meaning –  are like poetry to me.

9. Here’s an idiom poem called Losing Pieces by Shel Silverstein: Talked my head off / The conversation never stops / Worked my tail off / Sweating buckets of drops / Cried my eyes out / Which left an ocean of tears / Walked my feet off / Which I haven’t seen in years / Sang my heart out / I am barely alive / So you see– There’s really not much left of me

10. Halloween Party # 1 where I offered anyone a free beer if they could figure out who Yoda was HERE. Halloween Party #2 where dancing to The Kind was the best kind of therapy HERE. 

11.  I called Dan’s apartment when John, Joey, and Nancy, who were going to drive Dan’s Toyota Tundra truck back to Massachusetts, were there to close it down. “I have a strange request.  Bring me a pair of Dan’s shoes.  I want to keep them in my closet,” I said. The request was related to one of my most vivid childhood memories, and one that has been re-stimulated with Dan’s passing. When Danny was almost four years old, he went to Florida with our grandparents for the summer, but they ending up keeping him for a whole year.  A year might as well be a lifetime in the mind of a child, in the minds of children.  I was five and was rummaging through the room that Dan and Jim shared when I found a pair of Danny’s shoes in the closet. They were a 1950’s style, brown with white in the center.  Finding them was an abrupt reminder of the brother I used to have, the one I had forgotten about, the one I wanted back!  I carried those shoes around with me all day while I cried inconsolably.  I wanted my parents to witness my anguish, so they would get my brother back home for me. I asked for a pair of Dan’s shoes because I don’t want to forget my brother, the child he was, the man he was.  I wish he could come back, like he did from Florida. – From Chapter 3 of The Jim and Dan Stories. More HERE.

12. My poem Nightly News Prison Break was recently published in WINEDRUNK SIDEWALK: SHIPWRECKED IN TRUMPLAND HERE. 

13. Never is ever not.

___________Thirteen Thursday