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Song Lyric Sunday

Helen Espinosa’s theme for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday is Guilty Pleasure. Yummy!

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1968 Neil and 1988 Neil. Still going strong in 2016.

 

I fell in love with Neil Diamond when I was in high school. My friends — Dead Heads and Moody Blues fans — had the same regard for Neil that many today have for John Tesh or Michael Buble or Barry Manilow, meaning not a lot. But I. Didn’t. Care. Neil sang to me in a spiraling surge of emotional energy that I might now describe as a virgin’s chaste orgasm. (How can I admit this in public even now? I’m sure I’m blushing.)

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The Road We’ve Paved

 

Shootout
“Go on, ya yeller-bellied coward — draw!”

I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. Most of our staple TV entertainments were shoot-em-up Westerns and shoot-em-up Detective shows. Especially in the ’50s. My formative years. The hero shoots the bad guy. The bad guy falls down dead. No blood, no twitching, no ugliness or remorse.

Then John F. Kennedy was shot to death, and the world was shocked. Two days later, live on national television, we watched Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald. Up close. Live. Dead.

I was 12-1/2, and I was not shocked.

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Song Lyric Sunday

Sunday has come and gone, but Helen Espinosa’s Song Lyric Sunday’s theme this week was A Song from the First Band You Ever Heard in Concert, and I couldn’t very well pass that up no matter how far behind the rest of my life has fallen. (The YouTube link is in the song title.)

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I Hate Photos of Me

Back in the Kodachromagnon Age, when film was both alpha male and alpha female, transparencies were born as slides, but could transform — by the mystical power of Kodak Labs — into framable prints whose faces were either glossy or matte.

Without intending to, some anonymous, incompetent, color-blind photo lab worker gave me the key to understanding the eternal (since 1839 or 1840, anyway) complaint:

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Song Lyric Sunday 5

Weird Al
This is the life!

This week’s theme for Helen Espinosa’s  Song Lyric Sunday is “songs that make us happy”. Oh, yay! I have been waiting for the perfect chance to use this one! The video link’s in the song title. From his 1985 Dare to be Stupid album, Weird Al Yankovic’s parody of 1920’s music:

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3-Day Quote Challenge, Round 3, Day 3

One final thank you to Ana P. Rose for asking me to take part in the 3-Day Quote Challenge, and for reawakening an old urge to write something other than prose. ❤

 

Rose 2
“A Rose is a Rose is a Rose.” William Shakespeare

Love came for her on splendid wings of blue

and bones so brown

earth wept for joy,

And left her slashed

and cleft

and rootless

thirsty

fading to a blur of light

so dim

so far away,

she learned to love

with half

a heart

her face uplifted

to the dawn

of Time

~~~str  6/24/16

 

 

3-Day Quote Challenge, Round 3, Day 2

Thanks again to Ana P. Rose for tagging me into another 3-Day Quote Challenge. Please visit her enchanting site.

 

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Not an organic rose. The Beast’s Enchanted one.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. Don Marquis

3-Day Quote Challenge, Round 3, Day 1

Thank you Ana P. Rose for tagging me in the 3-Day Quote Challenge. Ana’s a student discovering through research and poetry the importance of emotional intelligence, and deciphering what it means to be  genuinely human. Please visit her site. There is much beauty there.

In her honor, my theme is The Rose.

 
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“Truths and roses have thorns about them.” Henry David Thoreau