Oh man, you gotta go to this site and see Trump fire Bush.
Got this in an email: Bush as Post Turtle. Love it.
While suturing a laceration on the hand of a 70-year-old Texas rancher (whose hand had caught in a gate while working cattle), a doctor and the old man were talking about George W. Bush being in the White House. The old Texan said “Well, ya know, Bush is a ‘post turtle’.”
Not knowing what the old man meant, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was. The old man said, “When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.”
The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain, “You know he didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he can’t get anything done while he’s up there, and you just want to help the poor stupid bastard get down.”

How sweet it is when a stranger finds your weblog and then emails you a compliment. Such was the case today when Greg Perry, who has a cleverly wine-designed weblog, told me that he’s been following my struggles to write poetry-on-assignment. He offered to link to me and asked me to link to him. Well, that’s a no-brainer! I’m also going to co-opt some of his poetry links and add them to my blogroll. (Except not tonight. I’m pooped.)
This connection from Greg has come at a perfect time for Kalilily Time, as I struggle with the fact that the blogcrowd around whose edges I’ve been running since I first began has gone off and left me behind. Or rather I’ve gone off in another direction. As a matter of fact, I’ve felt a little lost lately.
I’m not interested in the ins and outs of this technology. I’m a writer. I want to write about two things — caregiving and poetry. Well, sometimes about my grandson, too. And politics. Certainly politics. Politics and poetry. And loss.
As my mother loses herself in Yonkers, she finds this 1959 photo of me motor-boating up the Hudson River during the one summer I did go home between college semesters. Ah, was I ever that young? That slim? Yes. That “me” is long lost.

I never imagined, back then, when the Hudson River just outside New York City was clean enough to water ski in and life was just one big sunny-day boat ride, that I would wind up here.
So, I take a cue from Greg Perry’s post about the meme that’s going around and
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
And this is what I find in John Horgan’s Rational Mysticism:
“But the infinite can exclude nothing.”
Hmpf.

That’s where my mom’s thoughts are these days — lost in Yonkers, which is where she lived most of her life and where I grew up. She’s spending most of her time going through old photos and organizing them. As she does this, she’s transported back in time, back to better times, back to the times when our extended family numbered in the many, many dozens. Now, the few that are left are even worse shape than she is in. She got a call yesterday that one of my aunts is in the hospital dying of cancer. Losing. Losing. Lost. This is my mom in the 1940s having her portrait painted by a woman-artist who escaped the Nazis and whose husband-doctor my dad helped to set up a practice in Yonkers back.

The portrait is no Vermeer, but I can probably write a better poem about it than I seem to be able to do with the assigned Lady Writing a Letter.
I guess I’m feeling pretty lost myself, although not in Yonkers. I’m feeling lost in my own skin, my own life. I can’t seem to generate whatever it is I need to work on my poetry. As a result, I’m not at my every-other-Tuesday-night group, and I won’t be going to the Grennon workshop on Thursday. Actually, I’m heading out to Boston on Friday to help my daughter and son-in-law look at some houses they might want to buy. Getting ready for that trip is a whole lot more important to me than sitting down and wrestling some more with Vermeer’s Lady. My brother is coming up to stay with my mom. And I’m packing up my car with food and diapers and more toys for my little grandson, and bags and bags of Peppridge Farm double chocolate Milano and Geneva cookes that I buy at the discount outlet store because we’re all addicted to them.
The poetry will come when it comes. I’m driving out of here to get lost in family.
And then I’ll come back and work on getting ready for the last of the Grennon workshop sessions. I don’t want to miss that last one, because it’s the last workshop I’m going to be doing for a long while to come. I’ll either write poetry or I won’t. But I will or won’t on my own terms.