Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass.

The sun sank, and they both felt its final shudder of warmth.
Turning, he looked into her eyes.
“I feel as though you are the one I have waited for, all my life. And now you are here.”
“I’m not even sure if I believe in such a thing,” she whispered.

Yesterday I was a dog.
Today I'm a dog.
Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog.
[Sigh!]
There's so little hope for advancement.
-- Snoopy –

Have a great Wednesday!

← “In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know.”
-- Steve Martin, on Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life –

Have a great Monday!

There's really nothing like a woman's purse to tell whether she is prospering or languishing. It's not about the money inside so much as the BRAND of the purse. The smaller the better too. Mine - the one I like best - is a Fossil. Never in a million years would I have bought it for myself. Kids. Kids buy moms stuff.
-- Anonymous Woman –

In doctor’s waiting-rooms, a decade or two ago, the tedium would have been relieved with quiet background music: sentimental songs from Broadway, popular classics like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Nowadays, however, one hears only the thudding, mechanical music favoured by the young. Their cowed elders bear it without protest: faute de mieux it has become their music too.

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
-- W.S. Merwin –

Absence sometimes makes the heart grow ANGRIER, I say!
I have so missed being able to blog, and to converse with my great blog-friends.
But I think I am back in business now!
The MAC is fixed!

Have a great Thursday!
**********

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up

A University of Illinois student went to a bookstore & asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told him, it would defeat the purpose.

Have a great Friday!

Interviewer: What do you do about writer's block?

Years later, when he tried to remember what the maiden idealized by the alchemy of poetry really was like, he could not distinguish her from the heartrending twilight of those times. Even when he observed her, unseen, during those days of longing when he waited for a reply to his first letter, he saw her transfigured in the afternoon shimmer of two o’clock in a shower of blossoms from the almond trees where it was always April regardless of the season of the year.
-- From Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera –

Even in translation, so beautiful. I’m really enjoying this book.
Have a great Monday!
**********

Two newlywed University of Illinois grads were driving through Louisiana.
As they were approaching the town of Natchitoches, they started arguing about the pronunciation of the name.

Wow! I’ve had the most relaxing weekend
Ever. While winter has been frosting the
Windows and filling the driveway, my
Friend and I have been lazing about
In the hot-tub talking, reminiscing
About so many things. Listening
To a lot of terrific music. Also
Just generally catching up
With each other. Eating
And laughing 2 much.
At one point, I even
Wrote a poem, &

Do you think God gets stoned?
← I think so . . . look at the platypus.
-- Robin Williams –

Have a great Tuesday!

Isn't poetry absolutely wonderful though? I mean, really there is something about it that prose writing will never be able to quite get to. Poetry is so not reporting. It's so finicky, it is inherently allowed to appeal to a much smaller audience than prose. It is always such a narrow rolled-up newspaper telescopic opinion of something.
To a certain extent, the fiction shelves have to be saying... "I can appeal to you, you will be able to relate to this, please buy me, BUY ME," but the poetry shelves [more scantily clad and less visited] whisper to no one in particular, "This is what I am. Perhaps no one can relate. But no matter. I am not really for sale."
-- Cipriano –

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.
And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.
They do, he say, surprise.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters.
-- Jose Saramago –

Have a great Monday!

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright, New York Times, October 4, 1953 –

Have a great Monday!

Waiting

Rhymes with weighting, and makes me heavy.
You know I am going to keep believing in you.

The first half-hour I was embarrassed, I guess.
Felt there should be no reason for me, waiting.

I smiled at people, as they passed me by.
And An hour passed, and I put a hand to my chest.

Why does anyone write a poem?
Because they have to write one.
If they could have done something else with the those moments they’ve given to the composition process, it’s not a poem.
-- Cipriano –

Have a great Monday!

1. The drive is often the best thing about traveling.
2. I love a good snuggle with my husband when I'm cold.
3. I often use pasta when I am cooking.
4. I'm reading Little Women right now; I love it.

Well, here I am on the final leg of my holidays.
Still visiting. Still having fun. Still eating.
But come Monday, it is back to the coal mines for me. Tomorrow I will be boarding a plane and flying back home. Back to my meowing Jack, and the snowbanks I left behind in Ottawa.
At the end of each year I like to reflect upon the books I have read over the past 12 months. I reminisce about each one and see which come to the forefront as being especially memorable and worthwhile.

“It is like a firstborn son: you spend your life working for him, sacrificing everything for him, and at the moment of truth he does just as he pleases.”
--Dr. Urbino, on his wedding night, describing his penis to his young virgin wife Fermina, in Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera –
She continued to examine it, asking what this was for and what that was for, and when she felt satisfied with her information she hefted it in both hands to confirm that it did not weigh enough to bother with, and let it drop with a gesture of disdain.

Terrific book!
Have a great Thursday!

“If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.”
-- Holden, in ch.17 of Catcher In The Rye –

Here’s a little quick morning exercise for you.
How many of the Top 10 Banned Books of the 20th Century have you read, you naughty thing, you?

Well, I finally finished the frank Lloyd Wright biography. WOW!
What a wild book! What a wild life!
Today I am going to begin reading Sara Gruen’s [2006] novel, Water For Elephants.

INTERVIEWER: So how do you make that move in your writing process from a body of research to a story?

SARA GRUEN: I stare at the screen (laugh). I pick some music...I guess I figure out what the crisis of the book is going to be and then I sit down and I get my first scene. But once I have my first scene I really just have to keep going. My method is I spend an hour and a half sort of revving up every morning and I’ll read what I wrote the day before and maybe do a little revising of it, and then just keep going. I just read that last tiny little bit until I feel like I can continue.

She’s got a great sense of humour about herself. When she found out that the one group of potential voters who really hated her were white, middle-class men of property, she wondered, ‘What on Earth have I done to them.’ And then she worked it out. ‘Apparently,’ she said, ‘I remind them of their first wife.’
-- Gore Vidal, on Hillary Clinton –

"I love film. But it can't in any way do what a book can. In the first place, a film has only two hours to make you fall for it. Not much time."
A Bookpuddle reader sent me the above comment.
Movies vs. Books.
We have wrestled with this subject before, haven’t we?
Anyone who argues that movies are superior, [how do I say this?] umm… their campfire is not one I want to warm my cold hands at.
Last weekend, I watched The Door in The Floor, hoping to see something worthy of John Irving’s A Widow For One Year. [Movie was re-named, and only went to Part One of a three-part novel].
I was very disappointed.
I agree with the above reader’s statement, which was in reference to the same movie.

Can someone, anyone out there, please tell me how it can already be the month of March?
No, seriously, though. In a matter of hours, it will be MARCH!
March?
What the hell happened to February?
Am I going senile? Did I sleep through January or something?
Even with the extra day here, the 29th, I’m sorry, but something seems mightily askew!
Why does it feel like I was just back home not so long ago, for Christmas?
Is this just a classic symptom of old age?
Is the rest of this year going to be just as fleeting?
According to Robert Frost… perhaps…. perhaps it is!

The sun was warm but the wind was chill,