Loose Leaf Notes

1. I won an album in a raffle at the Ballad Swap at the Old Marshall Jail.

  2. And I didn’t get locked up. More HERE.

3. Although he’s not a ballad singer, My son Josh, owner of the Old Marshall Jail Hotel and Ballad Swap host, performed Rocky Racoon at the Old Swap, saying that it met all the ballad criteria, a death, an unfaithful woman and the bible. It was also a tribute to me and his growing up  years in Floyd.

4. Funny that song came around just when we’ve been dealing with racoons living under our porch and seeming oblivious to us.

5. “I lived when simply waiting was a large part of ordinary life: when we waited, gathered around a crackling radio, to hear the infinitely far-away voice of the king of England… I live now when we fuss if our computer can’t bring us everything we want instantly. We deny time.  We don’t want to do anything with it, we want to erase it, deny that it passes. What is time in cyberspace? And if you deny time you deny space. After all, it’s a continuum—which separates us.  So we talk on a cell phone to people in Indiana while jogging on the beach without seeing the beach, and gather on social media into huge separation-denying disembodied groups while ignoring the people around us. I find this virtual existence weird, and as a way of life, absurd. This could be because I am eighty-four years old. It could also be because it is weird, an absurd way to live.” – Ursula K. LeGuin

6. Speaking of wild things, I saw the above along a creek when we stopped to eat on our ride home from Asheville/Marshall. I had never seen anything like it (or them) before.  When I got home I noticed that my friend Mara had posted one just like it. She called it ebony jewelwing, a species of broad-winged damselfly.

7. “I wake up, and my mind splices my current awareness to my previous awareness, which preceded my nodding off. Subjectively, I lack awareness of sleeping, unless I was dreaming and remember the dream. Watching Chalmers doze, and ruminating over these exchanges with Emily, my idea for eternal consciousness came to me. If mind emerged once in the cosmos, I thought, it will surely, over the course of eternity, emerge again. When it does, perhaps in some sense this new consciousness will be spliced together with the old consciousness, as if the intervening darkness never existed. So consciousness is subjectively if not objectively eternal.” From A Super-Simple, Non-Quantum Theory of Eternal Consciousness

8. I lost my balance in a poker game / while practicing to fold / Everyone was playing with a 52-card deck / while I was playing with 30 / on a good day – Read Curve Ball in its entity HERE. 

9. What could be better than to check out a book on Stonehenge under an Andrew Wyeth print, next to an old school red dial phone? -Read my Floyd press story about the opening of Floyd’s new independent book store, The Book House HERE.

10. Best flower shot this week, early milkweed.

11. Best dance party.

12. Sometimes we have to pause our weekly Scrabble games to celebrate a friend’s birthday

13. Best sign.

______Thirteen Thursday