(Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Sloth”)

three R’s (reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic)

three points in a good landing

Three Signs of Being in Buddhism (impermanence, suffering, absence of soul)

four seasons

four classical elements (Earth, Water, Air, Fire)

four states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma)

four humors of Hippocrates (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood)

four temperaments of Hippocrates (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic)

four points on a compass

four freedoms (of speech, of worship, from want and fear – Franklin Roosevelt, 1941)

five ages of Man

five senses

five Great Lakes (North American)

Five Nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca)

six types of quarks (up, down, top, bottom, strange, charm)

six types of leptons (electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino)

Seven Seas (varies locally and is often idiomatic; list most often accepted today is North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Arctic, Southern, Indian)

seven continents

Seven Hills of Rome

Seven Wonders of the World

Seven Deadly Sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride)

eight bits in a byte

eight days (and nights) in Hanukkah

eight legs on a spider

eight tentacles on an octopus

eight vertices in a cube

eight paths to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths

eight planets in our solar system (now that Pluto is a Dwarf)

nine muses in Greek mythology

nine circles of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy

twelve pence in a shilling

29.531 days in the lunar month

365.25 days in the solar year

100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy

100 billion galaxies in the universe

100 billion neurons in the human brain

“My Heart is Like a Zoo”
– children’s book by Michael Hall

“My Heart is Like a River”
– song by Rebecca Lavelle

“My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea…”
– from the poem, “A Birthday,” by Christina Rossetti

“My Heart is Like a Singing Bird”
– the Christina Rossetti poem performed as a song by Lorna Kelly and  Niel Chapman in a live concert in Harare, Zimbabwe

“My heart is like wax, melting within me.”
– Psalm 22:14, King James Bible

“My heart is like a wheel.”
– from “Let Me Roll It” by Paul McCartney & Wings

“My heart is like the autumn moon”
– poem by Han-shan (from The View from Cold Mountain)

“… my heart is like a speeded train”
– from “Out of Place” by Oliver James

“My heart is like an open highway”
– from “It’s My Life” by Bon Jovi

“My heart is like a mason’s hands of weathered skin,
each scar makes it harder for me to hurt again”
– from “Pretty Girl from Chile” by the Avett Brothers

“My heart is like burnin’ up, burning up,
my heart is like burnin’ up, burning up,
my heart is like burnin’ up, burning up,
my heart is like burnin’ up”
– from “Burnin’ Up” by Faith Evans

“My heart is like a jigsaw puzzle”
– from “Jigsaw” by Lady Sovereign

“…my heart is like…a little pool/Left by the tide”
– from Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“My Heart is an Idiot”
– book of essays by Davy Rothbart

“My heart is like a bomb. She knows I’m full of shit, but she thinks I’m cute.”
– from “Fuck Yeah American Idiot,” the tumblelog for Green Day’s Broadway musical,  “American  Idiot”

“As for the wellsprings of wonderment, they run deep. The quiet mind, the youthful heart, the perceptive eye, the racing blood – these conflow to produce wonder.”
– E.B. White, The Points of My Compass

“Solitude. Where does its value lie? For in solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention.”
– Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“I love the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols.
– Montaigne

“I paint transience.”
– Montaigne

“Chaos, in a work of art, should shimmer through the veil of order.”
– Novalis

“One man, I remember, used to take off his hat and set fire to his hair every now and then, but I do not remember what it proved, if it proved anything at all, except that he was a very interesting man.”
– Dylan Thomas, “Reminiscences of Childhood,” Quite Early One Morning

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
– Goethe

…and, of course, the other topic dear to the heart of poets:

bang
bone
belly-bump
booly-dog
boozle
buff the floor
do bouncy-bounce
do a bit of hard for a bit of soft
make carnal acquaintance
cavault
do the conjugal act
consummate
coot
perform the culbatizing exercise
do the four-legged frolic
frick
frigg
do ficky-fick
do horizontal refreshment
practice in actus coitu
do the Irish whist
jig-a-jig
lay
lay pipe
ling-grapple
make the two-backed beast
make nooky
nub
nurtle
poke
roll in the hay
romp in the hay
toss in the hay
rut
do smockage
screw
shag
shake the sheets
roll the soul
trombone
make amorous congress
do what Eve did with Adam

Yeats or maybe Auden or perhaps Pound (probably all three) said that the only subjects worthy of poetry are sex and death.
Thus, in honor of those great poets, a list to draw on:

depart
expire
croak
keel over
kick off
bite the dust
pass on
pass away
perish
succumb
answer the final summons
answer the last call
breathe your last
take the long sleep
cash in your chips
climb the golden staircase
coil up your ropes
cross the great divide
give up the ghost
go to a better world
go to meet your maker
go the way of all flesh
lay down your knife and fork
shuffle off this mortal coil
pull a cluck
step off
step onto the last bus
tip over
cross over
buy the farm
take an earth bath
take a dirt nap

““… Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity… ”
– Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

I’m not much of a party guy. Used to be. Not any more. I’m dangerously clumsy at the art of air-kissing and never have figured out how to make small talk. Get a couple drinks in me and ask what I think of this crazy weather we’ve been having and I’m likely to drag you off into a corner and ask intense and embarrassingly personal questions about your life.

My strategy then is to listen more and talk less, which naturally has turned me into an eavesdropper. For years I’ve collected fragments of conversations overhead at parties. Here’s a selection:

“…Collie. No, his nickname. A pun on his dreadlocks, I guess, because when they get wet they smell like wet dog.

“…ultramodern music, apparently anti-sense, but deconstructed you could discern threads of melody.”

“…They’re a closed shop. You and I can’t get in. I don’t think we could get in if we won the Nobel, Pulitzer, and National Book Award all in the same year. Unless you’re an obscure Russian poet. They love obscure Russian poets.”

“…People like us should never have to work. We should be identified at birth and separated from the common herd and set up with stipends that allow us to live lives of creative lethargy. When we sleep until noon it’s for the common good. We’re escape valves for a too-pressured society. The world needs people like us to be wholly unproductive. The world does owe us a living.”

“…Look, you will never, under any circumstances – I must stress this – absolutely never, it’s impossible — find better ones than Tupperware. They’re the crème-de-crème. It’s one of the tragedies of the modern world that you can’t buy them in stores – you have to go to those horrid parties – we should have one ourselves! Oh but Rubbermaid sucks. Planned obsolescence, like panty hose, except it’s not that they wear out, it’s that they have dozens of sizes in round, square, rectangular – or I should say cylinder, cube, and what’s the three-dimensional form of a rectangle? Little caskets, all in a dozen sizes, so no matter how careful you are, you always lose the lids and have to buy new ones.”

“…Most people lack a ruling principle.”

“…What’s the opposite of an epic story? That’s my life.”

Things the Consumer Society Thinks You Should Own (based upon advertisements in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly):

– a stone from Hadrian’s Wall
– a hood ornament from a Mercedez-Benz
– a Blackberry
– Bose Quiet Comfort 2 Acoustic Noise Canceling Headphones
– a clarinet
– Junghams Apollo Mega Multi Frequency Atomic Watch (with radio-controlled accuracy; accurate to 1 second in 1 million years)
– a Panama fedora
– flawlessly tailored two-ply cotton pinpoint Oxford shirt
– the world’s first crumple zone
– an heirloom-breed, pasture-raised chicken

For a writer, of course, it’s a necessary tool. For many years I’ve kept full-sized spiral notebooks as idea banks – where I jot random thoughts, dreams, rough drafts, quotes from my reading, miscellaneous observations, overheard conversations, phrases that have become stuck in my head, arcane information of all kinds – anything I consider noteworthy. So far it adds up to more than 4,000 handwritten pages. Most of my published work has originated there.

I also carry pocket-sized notebooks for taking field notes, sometimes literally in fields but also on the water, in airplanes, in opera houses and subways and taxis and restaurants. Often those brief notes find their way into my larger notebooks and from there into essays, stories, and books.

Recently a friend presented me with a 48-page pocket-sized memo book titled “Field Notes” which has given me some unexpected pleasure. On the inside back cover is a list of recommended uses or “Practical Applications” for the notebook. (The list is solicited from customers, who offer up their thoughts via an entertaining website).

Here are my favorites from that surprisingly fertile list:

Corn Dog Batter Recipes
Scrapbooking Tips
Meat Goat Methodology
Sketches of Prize-Winning Rutabaga
Swine Suckling Schedules
Survivor/Eddie Money/Styx Setlist
Vegetable Judging Notes
Dart vs. Balloon Strategic Analysis
Animal Husbandry Techniques
Dairy Diatribes
Quilting Patterns
Freehand Drawings
Carny Contacts
Tractor Carburetor Calibrations
Rabbit Cage Diagrams
Crop Circle Designs/Schemes
Garden Gossip
Hybrid Pea Punnett Squares
Silo Content/Levels/Schematics
Expected Progeny Differences

Now I wonder, to what purposes do YOU put your notebooks?

Andy Wakeman photo

Last week Glenn Wolff and I posed as poster children for an upcoming campaign by the Grand Traverse Conservation District to raise awareness about the beautiful and fragile Boardman River. We spent a pleasant couple hours in the evening fishing on the upper river, just above Ranch Rudolph, while photographer Andy Wakeman shot us casting to imaginary trout and huddled together discussing weighty philosophical issues such as whether to use a Royal Coachman dry fly or a bead-head nymph. Later we stood on the bank with Conservation District director Treenen Sturman, outreach specialist John Gessner, and Eric Campbell, Director of Proof Positive Design, and swapped fishing stories.

Naturally, all of that got Glenn and me thinking about the Boardman in particular and rivers in general, subjects that are never far from our thinking anyway but have special urgency in these days when rivers are so at risk from careless land-use policies and galloping development. Those who know the Boardman know that she is among the most pristine and beautiful of Michigan’s rivers, that she is the jewel at the heart of the Grand Traverse region, and that she needs all the protection we can give her. The fine people at the Conservation District have been working tirelessly for many years to keep the river healthy and well protected.

The Friday List is a day early this week because I’m heading to Walloon Lake for the Bear River Writers Conference. As always, I look forward to reading your thoughts.

Ways to look at a river:
– as a thing of beauty
– as sanctuary/retreat
– as ecosystem
– as highway
– as energy source/water source/resource
– as playground
– as classroom
– as shaper of the land
– as metaphor for time or journey
– as sustenance (physical/spiritual)
– as metaphysical puzzle
– as residence of myths
– as itself

Am I missing anything?

What inspires you? The late fiction writer Edward D. Hoch, who published more than 900 mystery stories, including one every month for 35 years in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, must have found his inspiration in hardware stores, Walmarts, old Sears catalogs, and his own garage and attic.

Hoch’s obituary in the New York Times (January 24, 2008), noted that his serial character, Nick Velvet, was a professional thief who over the years had been hired by clients to steal a “bewildering array of things,” including “an ashtray, a cobweb, a canceled stamp, a dead houseplant, a used tea bag, a sliver of soap, a ball of twine, a bingo card, an empty paint can, a Thanksgiving turkey, a blue-ribbon pie, a bathroom scale, a bald man’s comb, an ostrich, a skunk, a major-league baseball team, and – in perhaps the most blatantly criminal act of all – an overdue library book.”

I find this list, with its startling juxtapositions and tumbling randomness, flat-out delightful. But even more delightful are the stories implied by the items. The prolific Mr. Hoch knew better than most of us that every object in the universe throbs with stories just waiting to be told.