I have a habit of starting a new year–or at least a new period–in a new journal notebook, with renewed intentions to fill it up.  Since I rarely fill it up, I set about tearing out the few pages I’ve filled and passing the newish blank Journal booklet to a daughter or other friend to use.  (The notebooks are bound and offer new possibilities to me for thoughts, poems and dreams.

Instead of putting all the torn out pages in recycle right away, I may save them–temporarily, at least–in my occasional blog post.  The following will help me salvage a little of what’s left blank in my booklet:

HOWL

No no no, I roar

Don’t continue closing

that car door!

My pinkie was entrapped

in the Cry-sler’s rear closure.

I wanted to retain my composure..

Today that pinkie

is no longer rose.

Thankful am I  that I didn’t dissolve…

But it helped me write a poem

that’s excusingly prose.

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ANOTHER WORD FOR UNIQUENESS IS WEIRD

I’m going to run these singular truths about my long life in a paragraph so as not to take up too much space:

When I took radio speech in high school I filled a spot as a deejay on the radio Saturdays…One Christmas I rang the bell for the Salvation Army…I had chickenpox twice…My mother was a member of the Junior League and much later drove a jitney in Miami Beach…I never took geometry or calculus…I provided housing for a family who were on the Mule Train to Washington…At night I snuggle up to a C-pap machine…Once I could toss a pebble over a telephone pole with my toes…I once put a hamburger on the stove and went out to a movie!!…Making collages out of magazine images is a creative outlet for me…When my little sister came down with polio in Charlotte, I was smuggled out of the state quarantine to Maryland…I once fell in love with a gay man…I love the old movie Trip to Bountiful…I could never ice skate because my ankles buckled…I got hives from eating too many plums at the bazaar in Istanbul and drank vodka for relief…I let the oil run out of my Valiant…I cast an I Ching for one of my daughters only twice, and both times the spread came out with her name…For at least twenty years I was overactive as a volunteer producer on Public Access television…I participated in the Women’s Right to Choice march in Washington, D.C….In the 11th grade I attended 4 different high schools, in 3 different states (N.C., S.C. and Miami, Florida)…I think it was in Bulgaria that my former husband and I came across a friendly band of gypsies with a dancing bear…I was No. 1 on the Miami Jackson High School tennis team in 1953…During the summer of 1952 I wrote a weekly column for a North Miami weekly newspaper…In 1962 I was radio editor of the Miami Journal, and have a  signed thank you note from Arthur Godfrey for a positive mention..I think I have mentioned that we visited the site of Schlieman’s Troy while on one motor scooter…A very close relative ran a small grocery in colored town and I helped her count coins at night on the dining room table…I’m an agnostic who has decided she may have a guardian angel…I worked as a psychologist in a state prison for 12+ years…As a child, a gorilla at the Washington D.C. Zoo pulled off my mitten…I had a Kundalingi experience in a Quaker meeting once…I was a licensed clinical psychologist in both Georgia and Ohio…One summer I was managing editor of the university newspaper and had a weekly column…I once shook the hand of Martin Luther King Jr. while the auditorium was being searched for a reported bomb…I edited a newsletter for sex offenders after their release from prison and the sex offender treatment program…At a branch of the Miami Florida Public Library I was in charge of paper backs…I used to comb through rows in farm fields after a rain, collecting Indian arrowheads as an adolescent…I lacked only one course toward an M.A. in Anthropology when I conceived my firstborn, and decided archaeological digs were not ideal for child rearing…sorry if I’ve repeated an earlier blog, but after the election I’m worn down to the nub.  Oh, and sorry these weren’t in chronological order, just from differrent journal pages.  And sorry for the focus on me-me-me; I live alone.

I found this very soothing…

On this busy election day I just had to share a comment from California which was also reported on Diane Ravitch and Ned Hamson’s posts:

“As the Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of California, you can imagine my surprise to receive a notice that my Twitter account was suspended with no explanation or reason. That’s right. The day before a Midterm Election, I am unable to access a once critical platform to monitor and share election information”

Do they stand in regimental line, marching in lockstep to the drum beat of determinism?

Somedays must you use a flyswatter to keep those pesky critters together?

Do your thoughts bubble up from below and go prink as hey burst themselves?

Are you obsessively possessed by an idea leech that interferes with doing the dishes?

Do night time dreams ever slip over the great barrier reef to surface on your beach?

Playing in my sandbox with all the whey and curds…

Did you ever think the following: I thought I could, I wished I would, but all I wrote was no  damn good?

Survival of the Fittest is the Devil known as Evolution.

My God, how did I ever get so old?

On Wednesday:  Have found will?  Comb cat. vacuum. mop kitchen, juice camera, get cash…

Example: What kind of spelling is the fourth day of the week?  I see it comes from Woden Odin, the chief god in Germanic mythology…

Would you share back? Would it be called a Reply or a Comment?  IDK.  Cheers

I voted, at the elections office in Athens, Ohio on Thursday.  Trying to keep my mind off the election now, but I’m flabber-d-gasted by the brazen mailbox watchers in Mesa, Arizona.  This is America?  How can they justify that in their mind’s eye?  –Like the Nazi workers at the gas chambers?  SO, trying to turn my attention to other things, I’ve been leafing through an old journal.  I apologize if I repeat something earlier published–my  memory for recent and technical things is on vacation.  [Looooong vacation I fear.]

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My Unconscious Doesn’t  Know I’m Old –  In recent dream episodes I’m going for a degree at Columbia University, maybe to accomplish what I fell short of in school.  My dorm room has several beds full of jolly students.  A QUESTION: Why is it when we’ve gotten a better hold on life it slips away?  We learn and the learning goes to naught. (Unless there’s reincarnation).  Boy, could I use a dose of that!

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If we can understand a country by the laws it requires to curb dangerous undesirable behavior, perhaps we can understand life by its only law of survival of the fittest and the treasured family genes.   Without it would we return to the universal void?  Speaking of void, what will accompany the crescendo of climate change?  P.S. I know, I know, there’s a smattering of apparent altruism in some animals, but when push comes to shove I believe  self survival wins out.  In humans it’s much more complicated, since empathy and good deeds can be motivated by an attempt to impress others and/or our need to reassure ourselves that we’re kind after all.  Does the motivation behind it matter?  What do you think?  Can we say that suicide bombers are self-serving altruists?

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I just took Shira Dest’s post testing knowledge of correct grammar use.  I haven’t received my score yet, but a couple of items  seemed pretty difficult for me.  I guess I had better explain my vocabulary–I had just received my Ph.D. after years in college when I was hired at a mental health center in Appalachia.  There one of the counselors made fun of my vocabulary, saying it would be over my clients’ heads (grammar?)   When I dropped the distinguished and/or proper words from my vocabulary, my vocabulary was lost forever.  Of course now the problem is age.  But seriously, I first got my vocabulary from Nancy Drew mystery stories.  That was long after the black hired ironer of our clothes on the farm (I think her name was Emmy) was kind enough to tell me there was a separate word for “the day after today,” and “the day before today”).  I can remember my delight.  By the way, did anyone out there ever read Freddy [the pig] detective books?

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I see in my journal that on page 166 of Arik Kershenbaum’s 2021 Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy  from Penguin Press, that ants and bees are genetic clones, meaning that the individuals aren’t really–in evolutionary terms–separate individuals.  True hives, such as those of bees and ants, are much more complex than ours, and their communication is correspondingly more complex.

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You see, I have too much time on my hands and few places to go and jigsaw puzzles get old after awhile.  (The only one I gave up on, however, contained no color, and was built with only a two piece puzzle pattern.  I put that one in the garbage and taped  shut all sides of the box so some unsuspecting soul wouldn’t waste their time.  I get my puzzles from the jazzy thrift shop down the street for a dollar.  At you-know-where they cost in the teens.  I don’t think I posted my last poem: