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 Thoughts destined to be washed away by the tides of life. |
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I've been studying my cover photo for a while now, and it seems to me that it is more than just a photo of what is there that can be seen, more than just three white rocks stacked on a beach. It contains an important question about the future, about what happens long after the photographer has gone. What will happen to our pile of stones when the tide comes in? Will it topple or has the architect built this structure at a safe distance? I don't know what will happen to these words that I stack here on the sand. They may prove safely distant, or they may be swallowed up by a rush of self-doubt. They may be here for a season. They may lose their balance and be scattered by the shoreline, or be hidden away under shifting sands. Perhaps someday, the tides of life will reclaim them. Or maybe that's just a bunch of poetic, romantic nonsense. After all, this is just a blog. |
| People are always so sure that they’re right. Me too, I'm usually pretty sure that I'm right. Of course, I hope that if something were to come up that indicated that I might be wrong about something that I would be open to entertaining that idea. That's not a guarantee. I'm pretty stubborn. But I hope I could recognize the truth. And I don't mean if other people tell me their opinions or repeat to me things they've heard that are not proven. I don't mean if they tell me that based on their logic and calculations, something entirely different than what I think or believe is the actual truth. I mean, I want something factual. I will debate. I will argue with opinions. But I think it's pretty childish to block somebody because you don't like what they said. And I'm pretty sure I won't do that. |
| I am using a different computer setup this morning that is not my own. I don’t have ear buds that are synced to this computer, therefore, I cannot watch and listen to youtube videos to distract me from actual writing. This is hell. |
| My mother used to tell us : ”Scud to school or you’ll rue it!” No, really. She did. My mother had some odd sayings but I loved them. Many of them come in handy when one has nothing else to say but the silence requires something to break it. When that happens. I can recommend these interjections: “Hark! I hear footsteps approaching on horseback.” “It is, it is. Let us be off!” “You’ll chase a crow a mile for that someday.” My favorite thing was my mother’s logic. When being questioned by my father on her latest expenditures, she exclaimed: “Jack, we’re married. That means your money is my money and no one is going to tell me how to spend my money!” |
| One of my goals this week is to organize my Portfolio. This involves collecting items into folders. However, it is very slow going. One reason for this lack of progress is that I am often unable to determine if an item is a short story or a poem just by its title. I must open each item and read it in order to place it in the correct folder. Then, I just get lost. I opened a short poem this morning and it just stopped me It was a 24 syllable poem based on the word mellifluous.. Monday was my mother’s birthday. She passed in 2003. It’s been a long time since I have heard her voice. I find myself Listening in Vain Sweet notes of your voice, now long gone. How my memory tries to echo its mellifluous music. |
| I’ve been thinking about Mars a lot lately. For a barren wasteland millions of miles away, it’s in the news quite often. I remember reading that when NASA advertised for volunteers to go to Mars, they were inundated with hundreds of thousands of applicants. I don’t understand that. Sure, there are some qualified scientists who might sign up for a one-way trip to explore in the name of science - a sacrifice in the service of mankind. I can respect that, but I still don’t understand it. And what about the rest? Most people wouldn’t want to leave those they love behind forever. No hope of return. To spend the rest of their lives far out in space. To travel an unimaginable distance to a lonely and inhospitable planet where they will die alone eventually - if not somewhere along the way. So what makes someone feel so disconnected to their planetary home that they could easily leave it, never to return. Is it utter despair or reckless optimism? I suppose it could be a metaphor for desiring personal space. Mars was on my mind. "The Place In Between"  |
Well, it’s August.  Not sure how I feel about that. Normally, I am all for Summer coming to an end. I look forward to a couple of months of cooler weather. The just-right weather means no air conditioning is needed. No heating is needed. It’s the less expensive weather.So, that’s how I start a blog post when I don’t have any ideas for a blog post. Trying to come up with some deep, philosophical thoughts about something everyday and mundane. I have no thoughts about August. I don’t think it’s possible to find anything philosophical or poetic about August. I forgot to watch Christmas movies in July so I am going to watch Christmas movies in August.  A little snow makes it all bearable. All the dry grass, the flowers dying and going to seed, all the desperate last-minute bees who don’t realize their fate is sealed, birds disappearing one by one. Cover it up with snow. Please. I see in the news that some parts of Australia got a rare blanket of snow. Enough snow to cause power outages. Enough snow to play in. Enough snow to build snow-roos.  Some snow, twinkly lights and a world without stinging insects. Better than August. |
| You know, I've been hanging around this place for a few years now, and I thought I had most things figured out by now. I was wrong. See, it's time to sign up for round 6 of Promptly Poetry and in order to sign up, I need a book to register as the place my poems will reside. My problem is the same as it was last year - I am allowed only 10 books and I already have that number. I also had some notion that each one could have only 100 entries. Well each round of PPC has 52 entries and I was convinced that I would have to upgrade my membership in order to proceed without deleting things. I don’t have any other place to keep my writing, so that’s not an appealing option. But even if I have enough GPs to upgrade for a few months, there's no way I can keep up with it. It would mean deleting things later, anyway. But before I did something rash, I went searching for better information on how much each book holds. It took me quite a while before I stumbled upon the "Manage Book” option in the settings menu. I know - I should have started there. I was not thinking straight due to unnecessary worry. To my surprise, these books are about 15 times larger than I thought they were. They are nowhere near full. And I don’t need to upgrade. Maybe I will someday . If the internet still exists. If I still exist. But for now, I can just keep stuffing more and more poems and such into the books I already have until they burst at the seams. Maybe that will be my new goal - to actually reach full stuffingness, or umm… full storage capacity. |
| I mentioned to someone the other day that if I didn't seek out the information, I could go all day without knowing if it was sunny or cloudy or whether it was night or day. I like to cover windows for privacy. But a window they can't see into, is a window I can't see out of. And then I was looking for something to write about and came across this prompt from "EXPRESS IT IN EIGHT " :WRITE A POEM ABOUT SOMETHING YOU AREN’T SURE OF The two concepts seemed to go together, especially for an indoor writer, thus: The Cloistered Life The sun may be rising or it may be that sunset will fall. I don’t know if it’s raining, Or if leaves have started to fall. Though I cannot see, I think (but could not to it swear) that beyond the shaded windows the world is still out there. |
Recently, Beholden  wrote about politics and the wisdom of avoiding them here. I agree with that, but not everyone does. Some members often mention politics - not in a piece of writing, but as an informal post in the newsfeed - and with such a casual air that it is obvious they expect universal agreement. I find that amazing. I expend much effort to avoid responding and disrupting their confidence. |
| For the last week or two I have been fighting an infestation of what I eventually determined to be drugstore beetles. They are a form of pantry beetle that enjoy dry goods. I thought I had found their source a few days ago but they kept coming. I finally decided to do a complete clean-out of all the cupboards and found some surprising things. For instance, who bought a box of protein pancake mix, opened up the box, left the box open so that the flour-y contents were completely exposed and then hid the bug hotel they’d just created way in the back of an upper shelf behind everything else? I also found myself questioning the packaging that manufacturers choose to put their food into. It’s almost as if they want to encourage staleness and bug infestation so they can sell you more sooner. Nah, they wouldn’t do that. So anyway, I have eradicated the beetles, their breeding and dining spots and a lot of forgotten dry goods that were lost in the dark corners of high shelves. And just for good measure, I moved all the food to another cupboard and switched it with the dishes so if the bugs do come back they’ll be confused by all the empty plates. |
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