Loose Leaf Notes

1. Is swell the mutant plural of well?

2. When does fantastic become fanatic?

3. “They told me I only have 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week. I’m thinking maybe Quentin Tarantino does a movie about it. In the end, the adults do the right thing.” – Brad Pitt accepting his Oscar

4. Facebook meme: In Trumpland, the punishment for telling the truth is termination. The reward for calling women sluts is the Medal of Freedom.

5. You were talkative / in last night’s dream / but I don’t remember / what you said / about everyday stuff / I wanted to tell you / how I dropped down into /a seabed of consciousness / that I knew wasn’t mine … I wanted to ask you / if you had ever been there / I was happy you were talking / It didn’t matter what you said -Read Were You There? in its entirety HERE.

6. At the hospital, I rubbed Dan’s feet because I remembered how much he liked it.  He didn’t ask me to, but he didn’t ask me to stop either.  It was hard to know how much touching Dan could handle. The nurse came in and asked me to put gloves on before massaging Dan because he bled so easily now.  She was afraid he might transmit Hepatitis C to me.  I lost my interest in massaging him after that (or did it when she wasn’t there). I couldn’t bear to put on gloves to touch my own brother. – From The Jim and Dan Stories Revisited: Chapter 13 HERE

7. I had a big budget dream last night, meaning lots of changing scenes and extras. It was a frightening dream in which I was being stalked by a murderer (a mix between Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker without make-up and Ted Bundy because I recently saw a chilling PBS documentary on him). In the dream, I was criticized for not wanting to hang out with this killer, but then he tried to strangle me and those critics apologized.

8. The word chilling is like an oxymoron.  It’s hard to chill when something is chilling.

9. My grandson Bryce, who is taller than me and is learning to play the saxophone, recently tried to teach me to play chess. He didn’t get far because as someone with dyscalculia (a directional/spatial/math kind of dyslexia) I couldn’t keep track of all the varied way the pieces move.  It also didn’t help that they were made from legos that didn’t necessarily relate to their identities.

10. THIS is how we Lounge in Floyd when the 1920s meet the 2020s.

11. I was impressed that Jane Fonda, who announced the Best Picture at the Oscars, brought attention to the Climate Change fight by carrying the red coat she wears to her protests and learning that she recently said, “When I talk to people and say, ‘We don’t really need to keep shopping. We shouldn’t look to shopping for our identity. We don’t need more stuff,’ I have to walk the talk. So, I’m not buying any more clothes.” She said the red coat was the last item of clothing she will purchase, and she has worn it to jail. At the Oscars, she re-wore a red dress from an earlier Academy Awards show, and her hair was a more natural platinum silver.

12. I was also impressed that Matthew Cherry, who won an Oscar for his short-animated film Hair Love, brought the teen whose school wouldn’t allow him to walk his graduation unless he cut off his dreadlocks to the event. The next day I watched “Hair Love” online, which tells the story of a man who must do his daughter’s hair for the first time, and was moved to tears.  Watch HERE.

13. “Run to the rescue with love, and peace will follow.” -The late River Phoenix as quoted by his brother at the Oscars

__________Thirteen Thursday