Hashtag-TITLE

In the mornings when I’m freewriting, I jot down in the margins whatever “extra” half-formed ideas pop to the surface while I happen to have pen in hand. I usually don’t have even a full cup of coffee in me at this point (I try to sort of take my brain by surprise, putting pen to paper before it fully engages) but I think of those little tidbits as “blog seeds,” and every once in a while I troll through the margins of my notebooks to see if there’s one I might want to plant and water.

Sometimes, coming back to those notes, I have no earthly idea what I meant by them. Like this one, which I was just puzzling over: >Canyouwill (“Old Jim” antique store)<… No. Earthly. Idea. >Never play pinochle<, on the next page, is at least coherent—but I don’t remember what it was intended to invoke. (It’s written just beneath >I cannot be trusted with cheese<… which is true, but not enlightening.)

In the spirit of a sort of experimental “mind snapshot”—I decided to sift out the Blog Seeds from this same week last year, and assemble into a list. Might be a revealing exercise (though I’m not yet sure of what)… Here goes.

>What superhero would you be? < Strikes me as a great writing-prompt… Except I have nothing to say. I own every single Marvel movie, yet I have nothing to say.

>If you had to start over with just a wheelbarrow…< Yes! I used to pretend I was running away, and pack my little red wagon with what I considered to be the essentials. Then and now my teddy bear, Toots, tops the list. (Toots is the one physical possession that would truly break my heart if he went walkabout.) So: Toots, an internet-enabled Apple device, and its charger (but actually, no—make that specifically an iPhone , for its camera!), a journal or blank notebook with pens… Mental-health meds. Passport? (Maybe a backpack… yeah, I’m picturing an airport security line with the wheelbarrow. Really hard to fit in overhead bins.)

>if I were a verb< If I say “thinking,” can I fold in “reading” and “writing” as sub-verbs to my main verb? (Never mind. Make that “overthinking.”)

>Falling asleep to a selected few shows< I used to have a very short list of movies I’d always play when I went to bed—movies I liked well enough to watch them repeatedly, and knew well enough that my brain didn’t try to stay awake to see what happened next. For the record: “Pirates of the Caribbean” (the first one), “Pride and Prejudice” (the Colin Firth one), “The Longest Yard” (the newer one), “50 First Dates” (the only one).

>era without TV ads: TIVO, DVR, streaming services, subscription to channels< Praise God, we don’t have to watch TV ads anymore! I really REALLY really HATE television ads. My mocking running commentary during commercials used to drive my college roommate crazy. Apparently that association occurred to me last year too, because the next notes are college memories:

>dorm-room phone w/ boys & pizza #s programmed< My mom donated an old office-phone when her law practice upgraded, so we had (unheard-of then) twenty programmable buttons for phone numbers! One semester when I was dating around, one row of those buttons did have guys’ numbers all programmed. (One of those guys didn’t tell me he had an identical twin in our same set of lecture courses, and some RomCom-worthy scenes went down before I realized there were two of them. My roommate married the twin.)

>Lysol on the doorknob< Another of those guys, in the dating-around semester, came over to our dorm room. My roommate didn’t say a word through his visit. When he left, she got up and pointedly, wordlessly sprayed Lysol on the doorknob he’d just handled. And wordlessly sat down again. And I knew exactly what she thought of him.

>being brain-trained for “likes”< Sometimes I think we humans are lab rats, pressing a lever over and over to get a treat each time. Except instead of a treat, we’re salivating for “likes” or “hits” or “views” of things we post online. (She says, in a blog-post online.)

>frequent-flyer “thought bubbles”—to hold up in response to frequent-flyer idiocies.< Like Larry the Cable Guy with “Here’s your sign!”… When a guest in the RV Park calls (getting my number from the map) to ask for the bathroom codes (which are ON the map)… Or standing directly in front of the bright-yellow sign with directions (again, from which they got my number) to ask what they’re supposed to do. What would the thought-bubble say? “Argh!”—channeling Charlie Brown. (Except at three in the morning, when it says “you’re fucking kidding me.”)

>defining things for kids< I always felt one of my Superpowers was explaining things—using the framework of things the kiddos already knew to describe or illustrate something new. (Ah, I guess I’ve answered that superhero question after all: I’d be THE EXPLAINER! Does a cape come with that?)

>God is always tagging along… like imaginary Dragon< The dragon was my son’s. For years, you could ask him what Dragon was up to and get detailed and inventive descriptions of Dragon’s day. (One of my favorites: Dragon having swim lessons, but having to “do the backstroke with his wings, because his arms are too small.”) Christian was never without Dragon at his shoulder—and somehow that’s a pleasant, solid way to think about God.

>My fortune cookie was empty. I ate it anyway.< …a stand-alone “short-short.”

>saying the word “hashtag” to title a thought or moment< Hashtag-mic-drop. My work here is done.