They Know

i know that you know that your aunt knows your uncle knows your cousin knows that your mother grandmother grandfather your next door neighbor knows your sister knows your brother knows your not much loved inlaw knows your boss knows your mail carrier knows your milk man knows grocery store clerk knows your pharmacist knows your coffee shop server knows that they all say you know nothing not a damn thing nada zilch zero sum base

A Thought

With a mass shooting in a supermarket, which earlier last year.
In late November a lake effect snowstorm which buried the greater
Buffalo area.
Then the blizzard in late December which paralyzed the city and its
environs, and the people who lost their lives.
And last, Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills going into cardiac arrest.

With all that said, my heart is with the Buffalo Bills, and rooting for them
to get to the Super Bowl and come away with a win.

Comfort of Feeling Safe

“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”

~ George Eliot

So

so today is a new day, a new month and a new year, which means in five weeks from now, I’ll be another year older and hopefully wiser with age. since it is a new year, what way to start it off with is plenty of black coffee … got to have coffee and start a new book, which is: The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher. it’s a historical novel about the bookstore
Shakespear and Company. also did a couple of online crosswords, and updated the latest version of windows 11, which took about an hour or so to do. that’s it for now from the home front in Massachusetts

p.s. happy new year everyone

People Write

“People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I’m not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don’t want to hear about it.”

~ Paul Theroux

Tremendous Hope and Spirit

“I wasn’t attractive, I wasn’t very verbal, I wasn’t very smart in school. I wasn’t anything that showed the world I was something special, but I had this tremendous hope all the time. I had this tremendous spirit that kept me going… I was a happy child, because I had this feeling that I was going to go beyond my body physical… I just knew it.”

~ Patti Smith – Born: December 30, 1946

The Mainstream Media

“I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, “How does it feel being on mainstream media? It’s not often poets get on mainstream media.” I said, “Well I think you’re the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you’re not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture.””

~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Documents Of The Mist

“Our radio plays rhythm and blues as we pass the joint back and forth in jutjawed silence both looking ahead with big private thoughts now so vast we can’t communicate them anymore and if we tried it would take a million years and a billion books – Too late, too late, the history of everything we’ve seen together and separately has become a library in itself – The shelves pile higher – They’re full of misty documents or documents of the Mist-.”

~ Jack Kerouac

If you worship money and things …

“If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

~ David Foster Wallace

To Live An Interesting Life.

“To observe the world carefully, to write a lot and often, on a schedule, if necessary, to use the dictionary a lot, to look up word origins, to analyze closely the work of writers you admire, to read not only contemporaries but writers of the past, to learn at least one foreign language, to live an interesting life outside of writing.”

~ Lydia Davis

An Appropriate Description to What it Was Like Here Shortly After Sunrise

“The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind in never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Growing

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.”

~ Anais Nin

Practice Kindness

“The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks dont see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.”

~ Jack Kerouac

Realizations

“It was like that class at school where the teacher talks about Realization, about how you could realize something big in a commonplace thing. The example he gave–and the liar said it really happened–was that once while drinking orange juice, he’d realized he would be dead someday. He wondered if we, his students, had had similar ‘realizations.’ Is he kidding? I thought. Once I cashed a paycheck and I realized it wasn’t enough. Once I had food poisoning, and realized I was trapped inside my body.”

~Amy Hempel

Writing

“It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, “Read,” but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or “Don’t read, don’t think, just write,” and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you’re going to be a writer, you’ll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, “There must be something else people do,” you won’t be able to quit.”

~ Alice Munro

Invincible Love

“My dear, In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back. Truly yours, Albert Camus”

Telling The Same Lies

“Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called ‘vital interests.”

~ Albert Camus

Big Cities Change

“The way our big cities change sucks. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. For me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go.”

~ Patti Smith

Fear & Love

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

~John Lennon*

*Died: December 8, 1980

Reality

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it.”

~ Jim Morrison*

*Born: December 8, 1943

Big Cities

“The way our big cities change sucks. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. For me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go.”

~ Patti Smith