@80incognito.bsky.social reminds me I took a photo of my hand lately. Can't recall why. Reminded me of Creature from The Black Lagoon.

GP: “How many people here take pills?” Me (holding up a finger): “one – you.” GP: “Really? that surprises me. That tells me one of two things is true. You either have very few clients or they have a strong resistance to pills.” Me: ”I’ll let you sort that out.” GP: “Right.”

Grandpa (looking at the flowers my sister brought him for his birthday): “Those flowers make me wonder how old I am.” Something unusual about the folks is that they show no awareness at all that they are old. They may even think of *me,* 30 yrs their junior, as being the old guy.

I'm not sure what the etiquette of linking to what was once Twitter is here, but this was quite striking: "you raise your voice, I erase your voice." It is as if the new ICE recruits are idiot J6ers -- x.com/ClaireMPLS/s...

I’ve read that the human body doesn’t have receptors for ‘wetness’; our idea of ‘wet’ is actually a function of our sensation of temperature.

Lucid Grandpa: the peace corps was a great experience but didn’t leave the country (Niger) off any better. Likely made it worse. My wife (meaning my mother, who predeceased him) may have had more success, working in the medical field with vaccinations.

@charlayn.bsky.social may I ask what you think of this Goya painting (fresco) The Dog? In particular, I've always wondered if the shadowy section in the bottom right quadrant might be construed as the imprinted shadow of a viewer of the painting... Plausible? Anyway, do you have a response to this?

The idea that Grandpa somewhat thinks as Picasso painted – but Picasso *makes* abstract while dad *is* abstract.

This was pretty touching. Hard to know if Grandpa really recalled I had played music, and some distant idea of that was resurfacing, or if this had more to do with his and Lydia’s perpetual notion that I was the owner of “the bistro”

Hard to know if GP really recalled I had semi-professionally played music, or if this had more to do with his and Lydia’s perpetual notion that I was the owner of “the bistro” – compounded with the fact we were really enjoying Benny Goodman that night – but he asked me, “Did you ever play music?”

Dad: what’s all that blood in the bathroom this morning about? Grandpa: “That’s what I’d like to know.”

I’ve woken up at five am to find Dad is making food for “the kids,” but he’s got enough untoasted bread with jam on the counter, in perfectly even rows, to feed an entire classroom of kids.

Q: how did I come to live with my parents? It is a little murky and came in stages, but I believe the first stage was this.

Old Person: when she's afraid she might lose her balance and fall, she instead says, "I'm afraid of the dark." Old Person: he says “future” instead of “clock” (or maybe "time.") “It’s 8:30," says the old person, "I can see the future right there.”

– Something’s missing. – Lydia’s missing. – Yes, she is. Dog wandering in and out of the room looking for Lydia. Heartbreaking. She's been hospitalized.

Lucid Grandpa: I asked him to explain their lack of progress in furnishing this house. He said they couldn’t agree on anything, and what they could agree on – for instance, the dining room table – were frequently mistakes.

For #GoodMemoryDay here's a picture of "Mnemosyne Genos" and "Kleio Play" with a detail from the Antioch mosaic depicting a funerary symposium attended by Mnemosyne and the personification of banqueting (AIOXIA) from the Worcester Museum (worcester.emuseum.com/objects/2763...)

Me trying to remember my dream is my dad trying to remember his morning. “There was a guy in the dream named Paul,” he says. “You’re not him?” He reports that he doesn’t dream when he sleeps anymore. His dream is his life now.

Old Person. “Alright, I’ll see you in the basement.” (He goes into the closet.) Old people: one is putting a box of unopened crackers in the trash while the other is carefully supervising.

Cognitively impaired person: It’s absurd that a person as capable as you are is working in a coffee shop. Attendant: Well… Impaired: I mean it’s almost criminal! Attendant: It’s the way of the world. Lot of people work in jobs beneath their skill level.

“I like old people,” customer said. (This was the Liberian customer “PD” who later told me he had “fantasized” about taking care of my folks.) “Me too,” I said. And now a young customer, whom I like a lot, is yet reminding me of how much I prefer my old people.

This morning, I came across my notes from when I was taking care of my cognitively impaired parents, and there is some funny, weird stuff here; so I think I will make it my bluesky project to share some of those notes. A word on the dramatis personae…

@charlayn.bsky.social do you really feel that "like" or "as" is the only distinction between a simile and metaphor? "Achilles is a lion" sounds to me identical to "Achilles is like a lion," while "the winter of our discontent" seems in a different category.

Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli - Minor Swing www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CDo...

Think the approximation is more humorous than just.

Very idly wondering if Times reporter Valerie Hopkins was thinking of Pynchon when she wrote the opening sentence to her article today: “The message came screaming through the skies at 8,000 miles per hour.” Gravity’s Rainbow’s opening is: “A screaming comes across the sky.”

Laundry that is warm in a basket that is broken. Everted socks, a null undergarment, a sleeve. I will again stand deciphering, with warming hands, These simple, largely unfashionable puzzles, Making of the warm clean mound a clear tall stack,

Perception that Cervantes was more a believer in God and faith than was Shakespeare, with maybe Montaigne as a mean. Into the liquor store: man ahead of me requiring an actual shopping cart. Wrote a text message: if she could imagine the street lamps she passed beneath as being

To consider: the idea of “having compassion” for people who are better, wiser, smarter than you are, as opposed to “having compassion” for those worse off in these respects.

Remembering The Mummies tonight: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr0S...

"A physician is worth more than several other men put together, for he can cut out arrows and spread healing herbs." (Il.11.514)

Maybe the only trick to writing is to say what you feel. Course, the problem then is that you have to feel something first. This continues the non-adventures of Sharon and Ray "A Romance in My Mind." Poor Ray... allpurposeblog.com/2025/12/27/a...

"Eris whose fury never tires, sister and friend of manslaughtering Arēs, who, from being at first but low in stature, grows till she raises her head to the sky ... She it was that went about among them and flung down discord to the waxing of sorrow with even hand between them." (Iliad.4.440-445)

I'm sort of opposed to such patently political content as I'm presenting here. What interests me is that I feel like the action against Venezuela *reallly is* what a lot of people thought the Iraq War was, back in the day.

Encountering the ghosts of Christmas past is what Facebook is for. BlueSky is for lying on the grass and staring at fluffy clouds rolling by.

And it doesn’t pertain at all to Thought (Thought is like math) or to Perception (which is like a florid verbal description of the sort you could never write yourself, the author is so talented)

Homeric poetry has been accused of glorifying violence, oppressive social hierarchies, and the patriarchy. But it has also been interpreted as antiwar, critical of religion, and lauded for giving rare agency to female characters. To an artist, such contradictions make Homeric poetry catnip.

Noted from yesterday during the press conference with the Federal Reserve Chairman: people are extremely fastidious about using a plural verb when the subject is data -- it's always "the data are" -- but they don't care at all about the pronoun. They don't call data "them" or "they" but "it."

I have no idea what I've been thinking of for the last ten minutes, but it all made such sense. Brain is on tumble dry.

I’d passed the woman with what I identified as the French baguette inside the grocery store, now she has passed me on the street outside with her baguette. I thought of the word “baguette” then began mentally to defend my use of the word "banquette" in a text message earlier in the day

I thought Bluesky users might enjoy a description of the argument that occurred in the kitchen during my Thanksgiving repast in NYC this past week. I was probably the right-most person there, and am left of center, a gen-x abundance liberal.

Somewhat comical: that moment that generally occurs toward the opening of every dog walk when, in a panic, I thrust my hands into every available fissure to ensure I've brought dog bags: left and right front trouser pocket, left and right front jacket pocket -- could I have really forgotten...?--

I had closed a message to a friend with the semi-jocular suggestion that she "be good;" now in the woods with the dog, I'm thinking that actually, seriously, that might be pretty good advice for me to follow myself,

Would love to hear of the complications that arose during the assembly of this piece.

That Denial is a process of reverse-annealing, a kind of weakening of a weakness. The word “archery” spoken by a passerby. “Maybe because he doesn’t like archery,” was I believe the phrase spoken by the young passing woman to her friend.

I think Harold Bloom’s discussion of Wallace Stevens’ poem The Snow Man (in The Poems of Our Climate) is more complicated than it needs to be and that it strangely neglects to consider the idea of snow.

Wow, very cool --

"The 2024 Oxford Ancient Languages Society performance of Euripides' Orestes. In the original Ancient Greek, with a freshly edited text and a complete new musical score, written in accordance with all that is known of Euripidean music." www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4hk...

Hard to tell at the level of the street but seemed like excellent attendance of the No Kings rally in D.C. today. Event organizers say 200 k, which is believable. Mood was much more chill than at your average Stadium rock concert. Best sign I saw: “QUICK QUESTION FOR YOU: WTF?”

I've been wanting to up my game as a protestor by carrying a sign, but what is to be the message this coming weekend? My first thought was something literary, so as to lend some class to the event