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For the past few days, I have experienced writer’s block or, perhaps, kindness block.  Whatever has had me in a sort of literary limbo, I just now am loosening its grips and feel like I have something worth sharing in this forum.  It figures that it was one of the finest gentlemen in all of Louisville, aka one of the men from the day shelter for homeless men where I am employed, who helped me find my voice once again.

This afternoon, I made my way across town to the modest apartment of one of the men who used to be a guest at the day shelter.  Today, I was a guest in his home during a monthly visit that is part of his participation in our permanent supportive housing program, and it was the highlight of my day.  I was there to offer him support in…

Are you where you thought you would be
as the old year dwindles down?
Have you told the ones who matter
why you’re keeping them around?

Are you where you thought you would be
as the old year dwindles down?
Have you told the ones who matter
why you’re keeping them around?

As found here. Happy Friday!

:::::

I didn’t get to switch the radio off in time this morning. She heard, and understood (it seems). This was her response.

I’m really tired of hearing about all the “fake patients” with medical marijuana licenses in Colorado.

When recreational stores opened on January 1, 2014, some people believed that patients would happily leave their medical marijuana behind and switch to paying higher prices for recreational weed. Marijuana is marijuana, right?

There’s been lots of speculation about why the numbers on the medical marijuana registry have stayed flat, neither increasing nor decreasing.

Who’s to blame?

They blame all the people they think are staying on the registry just to avoid taxes. They can’t say how many of them there are or how much tax revenue they’ve lost. They just know they aren’t getting every dime they think they deserve, all because medical marijuana patients don’t have to pay all the high taxes that the recreational consumer does. But the reality for patients who choose cannabis is that all of their medicine is…

‘what have you done to my trees?’ he cried.

I finished my moon painting! I was working from a photo I snapped last week. Once I sat down and painted the background – I was sucked in. For the next few days, whenever I had a minute I pulled it out.

After the background dried, I softened the edge of the moon, to give it a glow. When the background was dry I started adding the tree branches. I decided to work with India Ink instead of the Payne’s Grey watercolor, because it is a richer black and less opaque. (It’s the test on the left.)
 

I wasn’t happy with how the branches were turning out. They seemed too stiff. So I wet all the areas where I wanted the branches to be, and added the ink. At first, it was a bit out of control (too much ink on my brush), but I got the hang of it. I guided the…

Every few weeks we distribute to the AP staff examples of great saves by our staffers who protected us from hoaxes and inaccuracies. Here are some of the latest:

A SUSPECT SNIPER
The video looked like it had been shot on the front lines of Syria’s civil war. It looked so real that the Islamic State group’s official website posted it as a de facto event, which drove up its popularity. The footage opens with a young boy on the ground, apparently shot by a sniper as he attempts to save a nearby girl. The boy gets up after the first apparent gunshot wound and the viewer can hear distinct Syrian voices in the background celebrating the boy’s survival. Then, as he gets up and runs toward the girl again, he is “shot” a second time, a cloud of smoke billowing from his midsection as he falls forward. As impossible…

The line Monday morning at the annual Christmas Bureau giveaway of food and toys in Syracuse, NY — an hour before the doors opened.

Every December I re-read John Cheever’s short story, “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor.”

And every year I share a link to it on Facebook. I don’t think many people bother to read it — even when I preface it by saying it’s really a very uplifting story of human kindness and redemption.

The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results, but here we go. Here’s the link to the story, which appeared in the New Yorker, Dec. 24, 1949.

Cheever’s story is quaint, dated and a little over the top. But it’s a wonderful piece of fiction that reinforces the notion that there might just be some hope for us as a species.

You’ll feel damn…

Leigh‘s “Writing on Water” video went viral this week. Locally, I used the Xperia smart phone she gave me to show it to everyone I could find. Now I’m sharing it with you.

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It started happening more and more.  Elanore would travel the world to find gifts and toys for children everywhere.  She tried to hire artists to carve dolls, trucks and small chairs, she visited book publishers and ordered a million books.  But no matter how far she traveled, no matter how much identification she showed, no one believed that she was Santa’s daughter.  Their lack of belief is the reason Santa has a workshop at the North Pole.  Even when Santa went with is daughter, no one believed they were who they said they were.   Eventually, the lack of belief began to eat away at the wonder of the season.  People met Santa, but didn’t believe that he WAS Santa.  Finally, Santa stopped coming to town.  He decided to simply deliver toys, to good and bad  girls and boys, and not bother trying to tell people about the true spirit…

Original Watercolor on 140 cid free cold press watercolor paper.

Measure 2 1⁄2 by 3 1⁄2 inches

Year-2014

http://josemelgrattiwatercolorpaintings.wordpress.com/

“Perplexing thought”
Alf Sukatmo. Pencil on paper. 2014.

It is hard to describe an entangled mind, isn’t it?

(Reblogged.)

What could we start the new year with? My somewhat top ten Autumn photos of last year. That sounds reasonable. Had some really good days last Autumn, when it comes down to photography. Went out in the forest and came back with a dozen useable photos every day. 

Never been much for doing top ten lists.

Actually, this will be my first and last.

AUTUMN 1 SIGFRIDSSON

AUTUMN 1 SIGFRIDSSON

AUTUMN

Depression, Rage, Humiliation, Shame, Desire

These are all emotions that most people spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars trying to fix or hide from. Some go to shrinks. Some attempt to suppress their feelings with binges on food, alcohol, drugs, and even sex. And for some, the spiritual guru is the ultimate tool leading to their salvation.

I, too, have throughout my 33 years used every single one of the vices/remedies listed above to at the very least conceal my issues. Unfortunately, cupcakes, vodka, and random quotes on how to be a spiritual person have never helped. In my experience, they only lead to shame and ultimately humiliation.

No outside influence that I have found can demolish the ineradicable shell of pain that has taken up residence inside my heart and essence. I recently wrote a poem called Beauty, Hidden. It’s about how I sit and dream of writing…

Sometimes the “media” in my country continues to… Well, no they don’t…

I expect sensationalism and alarmism (is that a word?)

Anyway….

I saw this on my Facebook page.

“Walmart caves in to Muslims and Sharia law” or something like that….

It’s an article from a bunch calling themselves “American Overlook”

This article crapola is typical fear/hate mongering to the ignorant.

This is hate propaganda for ignorant people.

Here is what Halal means: Wikipedia

“In Arabic, the word halal means permitted or lawful.

Halal foods are foods that are allowed under Islamic dietary guidelines.

According to these guidelines gathered from the Qu’ran, Muslim followers cannot consume the following:

pork or pork by products

animals that were dead prior to slaughtering

animals not slaughtered properly or not slaughtered in the name of Allah

blood and blood by products

alcohol

carnivorous animals

birds of prey

That’s weird…

Jewish people don’t eat that…

Malone and I do lunch every couple of months or so. We Syracuse bloggers have to stick together, I figure. Besides, I’ve come to more and more admire the way the mind of this guy works, this fellow who writes The Infinite Abyss(es) here on WordPress as well as The Inevitable Coffee Ring on Tuesdays and The Espresso Shot on Thursdays over at the Syracuse New Times, the same site for which I toil to produce film review and news blogs on Mondays and Thursdays.

I send out the initial email. (Hint-hint, young Christopher.) He doesn’t look. I put a comment on his blog. He comments back and reminds me of the more technologically advanced ways in which he can be reached. (Hint-hint, old Mark.) And thus we meet and eat, and talk about writing and our city and employment search statuses and all sorts of interesting topics.

This…

Happy endings are hard to come by in dealing with big business, but here’s one to share. It didn’t come easily, but it was worth it — to the tune of hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars.

I had been fully prepared to blast Target in this space if it wouldn’t send me a simple one-paragraph letter on company letterhead. But someone at corporate headquarters saw the light and did the right thing.

Target had initially refused to send me a letter verifying that on a certain date I added my domestic partner as an authorized user on my credit card. We needed this as a proof of status to add Michelle to my health insurance policy. Target’s refusal would have delayed this and forced her to continue paying monthly premiums on another policy.

Several weeks of phone calls and e-mails finally resulted in a letter granting my request. I was pleasantly surprised, to say…

Why did these leaves wait until there was snow on the ground to fall?

It’s never too late to learn a lesson you snoozed through in high school biology.

Especially when it provides a metaphor that smacks you upside the head.

The science: When trees shed their leaves in autumn, there’s more going on than cold temperatures and wind wreaking havoc. Deciduous trees are wired for “abscission,” an active process of willful shedding that keeps them alive so they can bloom again in spring.

Last Saturday morning, as I looked out my kitchen window and listened to the coffee maker gurgle, a strong breeze whipped the leaves off the trees by the hundreds. They darted every which way before settling onto the snow-covered ground.

It’s dangerous to think too much before coffee, as it can lead to mixed metaphors. So be it. Here goes:

A prevailing mindset is that outside forces take things from us…

Rural Missouri Property in Winter

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”

The image posted above is the property behind a friend’s ranch where I stayed as a guest a few winters ago while spending Christmas holidays visiting my parents in the St. Louis area.  I stood in his kitchen and looked out through the glass patio doors at the beautiful snow across his sprawling woods, and worked on this quick watecolor sketch, so I guess I could say I was painting en plein air, though I was indoors, and warm.

I’m closing out a beautiful, though cold weekend (my furnace has been out of commission since Thursday–supposed to be repaired tomorrow), seated next to an electrice space heater (which…

Back when I covered the Central New York music scene for the big daily, I always had it in the back of my mind somewhere that these voices, these talents, these people I was hearing, seeing, watching, following, talking with, tracking, well, they were as good as the folks other people doing this job in other cities in the country — no, around the world — were hearing and seeing.

A bit parochial, of me, I know.

And, really, there was no way ever to quantify that hunch, no matter how many national and international acts I went to as they came to the bigger venues in Syracuse or cross sections of albums I listened to.

Taste is all relative, right? And I sure as hell wasn’t getting paid to travel to the little listening clubs and pubs to hear the emerging or longstanding bands in other cities.

The music…

Those who would draw, from such quotes as this, only that America’s founders believed in a small government have overlooked reality, and then pasted their own interests onto the quotation for a label. Such folks would find it hard to convince a scoffer that our federal government does much that is not in the majority’s interest or that it does much that goes beyond defending us from each other. The first thing such folks do when they gain power is tear down those controls and begin imposing new laws that violate personal freedom. Most of what would convince such a scoffer would show a heavy dose of favoritism for the rich, an expensive smidgeon of concern for wellbeing of the aged and poor, and a fortune devoted to outside influences.

This all avoids the point, however, of what Jefferson wrote about in Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17, from…

It’s Bonfire Night and the sound of exploding fireworks is unsettling Sparta Puss, who is alternating between dozing fitfully on my stool and pacing around the living room. I have a few small Khadi sketchbooks, beautiful textured handmade paper from India and some sepia walnut ink I made recently, so I grabbed a brush and started sketching her in transit. I’d previously coloured the paper with wet tea bags to break up the white with a pale brown wash, speckled by the rough texture of the paper.

I sketched her dozing, which is the page I’m least pleased with; then pacing around. She has one of those very expressive question mark tails, constantly curling around itself and it was fun following the movement with a sable brush. Finally, a couple of sketches, just a few seconds each, of her sitting down, watching me watching her. Most of the fireworks have…