Loose Leaf Notes

1. Do you ever feel like THIS? 

2. “Someone recently asked me if I had plans for the fall. It took me a moment to realize they meant Autumn and not the collapse of civilization.” – Seen on Facebook

3. “Voting isn’t marriage, it’s public transport. You’re not waiting for “the one” who’s absolutely perfect: you’re getting the bus, and if there isn’t one to your destination, you don’t not travel- you take the one going closest.” -Seen on Twitter

4. I was going to post this “thumbs up” picture for today’s TT title, but after yesterday’s election results, I thought the first one was more appropriate.

5. I only learned that the Addams family spell their name with two d’s when I covered the Floyd Community Theatre Guild’s production of The Addams Family comedy musical this weekend. It was GREAT!

6. “I never said “the devil made me do it” once all night, but I did say to Joe, ‘this is like my church,” and then thought it odd that I was dressed as the devil, no relation…More from We’re DEADicated HERE.

7. Look what I got for Halloween.

8. You wear your beret / in your imaginary coffin / while your lover rests in trees / where wildlife consumes him / You vow not to forget / that love is what’s left / when life has been spent / and time no longer counts you… Read When Time Doesn’t Rhyme in its entirety HERE.

9. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald,1936 essay Crack Up

10. “Someone had emailed me a newspaper article about me and I opened it and scrolled down to the Comments that followed. The old print newspapers had Letters To The Editor, which were signed and polite and the online Comments is a whole new venture of journalism, anonymous and open to malice. It’s like walking into a bar at 11 p.m. when the guys are well-liquored-up and you get to see human darkness up close. I read some real abuse about me, which people would never say face-to-face about my lifelong lechery and cruelty to coworkers and my fake amiability and how much they always hated my radio show, and I wasn’t offended, I was fascinated. I thought, “Why not? I’m only a name to them and a cliché. I went onstage willingly and offered myself to interpretation and fabrication, and these folks are having a good time despising a caricature and maybe they’ll work off their cruelty here and then treat their children with kindness. Leave them be.” People walk up to me and talk about the bond they feel between us and the Comments people deserve to have their say.” Garrison Keillor

11. Giving and forgiving are better than taking and mistaking.  I wrote that in 2015.

12. “When I’ve been asked for a solid answer to anything lately, I find myself laughing. If I’ve learned anything from living with chronic illness and from living through the past two years, it’s that an answer is a bad floatation device. It might keep you floating in a choppy sea for a day, but eventually it will deflate, lose relevance, and sink, leaving you to drown or learn how to swim towards a shoreline that is neither close nor certain. The only thing I am certain of right now is that I am constituted by a generous uncertainty. An uncertainty that gestates miracles I could never have expected or authored. I am certain that I am not the most reliable narrator. I have found that the space I hold for being wrong acts like a freshly mulched garden. Relationships sprout there, in the connective tissue between opposing ideas, that would never have grown in the relationally sterile bounds of a well-defended belief. We are entering an age of increasingly unpredictable climatological change. We are entering an age when we must remember that the most important ideas may not belong to human beings, but to bacteria and insects and entire geographies.” – Sophie Strand

13. “If you refuse to believe a door is a door, you will have a hard time leaving the room.” -Robinshope.com

_____________Thirteen Thursday