Loose Leaf Notes

1. A spider web catch always catches my eye.

2. The name of the Country band “Florida Georgia Line” was the foreshadowing of the fact that the duo broke up because one of the two performers was a Trump supporter and the other was NOT.

3. And the lead of the Dropkick Murphys, a Celtic Punk Band from Quincy MA (where I was born), just dropkicked Trump and his MAGAs at a concert  … Watch HERE.

4. Hell No or Hello?

5. I have a bunch of past 13 Thursday posts with Hang in the title:  Hanging Out, The Hang Out, Hanging in There, What’s Hanging, Let it All Hang Out.

6. But Hang On: “We are sawing off the limb that we are sitting on.”  Stanford scientist from “It’s Official: Scientists Say We’re Entering Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction.”

7. Soulful Aging poetry at Yoga Jam: Courage to Speak the Truth and The Origin Story.   More HERE.

8. The Poem: It dangles like a hangnail / that hurts to write / Brushes like a mystery / up against me / Like a thread through a needle / stopped by a knot / It pulls me like a craving / for what I can’t live without

9. “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor…He speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation…he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city…he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.” -From novelist Taylor Caldwell’s 1965 book A Pillar of Iron

10. “The idea that Judge Cannon felt obliged to reassure MAGA Republicans that Trump is being treated fairly, rather than the rest of us that the rule of law is being protected, redefines the American public and American principles…Philosopher Jason Stanley of Yale University, best known for his 2018 book How Fascism Works, tweeted today: “Once you have the courts you can pretty much do whatever you want.” –Heather Cox Richardson

11. Shaking my head or scratching it? Both.

12. Excerpt from Our State Magazine on my son and his wife’s Old Marshall Jail Hotel: “A night in Marshall’s old jailhouse isn’t so bad these days — it’s now a boutique hotel. When the work began, Josh approached the renovation as an extension of his own artistic practice — modeling, shifting, shaping, and layering. With every painstaking inch of progress, the building itself became his medium. Along with a local architect and contractors, he preserved graffiti left behind by inmates, transformed old radiators into fences, oxidized metal sheets to a perfect patina, repurposed window bars as handrails, and invited the public to participate in a brickmaking project. Those bricks now form the property’s patio and some of its exterior walls. When Josh discovered a homemade bedsheet rope stuffed into a crack in a cell — perhaps the very one that A.J. Bridges used to smuggle liquor — he displayed it in a shadowbox…”

13. Garden Hold-up or Don’t Spill the Beans?

__________Thirteen Thursday