There’s not enough time to live! It’s like 1:00 am and I just can’t not blog anymore.
While we’re talking about writing, let me share my last thing from Richard Lederer’s book – and you may have to think about this one for a moment:
‘A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. A writer is expected to know the difference.’ — Anonymous
I was talking with The Lady Janet over the weekend, and some complicated stuff came up, and I said something like, ‘Hey, well, it’s all just snowballs and spiderwebs,’ and she said that sounded blog-worthy, so here goes:
Snowballs accumulate the natural results of our actions. Spiderwebs are the causal ties that lead into our current decision processes. Snowballs roll downhill, and spiderwebs snag us into relationships with other events. Spiderwebs constrain snowballs, and snowballs create spiderwebs. Have you got all that?
I was thinking partly about this old Abraham Maslow quote that I love:
‘As I tried thinking about these matters it quickly became very clear that pure theory of theories must at once be involved. For instance, what we have here necessarily is a kind of holistic thinking, or organismic thinking, in which everything is related to everything else and in which what we have is not like a chain of links or like a chain of causes and effects, but rather resembles a spider web or geodesic dome in which every part is related to every other part and in which the best way to see everything is to consider the whole darn thing one big unit. Perhaps I’ll try this later, but now I think what I’ll do is try free association for one point after another.’
— Abraham Maslow, Eupsychian Management, 1965
Ol’ Abe, by the way, was that guy in your Intro to Psych class that talked about the ‘hierarchy of needs’ and ‘self-actualization,’ which are valid and important ideas, but he also talked and wrote about a whole bunch of other stuff. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Maslow’s ideas, I would urge you to strive to become so.
So anyway, and this will seem unrelated, but bear with me… I was listening to the radio this morning on the way in to work (note: not ‘into’) and they were playing ‘So Happy Together’, which I now know is by The Turtles. I have not been able to determine when it was written and recorded, but somewhere back around 1968, when I was 6 years old, there was a guy in a studio, and he said, ‘I don’t want to just sing ‘So happy together’ over and over again, so how about if the third time I sing, ‘How is the weather?’ and everybody else there said, ‘Man, that’s so lame,’ but that decision made my day today 36 years in the future, and I’ve walked around all day thinking, ‘So, how is the weather?’
So how’s that for snowballs and spiderwebs?
OK, time for some completely unrelated fun stuff!
I’ve known for some time now that you could ‘clean’ Revereware with a mixture of salt and lemon juice. But tonight, I accidentally discovered that you could write on tarnished copper with ketchup (note: not Catsup, because in my mind, that’s not even a word).
I’ve tried to write my initials CB on the pot-bottom, and I think I need a little practice, but I love the pompadour on the ‘C.’ You may also have noticed the cool artwork – in our home preschool last week, Lady Janet had the kids doing spin art in the salad spinner!
My cat has been with me for over 15 years already, and she’s on her last leg. She stopped cleaning herself about a year ago, and she appears to be almost completely deaf and more than a little senile. I think she is also having some kidney problems.
As this picture demonstrates, she loves to drink out of the shower. She’s also fond of the fishpond and the watering can that lives out on the front porch. We keep a tall cottage cheese container full of clean water next to her food bowl, so the best theory I’ve got is that she’s satisfying some basic huntress urge when she finds water in strange places.
She was a fierce huntress in her day – she killed a couple of hummingbirds, a pet mouse, and a huge rat, and I’ve seen her corner a opossum and bat a racoon across the snout.
(You’ll note that I consider opossum to begin with a consonant. I understand that this is known as ‘aphesis’ when it occurs at the beginning of a word, and it’s ‘more common in regional American dialects than in the more conservative Standard English, which tends to retain in pronunciation anything reflected in spelling.’)
We have these amazing bugs around here this time of year.
I don’t even know what they are, though I think we may have looked them up last year in a bug book.
Anyway, they look prehistoric, yet ant-like, and I love them in their own peculiar way, or my own peculiar way, or whatever. If you view the big version of the pic, those huge slabs of marble are actually sandstone coasters on the endtable next to my chair.
OK, here is the last thing, and then I’ll let you go.
I own one of Frank Zappa’s old tape decks. It’s not a big deal really, but it is kinda cool.
See, when FZ died awhile back, they put a bunch of his real junk stuff up for sale on a website called ‘Joe’s Garage Sale’ (a play, you see, on his, what, quintuple album masterpiece ‘Joe’s Garage’). I got this old beauty for $75 dollars American. I had a friend back in high school named Rick Glick (no, really) and he had one just like this. It doesn’t work anymore, but it was OK when I bought it. There actually was a Cassette B in the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen (UMRK), and I wish now I’d bought it at the time so I’d have the set. Heck, maybe it’s still there! (Believe it or not, FZ passed on December 4, 1993 – 11 years ago!) Wow.
When I first started blogging, I used to worry a lot about what to write. Now I just worry about when to stop.