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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Wednesday Winks*

* I know, I know. Pretty sad but it’s all about the alliteration isn’t it?

OK then, off we go with a hope and a prayer for the days to come filled with wit and shine, not to be mistaken for Wittgenstein! See, this is why some people should be given tranquilizers. Or gummies. And yet I often wonder why we do not, in some corners of the literary world, celebrate verbal wit. Alas, likely the same corner as the lost Salons.

—It occured to me (as I checked the time on Facebook for a response) that because three o’clock is written as 1500 in military time, many things are explained about the military and the military relationship to the public. This is funny. Then it gets sad.

—Someone got caught plagiarizing The Great Gatsby for god’s sake. Now that puts stupid right at the very top of appropriate comments. You might as well claim credit for The Bible. It isn’t a matter of breaking copyright however. “Gatsby” entered the public domain in 2021. It still will be a matter of claiming credit for something you didn’t do though. Always.

Posted by Poetic Outlaws:

“The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians.”

—George Monbiot

I’m all ready for Christmas and the girls are coming Christmas Eve (oyster stew) or Christmas day (chili and chocolate chip cookies). It depends upon the weather and if the storm warnings are true. They may be true for those issuing the warnings but not likely to be true for those of us on the ground around here. If the streets are plowed it’s not going to make much of a difference.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, ALL

And may all of your Christmas dreams come true.

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Thursday Thoughts

  • The problem with living in the now and with releasing the past (meditation, blank state and all that) is being a Reader. Reader, Writer, either—both. There it is in front of you, those dates, those times, those revolutions, those disappointments. Those misunderstandings. Those uglinesses and judgments (of self). And of course those flights when living inches off the ground, and equally the longing for them.
  • To say nothing of seeing again the raising of the flag of protest and reaching for the wine bottle. Or vodka when all of it is considered.
  • We found that if you don’t kneel to sacred cows you’ll be wiped out by them. We also found out the joke’s on us. That is, when it ends and you look around and no one’s there. There’s no one left standing as everyone grew up at the same time as they got older and then they became middle America.
  • Terrible is an adjective that has become so limited by its use in the negative when it should not be so. Think of a terrible love, think of a belief of terrible strength. Think Terrible Glory! No, it should not be limited to the anthem of negativity. The same with awful—as in an Awful Beauty.
  • The saddest thing about growing up is losing the dragons and angels and goldfish and secondary teeth without pay.
  • Certain expressions are so lovely that it’s a pleasure to work them in. To put a fine point on it we could say somethings are worth repeating even though we could become a walking cliche of ourselves in the process.
  • I personally wish people would stop saying they will give me a free gift for something. Number one and most egregious, that’s redundant. A gift is free by its very nature. Number two, we all know (or should) that it’s not free. The price is built into the cost of the item.
  • Those giants of passion, of terrible knowledge or ability, so caught in the web of their visions, never stop. Never quit. Never say “my work is over.” Einstein was working out an equation on his deathbed, and so died. Schiele was making a drawing of his wife Edith Schiele on the day she died, October 28, 1918. He passed away three days later.

  • Edith Schiele
    Posted by Modern Art Twentieth Century

But isn’t it also glorious that there are those whose work is finished when it is finished? That there are those whose work in factories builds our cars, as well the butchers who carve our meat, the drivers who bring the buses through our streets—all of value. All of need. All of it to be mastered and answered the same: to what purpose am I?

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Trying to Sit

When sitting becomes healing you cannot sit to heal

As Buddha said, “When, for you, in the thought is just the thought, then you shall be free…”