Loose Leaf Notes

1. We danced to Music Road Company at Dogtown on Saturday. The trio performed a Bob Marley medley for Marley’s birthday, which they called a “mardley.”

2. Walking in the Floyd cemetery with the library’s Rambling Readers (for a story), I noticed that the cemetery looked like a grave subdivision because most of the gravestones looked alike, row after row of them.

3. My life philosophy: Every high eventually comes down to a low. Live steady. You can’t be so easily shaken and you won’t fall so hard if you’re already grounded.

4. I confess that I only watch the Super Bowl advertisements and half-time show, and only because my husband has it on.  My favorite ad this year was a jeep one with Bruce Springsteen narrating, called the ReUnited States of America, and saying, “We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground…” See HERE. 

5. I was recently moved by Rep. Dean Phillips address to Congress about the attack at the Capitol: “But I’m not here this evening to seek sympathy or just to tell my story but rather to make a public apology,” said Phillips. “For recognizing that we were sitting ducks in this room as the chamber was about to be breached. I screamed to my colleagues to follow me, to follow me across the aisle to the Republican side of the chamber, so that we could blend in -so that we could blend in.” Philips explained he believed he and his colleagues would be safe from the rioters if they were mistaken for Republican lawmakers. However, he said that he realized that blending in was not a viable option for lawmakers of color…”

6. Not like the colander I stole a decade later/ when starting out in my first apartment / with lawn chairs for furniture / and thrift shop silverware… It’s white enamel coating has chipped / revealing its black base underneath / I confessed the theft to a friend once / He told me when Pope Francis was young / he stole rosary beads from a dead man’s coffin – Read These Sins in its entirety HERE.

7. I get bored with constantly mispelling the same words over and over. I misspelled misspelling as I wrote that.

8. I can’t believe I recently used lackadaisical in a sentence.

9. “Lackadaisical may now be a single word but, in its original form, it derived from a phrase, albeit by a circuitous route. The phrase in question is ‘alack a day’ or ‘alack the day’. It was used first by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, 1592, on Romeo’s mistaken belief that Juliet had died: Shee’s dead, deceast, shee’s dead: alacke the day!” – The Phrase Finder

10. I also used the word enveloped recently and was confused that it was about surrounding something completely but not about a sealed paper that surrounds a letter.

11. “The confessional poets changed the landscape of modern American poetry. In fact, the widely held view of poetry as “confession”—baring your soul, exposing truth or emotions, etc.—stems from this movement’s perspective shift. Essentially, the confessional poets asserted that all angles of the human experience are worthy poetic material. The poetry of “I” still reigns today.” – from Crash Course of Confessional Poetry

12. Confession: I don’t go out without it / my eyebrow / neatly matched / like shoe and sock / to the other one / I wonder if it’s crooked / If other people take theirs for granted / I worry that they’ll smudge it / or accidentally rub against it … Read My Missing Eyebrow in its entirety HERE.

13. “If you are a big tree, we are the small axe and whosoever diggeth a pit shall fall in it, shall fall in it.” – Bob Marley

__________Thirteen Thursday