Thoughts

Thinking out Loud & Making Comments

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Thoughts on My Daughter’s Birthday

These are actually thoughts I’m having on the date of her birthday, not thoughts about her birthday. Sometimes too many words are involved in order to make something clear. Especially in a header. And more than once I have thought that the preposition carries a boat load on its little shoulders.

• The daughter was sitting on the floor in front of the TV, eating a toasted-cheese sandwich. This means that it is a Friday and the rules are set aside for “Wild Wild West.” Her hair is shimmering and shining its thousand shades of brown in the sunlight that streams though the window. The boy is sent to his room for some childhood offense and loses out on the broken rules and favored TV show. Just as he walks by, without turning around or looking,

This from the girl: “He’ll never learn.”

• Another TV night, this time on the front porch. The girl is sitting in a chair, not eating, and watching a show. It’s another shoot-em-up but not a western. At some point a man rushes into his bedroom and lands on his bed. As he does so, the bed explodes.

This from the girl: “Oh boy! Is he ever in trouble!”

• The girl and boy are sitting on the sofa. They are watching a TV show. I walk into the room and ask them what they are watching.

The girl answers: “I don’t know but it must be ‘Mission Impossible’ because I don’t know what’s going on.

• Baby Z and I just got our noses slammed by a door. It was the cat’s fault. Her last words were “CAT! NO! No cat.” Followed by a slam. I was stunned. So was baby Z. We just looked at each other.

• The point of it is that a true novel would never end. We are living it after all.

• What is the need to be doing two things at once? Or is it something else making a distraction or a comfort in the background? Nope. It’s about having something to distract the part of the person who becomes aware.

• When the boy was very young he came into the bedroom to tell me that he had a stomach ache in his head. And he came laughing into the kitchen the first time he got the hiccups. He’d hiccup and giggle, hiccup and giggle. Big brown eyes wide and grin the whole of his face.

• Religion and Sex are the same things…sooner or later someone is going to end up on their knees.

• Hey, if we start every new sentence or break with a capital letter why do we need periods at all? Aren’t they redundant?

• Slowly you fall back in love with the things that mattered to you.

• “Permission to leave the battle, sir? God? God, sir? Permission to leave sir?”

• Household rooms need to be renamed: living = group therapy; kitchen=anorexia /bulimia /gluttony, talk therapy; and so on.

• Fear is the dog that’s lapping at the heels same as the voice that calls you back to awareness…

This is a photo from the candlelight chamber-music concert that we went to when we celebrated my birthday here in Cleveland. It was so beautiful. Then the daughter went to Portugal to lease an apartment and celebrate her birthday which is on the 28th.

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From The Little Book of Cat Syllogisms

From a sampling of cat logic. Feel free to answer True or False.

Boston ferns are brought indoors.
Boston ferns shed a great deal.
Humans sweep up Boston-fern sheds.
Humans sweep Boston-fern sheds into neat little piles.
Cats jump into once neat little Boston-fern shed piles.
Therefore
Cats spread Boston-fern sheds more than Boston ferns shed.

And here is the author himself, quite noble and pleased with his abilities, Baby Z, aka Zooie Cat, or Zeus.

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And Then There Was Jimmy Dean

From a posting by Follies of God.

As Lois Smith and Julie Harris have said, James Dean was a sweet and sensitive actor, beautifully handled by Elia Kazan and his friends. It was all happening far too quickly.

With thanks to Magnum Photos

USA. New York City. 1955. Jimmy DEAN with a withdrawn timid look, “East of Eden” had just opened in New York at the Astor Theater after a celebrity studded preview. Jimmy neither attended the previews or the opening, “I can’t handle that scene” so he boarded a plane to Los Angeles.
USA. Fairmount, Indiana. 1955. In 1955 James DEAN visited the town where he had spent his youth, it was just after he had made “East of Eden” but the film was not yet released. He stayed on the farm of his uncle Marcus Winslow with his relatives.
USA. New York City. 1955. James DEAN.

And he was my first love, my first crush. A symbol of what was to come in a love for bad boys: the unavailable, those meant to die young in a flurry of dreams and fast cars. You know, the kind you play the sad songs for. The ones who break your heart.

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The Cost of Living

HELL AND EARTH

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power.

Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”

~Arundhati Roy, ‘The Cost of Living’

Posted by Hell and Earth.

Another of those of us seeking social justice and reasons. Ultimately it comes back to the why of it. Why are we here? What is our purpose? And the things that fascinate us and transform us along the way.

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Louise Glück

A new-to-me poet, Louise Glück has tossed me a morsel or two to enchant me and cause me to pursue her poetry. Better yet, here’s what she has to say about it all. (More in the way of actual poetry to follow.)

“It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away.”
Louise Glück
Photograph by Webb Chappell

Posted by Follies Of God

My only question is why aren’t there more books on the shelves?