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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. |
| 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. |
| I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little tired of being told that I'm doing everything the wrong way. You know what I mean, all those videos on TikTok and X and Facebook that show you how to do everyday things in these new and inventive ways that you never thought of because you've been doing it wrong all your life. Now, these videos usually have titles like: “My mother taught me this”, or "My grandmother showed me this", or “I learned this from an expert”. This is to make you think that it's some secret knowledge that you never were taught because your mother, grandmother or chosen expert were total morons like you. Today, I watched a reel on Facebook of a woman showing me how to fold a towel. Apparently I've been doing it all wrong all my life. See, I just hold the towel in my hands and fold it up, first in half then into a rectangle or a square or whatever shape fits my closet best. I have in fact folded towels many different ways through the years depending on where I was storing them. However, it seems that the right way to fold a towel is to lay it down on the floor. Then you get down on your knees on the floor. Fold up one end about five inches or so. And then go to the other end of the towel and roll it up until you get to the folded bit, which you then wrap over the rolled towel. That holds it in place, like a cover, so to speak. Now you have a cylindrical towel. Now, my mother didn't teach me to do it this way. She definitely didn't. Neither did my grandmother or any expert that I've ever met before. All of the aforementioned taught me the wrong way. And for a very good reason. It works. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my old fashioned and very wrong method of folding towels is easier and quicker than getting down on the floor on my hands and knees, laying a fresh clean towel on the floor and then rolling it up into a tube that isn’t going to hang very nicely on my towel rack. Maybe it's me, but I don't think these mothers, grandmothers and experts with all these fancy new ways of putting garbage bags in your cans, straining your pasta, opening cans in the apocalypse or rolling up your towels on the floor ever actually existed. Because all the mothers and grandmothers and experts that I know taught me to do things all the wrong ways. All the wrong ways that these videos attempt to correct. Funny thing is, these wrong ways have worked perfectly well all my life and continue to do so. And I don't have to get down on my hands and knees on the floor to do any of them. |
| Did you know there’s a theory that oil might not be a “fossil fuel” formed by the biological processes of decaying organic materials but instead, may be produced through an abiotic process that originates in the Earth’s core from deposits of hydrocarbons and seeps up through the layers of the Earth’s crust? And further, are you aware of the possibility that this abiotic process may be ongoing - meaning that oil is a renewable resource? No, you are probably like me and didn’t know about this because the science is settled and we won’t have any new theories, thank you very much. There’s so much political power and money now thrown into the solar and wind industries, that I doubt there will be any further research into abiotic oil production. However, I found this old article from USA Today which seems to have been published before Science locked the doors and put up a “CLOSED” sign. Abiotic Oil a Theory Worth Exploring |
| When the grandson stays over, I sleep on the futon in the spare room where his bed is to keep him company. When I say sleep, I mean sleep in all its various forms like tossing and turning, curling up in pain and desperately willing myself to stay in bed until a decent hour. I managed until 3:47am, at which point I turned on the coffee pot, knowing it would not be brewed before 4:00. Drinking coffee before 4:00 would be indecent. When I was a kid, I could sleep anywhere. I slept outside on the ground, straight through until the sun in my eyes woke me up or the grasshoppers clambering about the dry August grass made too much noise. I slept on the concrete floor of my friend's basement. When my kids were young, I regularly got up at 4:00 to write for a few peaceful hours before work. Now I get up at 4:00am because sleeping too long is painful. But it's nearly 5:00 and that's late enough to blog. |
| Some people ought not to take to social media when they're upset. They make bad decisions. I just saw a video from some guy I've never heard of who apparently is in a band that I've never heard of and to my knowledge, he has never heard of me, either. Nevertheless, he is really upset with me and tells me I'm not allowed to go to his concert. Now normally, I only want to do things that people tell me not to. That’s why I never tell anyone when I am on a diet. If someone says “You’re not allowed to eat that cookie on your diet”, I have to eat ten of them. But, if this guy’s judgment is so bad that he actually aims to stop people from paying him money for his music or for tickets to his concert because they make different political choices to his own, then I'm not sure that he would even understand my coming as a protest. I don't know, maybe it's some strange marketing ploy? Maybe it's reverse psychology? Maybe he really wants lots of people to come but nobody knows who he is and the only way he can get any kind of publicity is to demand that people don’t come to see his band? Actually, I'm sure this is what it is. Because I don't think people from any political camp have ever heard of him. This way he might get some people coming out of spite and a whole lot of other people coming out in support of his ridiculous bigotry and hatred. I guess it's genius in a way. |
| I was readng an interesting post on Facebook this morning. It was about the baseball field that preceded the famous Fenway Park with its infamous "Green Monster" in Boston, MA. It was called the South End Grounds and it had some eye-catching architecture in the form of a few fairy-tale type towers. Rapunzel would have felt at home. The post, however, wasn't as interesting as the comments. I mean, I should have expected it, but still it surprised me that one commenter managed to blame the destruction of the South End Grounds and its "architecture" on a present-day elected official who hadn't even been born at the time. Fenway was opened in 1912, after all, and the Boston Braves were replaced by the Boston Red Sox. All of this happened a long time ago and although capitalism might have had something to do with it and it was a form of real estate development, it's a stretch to blame anyone not alive at the time for their relationships to those economic fields. It reminded me of a little poem I wrote about the results of bitterness. Resentment They say resentment is a poisonous drink. Your enemies mix it and somehow you think if you swallow it down, you will kill them all - but it will eat at your peace with bitter gall. Forgiveness seems unmerited, and so withheld. But grudges remain and build prison cells. Your life becomes centered on those you blame. But they have moved on and forgotten your name I dunno. Just my opinion. |
| It’s a grey morning. The clouds hang over the house like wet sheets, their bellies distended and low. They are pregnant with moisture and threaten to break open at any moment. There’s a current running between them, buzzing in the air, about to flash. I know a thunderstorm is due because the cat is skulking around the house, trying to maintain a low profile, getting her body as close to the floor as her legs will let her. She’s one of those animals who is afraid of thunder and hides in strange corners and overcrowded closets, trying to secrete herself where the danger cannot find her. My mother was nearly as cautious in thunderstorms as the cat. Having once been struck by lightning, she was apprehensive whenever a storm was near and as children, we were not allowed near doors or windows during a thunderstorm. No one could watch TV or talk on the phone. We were told to stay off the rug and forbidden to pet the dog. She saw everything in terms of its possible conductive qualities and warned us of hidden dangers. Which brings me to this little fact about June 10th. On this date in 1752, one crazy, inquisitive, Boston-born inventor decided to try to capture electricity in a jar during a wild thunder and lightning storm. My mother would never have allowed this. Benjamin Franklin’s mother obviously was never struck by lightning and so never warned Ben not to play outdoors in a storm. Of course, we all know that because of this, we eventually learned to create electricity and harness its power to illuminate our lives and charge our cell phones. The cat has no need of electricity and so is skulking off to the closet. |
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