Tag Archives: 2012

Came home. Read some. M and I were up ’til about midnight—then there were what sounded like firecrackers outside. Dog panted by side of my bed. About 12:34, we got dog onto the bed and I kinda hugged him, spoon-style, and M said I fell sleep before Sam left.

Old Man Show’s back on [the radio]—he said #1 on 26 December 1942 was “White Christmas.”

Had an idea while outside: how if I quit [my subscription to newspaper] RRStar (“I don’t give a sh!t. It’s not like I ever read it,” M said just now, at 11:10, when I asked her if she’d mind me canceling RRStar), I’ll be out of that conversation.

How people get excited to see people they know on TV (Mom even used the term “Tebowing” to mean going down on one knee—I was surprised she knew and used that term.)

M and I joked about a radio station without talk or songs: “Silence 104—We play nothing, all the time” and “We’ll be back with more silence after these words from our sponsors.”

We joked at Copy Center counter about “Fiction on Demand.”

20 years—”Enter Sandman.” I heard that on way to New Year’s party. It’s been out 20+ years, that song. I played it at my graduation party 20 years ago.

Mom: there’s less pressure now on young people to get married than there was in her time.

Me: I don’t like life, being alive, well enough to bring someone else into it? My life’s not so great that I need to bring others to life. Mom: We don’t give life, we force it on people. Me: Maybe people don’t think about it this way? Maybe they just selfishly want kids, or didn’t want kids but had them.

Mom: Having kids is wonderful, but fraught—worry, disappointment. One invests in other humans, but bad things happen. Being a parent can be wonderful, but it can also be the opposite of wonderful.

People growing up to do their people-things.

The wrong beast: M said she was talking sweetly to Sam as I held him, and I fell asleep first—the wrong beast fell asleep.

Mom: “I love learning things—new ways of looking at things.” She said this when she was telling example of perspective, how an artist told about how important things in Eastern art are larger in depiction—a mountain is top or bigger (not distant as in Western art).

M liked “speculative nonfiction” as a term. (It helps explain stuff her parents say.) M said all nonfiction is an argument. Nonfiction makes a claim for truth, so fiction either claims falseness, or makes no claim. Every nonfiction statement about the future is B.S. (as Wendell Berry said, the future doesn’t exist), whether it’s an expert’s prediction or an idiot’s. It’s just that some predictions are less likely than others.

I was saying last night that the possum we almost hit in Chana at railroad crossing a couple years ago—the possum I advised to “pick a direction”—was maybe a “hobo possum,” ridin’ the rails. M said, see, you make up things all the time—why not write fiction?

[From journal of Sun., 1 Jan. 2012, Journal 152, page 16-8]

And here’s the thing: Even Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would be as sweet. And too he said nothing’s good or bad but thinking makes it so—and these two thoughts together might be all you need to make a freedom creed of E__’s thoughts: E__’s world is E__’s creation.

Let go of thoughts. Be free, have open mind with which to see just what there is to see.

Have your thoughts—it’s fun to think, to know, and then let go of thoughts.

You’ve joined our lives, our world, already in progress. Other have said things before you got here—but it’s beautiful how free you are to say your own things!

[From journal of Thurs., 7 June 2012, starting to write the Baby Philosophy book, Journal 160, page 120]

… and it’s disheartening if you think getting attention matters, an attitude I occasionally fall prey to but then I remind myself that that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m writing to write—and I do like that I’m—I like that I’m explaining some things

(change that metaphor about processed food to the one about taxidermy? maybe? maybe not? It’s a metaphor, so it’s not truth anyway)

Pulling Sammy back into the house from the yard, he’d come back with me a few steps, then arc around back toward the north, barking—and—yeah—so, that bit I read last week about wealthy people at Hamptons throwing money around to, at least partly, it seemed, impress their friends. People in that situation think money matters. This must include P_____, who works for a hedge fund or something, so I’ve heard. It’s a little disappointing, actually, that he had these altruistic motives, then went into hedge funds. Ah, well. I shouldn’t judge. Sometimes, even to observe and write one’s observations is to judge. B___ wrote in her journal that she judges people—and she had even judged herself as not too pretty, not too skinny, stuff like that. I wrote next to that, that “what I’m about to say may be one of those obnoxious things adults say, but that eventually, you’ll see what a great person you are, and a few years from now, you may read this and have some sympathy for the sweetness expressed here,” something like that, a little sappy, perhaps, but … She also wrote abut worrying so much she can’t sleep sometimes.

[From journal of Tues., 28 August 2012, Journal 165, page 58]

Kitty just sorta stood on back paws to swat at dog, and left, and came back to attack dog’s tail. Dog paid little attention.

How loose were these words over time—shapes changed, etc., but we’ve got pretty specific spellings, etc., nowadays.

And the sports scores in Rockford Register Star—say, lately, the results of NCAA tourney—see, I don’t —they’re so much data to me, since I don’t follow the teams or, now without TV, I’m not even aware they’re happening—not that I attended much to these things—boys basketball—I’ve used a couple times lately the line that “I stopped paying attention to basketball when they took down the cage and disallowed body checking”—maybe not exactly that wording—”disallowed”?—but that brings up a couple things—one, how much more paper I fill than a medieval scribe would have filled—but then, they had to be careful—they were writing for publication (now that I’ve got this great hand-made book, I’d like to make it into some fancy illuminated book—maybe a “Sayings” edit).

Sh!t, I’m tired. I could close my eyes right now—not buying new things—#2, back above—how nimbly my brain can deal with sounds & letters & words—and can even take these lower-level symbolic/representational things somewhat for granted (though I have spend time sounding out the consonant sounds, etc.—I’ve been aware of the sound similarities between how our tongues make “T” & “D”—I learned that somewhat, partly, not fully though, on my own.)

Sarah Palin’s 40-something and more ambitious than I am. Romney’s aide’s Etch-a-Sketch comment—that he can erase all his extremist positions once the general election begins—has been widely mocked by the online mocking/cleverness classes.

[From journal of Sat., 24 March 2012, from Journal 158, page 18-9]