18 thoughts on “Saturday, November 6, 2021”

  2. Duane has quite a few good repair videos. I like this one especially for his the machine was gunked up with the enemy of typewriters.
    Sometimes even lacquer thinner will not clean WD-40 out of or off of machines.

    Great use for the Trader Joe’s bag.

    Today started with some good advice. Here’s what I learned from an engineer when I first started out as a technician. “You can’t make me angry. No matter what you do you can’t make me angry. I won’t let you. No one can make anyone angry unless you let them.” Thing is no matter what this engineer never got one bit angry or upset.

  3. Hi, H@M. It makes me very happy that something I wrote would make anyone else happy. Reading your comment about 5-Minute Poem #121 put the first big smile on my face today. I’m one of those people who look deadly serious when they’re not smiling but I actually smile a lot and I’ve got the laugh lines to prove it. I did in fact write a short story (10-Minute Story #5: The Poetry Mender), part of which I cannibalised for the poem, which appeared in these august pages on August 26th (n.p.i.) to a resounding silence which broke my heart. Fortunately, I keep a drawer full of spare hearts for just such occasions. No poet can survive on just one heart. There was a real life man they called The Poetry Mender who lived in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. Here’s a link if you haven’t heard about him:

    https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/the-1940s-poetry-mender-of-greenwich-village/

    I have him make a cameo in one of the novels I’m writing. The character in my 10-Minute Story, however, is more like a plumber who comes to fix your pipes and leaves you with the same problem but several spondulicks lighter. Thanks again. Later in the day I might think, almost reflexively, while I’m writing something, “Oh, what’s the point? No one’s reading it.” Then I’ll remember that I can sometimes induce happiness! I feel like a king. (Though I object to the monarchy, of course…)

    Hi, Catalina: Yes, I love that cat, but I might have to report you to the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) for making it wear stilettoes!

    Hi, Natasha: Is that Roger Moore in his ‘Saint’ days near the Olympia case?

    1. I went back to Aug 26 and read it, Leo! “The worst had been confirmed. His poetry was prose.” Thanks, too, for the link to sketch of the life of Anton Romatka the Poetry Mender. I feel Anton might get along very well with Yves, the barber of Paris that William wrote about a few days back. If such people still exist, especially in NYC, it is only because of rent control. And like Catalina says, meeting them is like finding gold on the street. A little bit of serendipity, a little bit of having the eyes to see what others pass over.

    2. Hey Leo,

      Yes that’s Sir Roger Moore in his Saint days! He’s my male muse (young RM). The case is actually an Underwood Leader with an Underwood 3 disguised on top.

    3. Leo, don’t interpret a lack of pithy comments as oversight. If I commented on each of your poems, my reputation as a bootlicker would be confirmed. Your entries are thoroughly enjoyed daily, in silence or otherwise. Cheers!

  4. Hi, Brendan. I enjoyed your OTP today. “Yet we should not hesitate to pound away, because the reader we do not know and cannot anticipate, awaits our story without knowing it.” So, maybe I should give up stopping strangers in the street and forcing them to read my poems…aloud…

    1. Hey Michael,

      Thank you! I will look you up when I get back to NaNoWriMo today! I didn’t get to write at all yesterday. Hours of photo editing took its place and still more to do 🙄.

  6. Oh my. I feel so foolish. It wasn’t until I read Horses at Midnight’s OTP today that I even realized there is a real-time comments section. For all of those who have offered criticism and support or made queries of me in the comments I apologize! I’ll be sure to consult them now!

  7. Mike in WA,
    I don’t know if your hockey team is in the NHL but if so you may be able to watch on the DOFU app. for free. That’s where I watch the Amazing Steelers games when they are not televised in this region.

  8. I really enjoyed our post Kent. I may even print it out and leave it on the desk of the asshole that works next to me.

  10. I think our typed pages, our writing, good or not so much, is the gold. That is why I am here. Comments are ok. I’d quit em like i did the facebooks, in a split second.

  12. Horses@midnight, since you went to the trouble of cut and pasting Anne Sexton’s poem “In Celebratin of my Uterus,” I am inserting Jason Allen-Paissant’s poem “Walking with the Word ‘Tree’”

    To have money
    is to have time
    To have time
    is to have the forests
    and the trees

    I look at my baby
    mindsliding
    in the sticky
    film of the bud
    rubbing her thoughts
    between
    fingers

    and knowing the
    purple lips of the
    involucres in her mouth

    And me am I living
    my childhood all over
    again?

    For her a wood will not be
    burned for fire coal
    where the pig pen is
    where you hide from your Mama
    where you escape from scolding & rolling eyes
    where the duppies live
    where the madman lives
    where wild animals stray dogs
    and the unwanted go to die

    And me am I living
    my childhood all over
    again?

    a child’s way
    of pinching flowers
    a child’s way of touching buds
    but what I had never known
    this way of listening to the forest

    Did Daisy
    Miss Patsy’s eleventh child
    and my playmate
    even know her name
    was a flower?

    In Porus life was un-
    pastoral
    The woodland was there
    not for living in going for walks
    or thinking
    Trees were answers to our needs
    not objects of desire
    woodfire

    Catch butterflies
    along the way to grandmother
    on the other side of the yam field
    Just don’t do something foolish
    like lose the money or
    take too long
    so the pot don’t cook
    before daddy reach home

    There’s a way of paying attention to plants
    a way of listening to trees
    a way to hold a flower in your hand
    now that I’m here in a park in England

    and I stop when called by the pistils of a tree
    There is something in the pink
    that speaks so clearly to me saying
    glad you stopped I saw you
    from far away

    I don’t even know
    what they call it
    but I want to know
    what it tells me
    about itself

    its appearance
    with thousands of others
    on this tree
    that up to April
    seemed like death

    Our parents and grandparents planted yams
    potato slips reaped tomatoes carrots and so on
    Then market then money then food then clothes
    then shoes to go to school

    Now I’m practising a different way
    of being with the woods only
    I try not to stray too far from the path…

    The daisies glitter
    at my feet

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