Patty and Judy

Last night while walking Romeo in Blackstone Patty flagged us down and asked for a jump start for her blue Toyota sedan. No problem! We pulled up into the driveway and attached the cables and had success. Judy ran inside and brought out bag of frozen homemade Anise Pizzelle she had made at Easter. I am enjoying them now with my coffee. 

It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine--

Raymond Carver

It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine--the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That’s the kind of writing that most interests me.

 

Raymond Carver 

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder in Hollywood 

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else’s.

 Billy Wilder

Individually, the audience is stupid. Collectively, the audience is a genius.

― Billy Wilder 

If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you. Billy Wilder

Teaching Beginners

Article

"While it might be tempting to use children’s songs or nursery rhymes because they’re simple, this can feel infantilizing for adult learners. Choose materials that are appropriate for their age and interests, even if they are beginners."

I was sitting in my backyard the other day when my neighbor, the noted biologist, dropped by. I told him how much I loved listening to the birds singing at the start of spring. Technically, he said, they're not singing. They're vocalizing. Then he walked off into the world of biology, leaving me alone in the world of poetry.

 George Bilgere (on why I chose this poem)

You start with too much, not with nothing, and it can go in every kind of direction. Every possible avenue is open. They you have to dramatize it — it is as simple as that — by omitting, by simplifying, by finding a clean theme that leads someplace.

Billy Wilder

I Get to Do This (Instead of I Have to Do This), You Can Do Some of Your Best Work on Your Worst Days, No Shoulds: grace and compassion instead of judgment.

 source

Under instrument flight rules pilots are taught to ignore all their physical sensations and perceptions of speed, attitude, up and down and only pay attention to the flight instruments. The instrument panel is reality. Simply because laws go unenforced doesn’t mean the law doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean crimes aren’t being committed. A major point of a DOJ-in-Exile would be to serve as political society’s instrument panel in a period of public deception. Even when you can’t change the reality it is still critical to know what the reality is. It’s the only path to changing it.

Josh Marshall

All appears to change when we change

― Henri-Frédéric Amiel 

It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which directly expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.

 ― Henri-Frédéric Amiel

“Women wish to be loved not because they are pretty, or good, or well bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves.”
― Henri Frédéric Amiel 

 

“The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.”
― Henri Frédéric Amiel  

You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.

― Henri-Frédéric Amiel 

The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings.

― Henri Frédéric Amiel, Amiel's Journal 

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.

 ― Jerry Seinfeld 

The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet: A Memoir (American Lives) 2018

by Kim Adrian (Author)

Part of: American Lives (46 books)

---

Clear-sighted, darkly comic, and tender, The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet is about a daughter’s struggle to face the Medusa of generational trauma without turning to stone. Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs of the 1970s and 1980s in a family warped by mental illness, addiction, and violence, Kim Adrian spent her childhood ducking for cover from an alcoholic father prone to terrifying acts of rage and trudging through a fog of confusion with her mother, a suicidal incest survivor hooked on prescription drugs. Family memories were buried—even as they were formed—and truth was obscured by lies and fantasies.

In The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet Adrian tries to make peace with this troubled past by cataloguing memories, anecdotes, and bits of family lore in the form of a glossary. But within this strategic reckoning of the past, the unruly present carves an unpredictable path as Adrian’s aging mother plunges into ever-deeper realms of drug-fueled paranoia. Ultimately, the glossary’s imposed order serves less to organize emotional chaos than to expose difficult but necessary truths, such as the fact that some problems simply can’t be solved, and that loving someone doesn’t necessarily mean saving them.

Why do people give each other flowers? To celebrate various important occasions, they’re killing living creatures? Why restrict it to plants? 'Sweetheart, let’s make up. Have this deceased squirrel. Jerry Seinfeld

 “You know you really need some help. A regular psychiatrist couldn't even help you. You need to go to like Vienna or something. You know what I mean? You need to get involved at the University level. Like where Freud studied and have all those people looking at you and checking up on you. That's the kind of help you need. Not the once a week for eighty bucks. No. You need a team. A team of psychiatrists working round the clock thinking about you, having conferences, observing you, like the way they did with the Elephant Man. That's what I'm talking about because that's the only way you're going to get better.”
― Jerry Seinfeld 

“You know the message you're sending out to the world with these sweatpants? You're telling the world, 'I give up. I can't compete in normal society. I'm miserable, so I might as well be comfortable.”
― Jerry Seinfeld 

 

“Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God's final word on where your lips end.”
― Jerry Seinfeld  

 

“The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. Pretty impressive. Also pretty lucky for them. Ever seen that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with? Not much of a weapon there. Corkscrews. Bottle openers. ‘Come on, buddy, let’s go. You get past me, the guy in the back of me, he’s got a spoon. Back off, I’ve got the toe clippers right here.”
― Jerry Seinfeld

  

“A two-year old is kind of like having a blender, but you don't have a top for it.”
― Jerry Seinfeld 

 

“Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you've got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.”
― Jerry Seinfeld

  

“It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.”
― Jerry Seinfeld 

Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun. You don't stare at it. It's too risky. Ya get a sense of it and then you look away. Jerry Seinfeld

There’s no writer’s block. There’s lazy. There’s scared. But there’s no writer’s block. Just sit down and realize you’re mediocre and you’re going to have to put a lot of effort into this to make it good. That’s what writing is.

JERRY SEINFELD

frustration is a part of the process

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that frustration is a part of the process. I’ve rarely written anything good that did not come out of moments of extreme frustration. It’s the frustration that propels you forward. If it doesn’t — if you back away from it — the work will be less than it could have been. When I teach writing, I find that students are relieved to hear this...that frustration is an indication of a literary problem to be solved, not a sign that they aren’t good enough writers.

DIANNE WARREN

Rebecca Solnit: I’ve written stuff amidst hideous suffering, and it was a way not to be so stuck

Carpenters don’t say, I’m just not feeling it today, or I don’t give a damn about this staircase and whether people fall through it; how you feel is something that you cannot take too seriously on your way to doing something, and doing something is a means of not being stuck in how you feel. That is, there’s a kind of introspection that’s wallowing and being stuck, and there’s a kind that gets beyond that into something more interesting and then maybe takes you out into the world or into the place where deepest interior and cosmological phenomena are at last talking to each other. I’ve written stuff amidst hideous suffering, and it was a way not to be so stuck in the hideous suffering, though it was hard, but also, hard is not impossible, and I didn’t sign up with the expectation that it would be easy.

REBECCA SOLNIT

It is critical to remember these things. I’ve often used the metaphor of a pilot’s flight instruments. Under flight rules, you’re taught only to follow the instruments. Your body and senses may be telling you you’re right-side up but actually you’re upside down. They may be telling you you’re going up but you’re actually going down. Your instruments are reality; your body and sensations are lying to you.

 Josh Marshall

Kurt Vonnegut

This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

KURT VONNEGUT

they want something that addresses what can’t be said

Poetry goes back to the invention of language itself. I think one of the big differences between poetry and prose is that prose is about something, it’s got a subject… poetry is about what can’t be said. Why do people turn to poetry when all of a sudden the Twin Towers get hit, or when their marriage breaks up, or when the person they love most in the world drops dead in the same room? Because they can’t say it. They can’t say it at all, and they want something that addresses what can’t be said.

W.S. MERWIN

George Bilgere on why I chose this poem

I remember, after enduring a long, bleak period of terrible grieving, waking up one spring morning to the sound of a cardinal singing outside my window and thinking, Life, I'm back. And you're more beautiful than ever. George Bilgere on why I chose this poem The Thing Is by Ellen Bass

this is how you do it.

 https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/harvard-letter

Jhumpa Lahiri

My work accrues sentence by sentence. After an initial phase of sitting patiently, not so patiently, struggling to locate them, to pin them down, they begin arriving, fully formed in my brain. I tend to hear them as I am drifting off to sleep. They are spoken to me, I’m not sure by whom. By myself, I know, though the source feels independent, recondite, especially at the start. The light will be turned on, a sentence or two will be hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper, carried upstairs to the manuscript in the morning. I hear sentences as I’m staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing.

JHUMPA LAHIRI

King Cong of Woopeckers Wreaks Havoc in Rockport MA

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/14/metro/knock-knock-woodpecker-is-menacing-rockport-neighborhood/

And what would humans be without love? RARE, said Death.

― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery 

out of that love, remake a world.

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.

You must write every single day of your life.

You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.

I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.

May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise.

Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

RAY BRADBURY

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

 ― Terry Pratchett

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

 ― Terry Pratchett, Diggers 

As a child wh I had trouble finding honest stories. I felt that adults were always keeping secrets from me, even in the books I was reading. Judy Blume

Telling kids the truth isn't always entirely possible, but talking to them is. Judy Blume

It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. Judy Blume

The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers. Judy Blume

I know it's working when I'm writing a book if I'm laughing or crying. Judy Blume

Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear. Judy Blume

We're supposed to be uncomfortable when we read something. That's how we learn. Judy Blume

A good writer is always a people watcher. Judy Blume

You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.

The best books come from someplace deep inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to. Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

JUDY BLUME

Cruciferous Trough & Mini Cannoli

 (my two stage names)

Humbled

My first line of defense for mental health is swimming and walking which also connects me to community. This is why it scares scares me to have a physical injury. At the pool yesterday I shared a lane with a woman I have seen many times before. I told her about my sore shoulder. She said she only swims breast stroke because she has vertigo. I was immediately humbled.

What is the goal of parenting? It's to help a child grow up to be a decent human being, a mensch, a person with compassion, commitment, and caring.

 ― Haim G. Ginott, Between Parent and Child: Revised and Updated

Teachers have a Spare Key

 “While parents possess the original key to their offspring's experience, teachers have a spare key. They, too, can open or close the minds and hearts of children.”
― Haim Ginott

often in the laboratory of loss and uncertainty that we calibrate and supercharge our capacity for kindness

Of course, even the best-intentioned of us are not capable of perpetual kindness, not capable of being our most elevated selves all day with everybody. If you have not watched yourself, helpless and horrified, transform into an ill-tempered child with a loved one or the unsuspecting man blocking the produce aisle with his basket of bok choy, you have not lived. Discontinuous and self-contradictory even under the safest and sanest of circumstances, human beings are not wired for constancy of feeling, of conduct, of selfhood. When the world goes unsafe, when life charges at us with its stresses and its sorrows, our devotion to kindness can short-circuit with alarming ease. And yet, paradoxically, it is often in the laboratory of loss and uncertainty that we calibrate and supercharge our capacity for kindness. And it is always, as Kerouac intuited, a practice.

Naomi Shihab Nye

I was no longer needing to be special, because I was no longer so caught in my puny separateness that had to keep proving I was something. I was part of the universe, like a tree is, or like grass is, or like water is. Like storms, like roses. I was just part of it all.

Ram Dass

If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate; it is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyful. I can be a tool of torture, or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations it is my response that decides where a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a person humanized, or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Haim G. Ginott

“Ce n’est pas possible d’éplucher des pommes de terre et de gratter des carottes en combinaison.”

“It’s not possible to peel potatoes and grate carrots at the same time.”

― Georges Simenon, Tout Simenon, Tome 1: La fenêtre des Rouet / La fuite de Monsieur Monde / Trois Chambres à Manhattan / Au bout du rouleau / La pipe de Maigret/Maigret se fâche / Maigret à New-York / Lettre à mon juge / Le destin des Malou

lost all shadows

“And Boucard desisted, probably because like everyone else he was deeply impressed by this man who had laid all ghosts, who had lost all shadows, and who stared you in the eyes with cold serenity.”

― Georges Simenon, Monsieur Monde Vanishes

“It was the serene cheerfulness of a man who has no nightmares, who feels at peace with himself and everyone else. They [Americans] were almost all of them like that. And it definitely got Maigret’s back up. It made him think of clothing that was too neat, too clean, too well-pressed.” ― Georges Simenon, Maigret at the Coroner's

“Why, despite the blinding brightness, did everything look gray? It was as if the painfully sharp lights were helpless to dispel all the darkness the people had brought in from the night outside.”

― Georges Simenon, Three Bedrooms in Manhattan 

“He distrusted ideas, as they were always too rigid to reflect reality, which, as he knew from experience, was very fluid.” ― Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Lazy Burglar

the pink chimney pots outlined against a pale blue sky where a tiny white cloud was floating.

Then, just as they were crossing the Grands Boulevards, instead of automatically checking the time on the electric clock as he usually did, he raised his eyes and noticed the pink chimney pots outlined against a pale blue sky where a tiny white cloud was floating.

It reminded him of the sea. The harmony of blue and pink suddenly brought a breath of Mediterranean air to his mind, and he envied people who, at that time of year, lived in the South and wore white flannels.”
― Georges Simenon, Monsieur Monde Vanishes

It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened. Georges Simenon

 “INTERVIEWER

What do you mean by “too literary”? What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?

SIMENON

Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.”
― Georges Simenon

I adore life but I dont fear death. I just prefer to die as late as possible. Georges Simenon

It just happened. As though a moment comes when it's both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made. Georges Simenon

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication. Georges Simenon

The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world. Georges Simenon

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

 Georges Simenon

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

 Georges Simenon 

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother. Georges Simenon

If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.

 Georges Simenon

write from where it hurts —Anne Bernays

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few. Shunryu Suzuki

https://compassionprisonproject.org/the-documentaries/

America has become Putin's Perverted Peep Show

Teaching students how to swim is like teaching them to FLY!!! I am not sure what teaching folks how to speak ENGLISH is a metaphor for. How to swim?

History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes

  ― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

another whopping irony

 “...In all this, financialization has done what people back in the 1950s and '60s and '70s worried and warned that the Communists would do if they took over: centralize control of the economy, turn Americans into interchangeable cogs serving an inhumane system, and allow only a well-connected elite to live well. Extreme Capitalism resembles Communism: yet another whopping irony.”

― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Let me quote once more from Tolkien’s lecture, which he delivered a few months before the fantasy-besotted Nazis started World War II. “Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came.” ― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Before the Internet, crackpots were mostly isolated and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the Web, just like actual news. Now all the fantasies look real.” ― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else’s.” ― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities. But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs.”

― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Keeping an open mind is a virtue,” Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but “not so open that your brains fall out…. I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” That was twenty years ago.” ― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.” ― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” ― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.” ― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

In Defense of Temporary Obsessions by Anitka Shah

We scorn the dilettante and dismiss the amateur, but these are their origins: dilettante from the Italian "dilettare" which means to take delight and amateur from the Latin "amator" which means lover.

read 

In a world that wants mastery or monetisation as the outcome of every fleeting interest, temporary obsessions are little rebellions. Their purpose is to restore order in the playground that is your life.

. . . all are imprints of our curiosity, evidence that we once let ourselves fall in love deeply with something new and wildly outside of our comfort zone.

Temporary obsessions are always timely. They arrive after a heartbreak, during a career crisis, in grief. 

And lastly, these obsessions aren’t distractions from something more “real” out there, they are what’s real. So the next time you find yourself inexplicably drawn to analyzing one-shot techniques in films at 2 AM or spending an entire weekend learning to make the perfect dumpling, don't resist. Return to the playground that is your life.

How to Make Moroccan Cous Cous by Hand

video

Released in 1945, ‘Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well?’

 

Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well?

Wynonie Harris, Lucky Millinder

Featuring

Wynonie Harris & Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra

Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well? Lyrics

It was an early Sunday morning
And the church was crowded full
Old Elder Brown was raving
He was angry as a bull
The congregation sensed it
And they knew just what he'd meant
When he said, 'my text today is
You sinners must repent!'

Who threw the whiskey in the well?
(In the well)
Who threw the whiskey in the well?
(In the well)
'Cause Deacon Jones knelt down to pray
All he said was, 'Hey, hey,'
So, who threw the whiskey in the well?
(In the well)

(Now, who threw the whiskey in the well?)
In the well
(Who threw the whiskey in the well?)
In the well
I'm feeling mighty fine
I'm high as a Georgia pine
(So, who threw the whiskey in the well?)
In the well

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[Instrumental]

Who threw the whiskey in the well?
(In the well)
Who threw the whiskey in the well?
(In the well)
Keep your dippers out of that well
Or we'll all wind up in-
(Well!)
(Who threw the whiskey in the well?)
That's what I'd like to know

Well, sisters and brothers
I'm taking my leave of thee
Here, I've been trying to show you the light
And you all live outside of me
Since Brother Jones brought his bones
And Sister Ash has all the cash
Let's get together
Drink water, get tall
Come on, children
Let's have a ball

 

Released in 1945, ‘Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well?’ became Lucky Millinder’s most successful song. Detailing the scandal caused by someone tainting drinking water with whiskey, the song reached #1 on the R&B chart.

Son of a Bird by Nin Andrews

 read it!

"One of the strangest, loveliest, most powerful memoirs I have read."

George Bilgere 

Swimmer's Shoulder

Article https://www.usms.org/fitness-and-training/articles-and-videos/articles/3-modifications-you-need-to-make-to-your-freestyle-if-you-have-swimmers-shoulder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6B59jcPXls

more simple stretching shoulder tips

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdr4xZJG8Eg 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAisF0uzwAY 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi0xBgv4dbw

Spring Fever

Yesterday I walked out the front door to walk my dog. I realized that I had forgotten my keys after the door locked behind me. Oh well I didn't worry because my husband was home grading papers. When I returned I knocked on the window and he let me back in. 

My neighbor left for work and his big dog which is part Great Dane jumped through the first floor window screen and began wandering the neighborhood. A man around the corner who works for the city's Highway Dept was walking his dog and he was worried about the the dog being loose in the city. A boy who lived downstairs from him decided to try to catch the dog. 

We arrived home from the grocery store and saw the boy chasing the dog. Hey that's Oreo, and he lives over there, I said, pointing to an apartment house. We walked over, calling the dog by name. I noticed the broken screen on the ground and the dog's apartment window was wide open. We knocked on the door a few times. Nobody was home. Their car is gone, I said.

The boy knelt down to approach the dog who was very scared. My husband ran inside to get a rope to serve as a leash. The boy reached up and captured the dog by his harness. My husband attached the rope leash. I ran inside and wrote a note that I attached to the apartment door explaining that Oreo was loose and the boy around the corner has him, and I left the boy's name and address. It all worked out.

This morning my husband couldn't find his keys. We searched everywhere and tried to retrace our footsteps. I remembered that we were involved with the dog when we came home from grocery shopping and it was raining. You made the leash, I said, and then later we unlocked the trunk to unload groceries. We imagined that the keys might be in the trunk of the car. We called triple A and the guy came. He said, "I love breaking into cars!" And he did, and luckily the keys were in the trunk.

Green Pea Soup and Basmati Brown Rice

Last night after swimming I was hungry. I made split pea soup and brown basmati rice in the bowl within bowl method using my pressure cooker.

I rinsed the split peas, added water and a chicken bullion cube, chopped carrots, smashed garlic, chopped onion, Adobo, olive oil, a splash of Chianti and the rack in the instant pot. Then I placed the rinsed rice in a metal bowl on the rack (surrounded by the soup ingredients) with appropriate amount of water and set the time for 30 minutes.

I had hot soup and rice!  Bowl within a bowl!

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart you feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

 KURT VONNEGUT

George Bilgere

 “One day last summer my five-year-old son walked in from the backyard and dropped a pill bug on the dining room table where I was eating my scrambled eggs. ‘Pill bugs are the dinosaurs of the backyard,’ he told me gravely. And I thanked him, because now I had an idea for a new poem. As anyone who has kids knows, they are born poets. The trick is to help them hold onto it as the distractions of adulthood loom.”

George Bilgere 

Be Drunk

by

Charles Baudelaire

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

From Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology, translated and edited by Louis Simpson, published by Story Line Press, Inc. Copyright © 1997 by Louis Simpson. Reprinted by permission of the author and Story Line Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

We are all Teachers

I taught swimming again last night and it was so awesome having two new students who were open and ready to learn. I reassured the new people we do not need to use the deep end until they are ready. No point in increasing their anxiety! I said first let's do some bobs. One woman with a great smile and good energy maybe age 58 was holding her nose and I said OK first off let me show you how to breathe because it's the root of everything. Breathe in your mouth and then underwater blow out air like you are blowing your nose. She was off and running, happy to have the tips. I am a quick learner, she said. She made the prayer sign thanking me when she left. She grew up in Morocco and knows 5 languages!

My other new student, age 14, already swims but needed some pointers. She was also quick when I showed her how to not lift her head up in the water while doing the crawl and instead keep her head down and roll her head slightly to breathe by keeping her ear on her arm. I said you have to see yourself as a human shish kabob, all lined up straight on the skewer and you'll stay on the surface. She liked that and was able to make the adjustment. Doesn't that feel better? I asked. Yes! she said, smiling.

 

I always ask my students what they want to work on and they usually have an answer. They get to choose! Then this same new 14 year old with two beautiful braids and an Italian name did a magnificent dolphin kick and I said Oh Wow, please show my other devoted swimmer (age 13). So the new girl showed her and they were both happy. The mother of the 13-year-old was overjoyed. "I am so proud of her!" 

 

I said to the new girl, it's fun to be the teacher isn't it? This is a new exciting thing I have discovered - we are all teachers to each other.

When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You)

When you're smilin' keep on smilin'
The whole world smiles with you
And when you're laughin' oh when youre laughin'
The sun comes shinin? through

But when you? re cryin' you bring on the rain
So stop your sighin 'be happy again
keep on smilin Cause when you're smilin'
The whole world smiles with you

Oh when you're smilin' keep on smilin'
The whole world smiles with you
Ah when you're laughin' keep on laughin'
The sun comes shinin' through

Now when you're cryin' you bring on the rain
So stop that sighin' be happy again
keep on smilin Cause when you're smilin'
And the whole world smiles with you

The great big world will smile with

The whole wide world will smile with you

Songwriters: Daniel Gaston Ash / Glenn Derek Campling

 

When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You) lyrics © Universal/momentum Music 3 Ltd., Emi Mills Music Inc

for want of an understanding ear

 “The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

― Stephen King

They gave each other a smile with a future in it.

  ― Ring Lardner

How can you write if you can't cry?

― Ring Lardner 

If you've ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you'll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be.

 Stephen King wrote in his novel 11/22/63

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

  ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft 

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
― Stephen King

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

  ― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

You Can't Play the Blues in an Air Conditioned Room

source

All my life I had to struggle, I paid some heavy dues
Squeekin' out a livin', playin' easy blues
Then one day my music made me a millionaire
I bought a big old mansion with central heated air
Now I got more money than I know how to use
Got everything a man could want, but I ain't got no blues
Success for me could only lead to my immediate doom
'cause I can't play the blues in an airconditioned room

Now I was doin' better with a smaller piece of pie
But all my fame and fortune I can't identify
I lost the inspiration that came natural in the start
I had to hire a mean old woman, just to break my heart
Now my life's too easy, I'd be getting soft
I used to play the blues all day, but now I just play golf
Now all my pain is rearranged, my life is changes too
'cause I can't play the blues in an airconditioned room


You know what I'm saying
It's kinda hard to play the blues
if you don't have any problems


You might think I'm crazy, you might think I'm strange
The first thing in the morning I'm gonna make a change
I throw away my money, I move back to that shag
Do whatever I gotta do to get that old feelin' back
I know I'd be feelin' better with nothing left to lose
When times are bad, the less I had, the better I played the blues
I buy myself some turkey and wine, and howl it at the moon
'cause I can't play the blues in an airconditioned room


If I should die tomorrow you can write it on my tomb
'He couldn't play the blues in an airconditioned room'

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

― Stephen King

 “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”

― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

  ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Fiction is the truth inside the lie. Stephen King

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once. Stephen King

Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches. Check out the bestseller list for April 1937 or August 1978 if you don’t believe me.

REBECCA SOLNIT

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

 ― Kin Hubbard

They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

 ― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

The only time some fellows are ever seen with their wives is after they’ve been indicted.

 ― Kin Hubbard

A good listener is usually thinking of something else.

 ― Kin Hubbard 

No one ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.

Kin Hubbard 

To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

 Kurt Vonnegut

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon. Kurt Vonnegut

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum. Kurt Vonnegut

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country 

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan 

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.” Kurt Vonnegut

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC” Kurt Vonnegut

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

 ― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories.

 “If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

 Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand. Kurt Vonnegut

Secret Read

As a child I had to hide if I wanted to read because if I was caught reading it was attention away from my mother. I'd be told told to do some menial task. My step-father  said he read at 5:AM while my mother was asleep. I hid in my bedroom to read. My mother had a fear that I was leaving her, by reading. Yes I was. I thank God daily for being able to read and escape my mother.

Going out to buy an Envelope

“(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”

― Kurt Vonnegut

Anna Karenina

 poem by George Bilgere

Love and Loss

Grief is not just an emotion—it’s an unraveling, a space where something once lived but is now gone. It carves through you, leaving a hollow ache where love once resided.

In the beginning, it feels unbearable, like a wound that will never close. But over time, the raw edges begin to mend. The pain softens, but the imprint remains—a quiet reminder of what once was. The truth is, you never truly "move on." You move with it. The love you had does not disappear; it transforms. It lingers in the echoes of laughter, in the warmth of old memories, in the silent moments where you still reach for what is no longer there. And that’s okay.

Grief is not a burden to be hidden. It is not a weakness to be ashamed of. It is the deepest proof that love existed, that something beautiful once touched your life. So let yourself feel it. Let yourself mourn. Let yourself remember.

There is no timeline, no “right” way to grieve. Some days will be heavy, and some will feel lighter. Some moments will bring unexpected waves of sadness, while others will fill you with gratitude for the love you were lucky enough to experience.

Honor your grief, for it is sacred. It is a testament to the depth of your heart. And in time, through the pain, you will find healing—not because you have forgotten, but because you have learned how to carry both love and loss together.

Anonymous (author unknown)

Don't harden your heart.

advice from my friend Greg down the street.

Robert Frost called his work a lover’s quarrel with the world.

 “I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind numbing, on a level with telling fond tales of one's rapist.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

Every third night a commitee holds a meeting in my head. James Lee Burke, Rain Gods

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin. James Lee Burke, The Glass Rainbow

“Age is a peculiar kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don't recognize.”
― James Lee Burke, Creole Belle

“I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream in the mind of God. Perhaps it is only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent?”
― James Lee Burke, The Glass Rainbow

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place. James Lee Burke

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money. James Lee Burke

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity. James Lee Burke

When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily. James Lee Burke

It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced - in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.

 ― James Lee Burke, The Glass Rainbow

The fire of one’s art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.

 James Lee Burke

Sourdough (Rye) Story

Last night I told my husband, Keep an eye on the rye dough as I left to go teach. I imagined coming home the kitchen overflowing with raw dough spilling like lava out of the back door. At 10:30 PM The dough had reached the lid of the bucket. My husband was asleep. I punched down the dough and put it in the fridge to slow it. This morning in the fridge she has reached the top again, threatening to take over. There are air bubbles! She is ALIVE!! I just punched her down again. Circus Sideshow! Quicksand! Just like in the movies, swallowing everyone in it's path. My plans have changed. Today will be baking day.

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. Pedophilia is a pleasure a person should have guilt about. Not chocolate. Ira Glass

Red Lentils and Basmati Brown Rice (bowl within bowl method)

I rinsed the red lentils and placed them in the instant pot with water and bullion cube and 2 large chopped onions, 2 TBSP olive oil, and freshly smashed & peeled garlic cloves, a dash of cumin, & ginger. 

Then I rinsed the basmati rice and placed it in a bowl with water on the tray inside the pressure cooker---this way cooking both foods at once in 30 minutes.

It was delicious with sriracha and salt and pepper to taste.

The only problem was the colors of the lentils and rice were too similar. But that can be remedied with some carrots or tomatoes or lettuce on the side if that bothers you.

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

― Ira Glass  

“...these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.”
― Ira Glass, The New Kings of Nonfiction

 

“The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.”
― Ira Glass 

 

“You will be stupid. You will worry your parents. You will question your own choices, your relationships, your jobs, your friends, where you live, what you studied in college, that you were in college at all. If that happens, you're doing it right.”
― Ira Glass   

 

“Nobody tells people who are beginners. I really wish someone had told this to me. Is that [if you are watching this video, you are somebody who wants to make videos right?] all of us who do creative work, we get into it. We get into it because we have good taste. You know what I mean? Like you want to make TV, because you love TV. There is stuff you just like, love. Ok so you got really good taste. You get into this thing … that I don’t even know how to describe it, but there is a gap. For the first couple of years you are making stuff, what you are making isn’t so good... ok, its not that great. It's really not that great. Its trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but not quite that good. But your taste, the thing get you into the game, your taste is still killer. Your taste is good enough that you can tell what you are making is a kind of disappointment to you, you know what I mean? You can tell it is still sort of crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. The thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know, who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it felt short. [some of us can admit that to ourselves, some of us less able to admit that to ourselves] we knew like, it didn’t have that special thing that we wanted it to have. [...] Everybody goes through that. For you to go through it, if you are going through right now, just getting out of that phase, if you are just starting out and entering into that phase, you gotta know it is totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re gonna finish one story. You know what I mean? Whatever its gonna be. You create the deadline. It is best if have somebody who is waiting for work from you, expecting work from you. Even if not somebody who pays you, but that you are in a situation where you have to turn out the work. Because it is only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap and the work you are making will be as good as your ambitions.”
― Ira Glass

When you LOVE cabbage

 https://www.recipetineats.com/everyday-cabbage-salad/ with international variations.

Cruciferous vegetables are vegetables of the family Brassicaceae (also called Cruciferae) with many genera, species, and cultivars being raised for food production such as cauliflower, cabbage, kale, garden cress, bok choy, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, mustard plant and similar green leaf vegetables. The family takes its alternative name (Cruciferae, Neo-Latin for "cross-bearing") from the shape of their flowers, whose four petals resemble a cross. 

Box Elder trees, also known as Acer negundo, a type of Maple tree native to the United States.

Box Elder is a type of Maple tree native to us in the United States. This type of tree is primary wind-pollinated which means it's allergenic pollen can be spread for hundreds of miles.

Box Elder pollen is most prevalent during March to May.

Box Elder trees, also known as Acer negundo, are a type of maple tree found primarily in the Midwest and Eastern parts of the United States. During the spring and early summer months, Box Elder trees produce large amounts of pollen, which can cause allergic reactions in many people.

The peak allergy season for Box Elder pollen typically occurs in late April and early May, although the exact timing can vary depending on the location and weather conditions. Box Elder pollen is a common cause of seasonal allergies, with symptoms that can include sneezing, runny nose, itchy eyes, and congestion.

For individuals with asthma or other respiratory conditions, exposure to Box Elder pollen can be particularly problematic, as it can exacerbate existing symptoms and make it difficult to breathe. As such, it's important for those who are sensitive to pollen to take steps to minimize exposure during peak allergy season.

April is the Cruelest Month... T.S. Eliot

 How these famous words enlighten us about seasonal depression in the spring. Article

American Lives Series Tobias Wolff

 American Lives 

The singular American life is a source of endless diversity, and the methods of telling the life are as important as the details themselves. The American Lives series, called “splendid” by Newsweek, features works of creative or literary memoir that, whether evoking moments of death or disease, in family or marriage, history, politics, religion, or culture, provide glimpses into singular American lives. Taken together, these stories coalesce into a richly textured and colorful portrait of our contemporary culture.

Submissions to the series are accepted annually September 1 – June 1.

All manuscripts must be submitted electronically via Submittable.

Series Editor

Tobias Wolff

Acquiring Editor

Courtney Ochsner

The first thing to do if you’re interested in saving your country is to adopt a posture of cool defiance toward those who would destroy it or pervert it into a mockery of itself.

Josh Marshall

The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

ANNE LAMOTT