Meet the Snippets

When a phrase or thought or sentence captured my imagination throughout these past eight years of writing in earnest, I took to the habit of writing it down in the NOTES section of my IPHONE.  Since I’m spring cleaning both hearth and mind, I decided it’s time to clear them out of my phone. There are now too many for me to take the time or patience to sift through whilst searching for yet another password or my sons’ social security numbers or a random temporary phone number I needed for a second but since forgotten why it’s even there.

They were born as orphan snippets meant to find a forever home with a grownup book or essay not as yet written.  Some spawned from something I heard or saw, some were sired by a notion for a future project and some just randomly appeared. 

I’ve taken care to weed out those I am reasonably sure I got from some Instagram but who knows with this memory of mine these days. The fear of unconscious plagiarism stopped me from reading books altogether eight years ago when I began to write. I don’t seem to be able to anymore after a life time of devouring books as evidenced by the thousand or so that lined my library shelves.  Since I was eight years old, I’ve never watched a TV show without a book in hand. It was a glorious way to skip commercials before the advent of the DVR.  It used to take me but a day or two to read the books of my favorite authors. Now when I try to read a book, my mind immediately wanders. I can’t focus nor pay attention to the story. It’s a very odd sensation and so I no longer attempt it at all.  But I do still buy them.  I can still read newspaper and magazine article, though, to research topics I’m interested in getting to the bottom of.

For now, the snippets will live here. Whether they reside here forever or just until I find them a permanent ‘home’ remains to be seen.  Meet the snippets or my digital drawer filled with written on cocktail napkins.

• The re-enactment of past battles will never change the outcome of that past war.
• Sometimes a secret can save you.
• If you seek to prevent death, you will only succeed in preventing life.
• When one is miserable never conspire with those even more miserable.
• When there are no real facts to assuage your fear the only thing left is perspective.
• The amount of sense something makes to you is in direct proportion to the amount of sense you have
•  May the light of the past be your lamppost of the future.

• The young are biologically disposed to hopefulness

• An artist needs legions of fans but only one visionary. The fan loves what an artist has done, the visionary loves what the artist has not done yet.

• Being old means being too tired to be young anymore.  Being dead means too tired of being old

• Never miss a good chance to shut up.

• Sometimes the lies you don’t tell get you in just as much trouble as those you do.

• We have entered the catatonic covid phase where the hope that sprang eternal last spring that the virus by summer would cease gave way to no sickly end in sight

• Drinking is a choice not a command

• Artists feel deeply so that the masses can be spared.

• May all your heartbreaks be songs and all your songs be hits

• Every generation needs their own darkness to propel society to its next level of light

• I’m going to move to Paris, drink whiskey and write For Whom the Beltrami Trolls; the search for husband number three  

• The roaring 20s will be the decade we finally let our poor children out of their bubble wrap.

• An artist has to be constantly curious.

• Time doesn’t heal any wounds. It simples changes them. Your hurt and losses become woven into the fabric of your heart and soul and life in ways that are either blazing on the surface or deeply wound into your pattern like so many strings of the prettiest pot holder.  

• One’s 60s are filled with magic and music and mayhem if one is fortunate enough

• The world is making noise (my son Max observing rare Los Angeles thunder)

• Aries are ruled by the mind, the moon and Mars

• When minefields turn to memories, the heart and mind will mend

• You can’t be seduced by the praise without being crushed by the criticism

• Never put your heart where it doesn’t belong. It’s akin to being seared by the fiercest fires of hell

• Humor is the essence of a democratic society. Everybody votes for a dictator

• She has all the attributes of a woman together with the qualities one expects from a man with none of the inconvenience of either

• Sometimes what we want is as heartbreaking as what we have.

• The mediator between mind and hand must be the heart

• Life is long. Contain the crazy. Face your fears of being alone.  He is NOT the answer

• Remember what you have. Forget what you don’t

• All the poetry is gone but he still has his Black and Decker

• I can’t sit on a sun porch in a sun hat sipping a mint julip. I rather wander the moors at midnight in a black velvet cloak

• Suspicion breeds confidence

Freshman parents: word to the not yet wise.  Humans come with their own set of talents, likes and dislikes. It’s a parent’s duty to discover and nurture those attributes, not manufacture them. You do so by trial and error, not trial and horror. I am reasonably sure that the three year-old who screamed their way through an entire half hour of swimming lessons today won’t grow up win the Olympic gold medal for the backstroke nor be captain of their own sailbo