Chad Parenteau's Lost Causes, 9-20-23

The Seinfeld Edition

I’ll tell you the Chad News First

This is going to be a quick newsletter because not much happened of note with me this past week. I had personal matters to attend to for much of the weekend and stayed to myself with very little writing getting done. Some of that time was spent putting other things in motion to announce later, but otherwise not much going on.

Mostly stayed indoors when I wasn’t running errands. When I did run them, I was looking at the plants outside people’s homes. Many of the hydrangeas I passed were in bad shape. This year only one popped up outside our home. Last summer all of ares were fried in the sun. Despite getting a lot of rain this year, it seems the damage was done.

I wonder how many more years it will be before certain plants we take for granted are no longer able to grow where I live.

When I was in school, I gave a presentation on homelessness in America. I started by saying the homeless population totaled an estimated one million. I got that from a book.

This was in the eighties. When Reganomics threw so many poor and mentally ill out in the street, my entire generation had to be introduced to the very concept of homelessness.

And yet, the teacher was a smug prick. In the middle of my presentation, he spoke out, “Isn’t that a little high Chad?”

Twenty years from now, I can imagine that same kind of smug prick editing a poetry journal and writing back to some older poet, “You never hydrangeas in you backyard! They don’t exist in Massachusetts!”

Stone Soup Poetry

Last week’s Stone Soup Poetry with Dexter Roberts was amazing. Read the Stone Soup Croutons from last week, “In This Episode.”

Stop by tonight as we feature Randy Barish. Next week, come back for the final September feature, Richard Spisak.

Oddball Magazine

Click here to read poetry by Sandra Wyllie, Atullya and edo strannikov. Props to the visual artists Edward Michael Supranowicz, Luis Lázaro Tijerina and Jennifer Matthews.

Thanks once again for Monday’s timely acrostic sonnet Mike Mesterton-Gibbons. We also had a great 1-2-3 combo of comics by Geoffrey Fallon, Anne Skove and John “Hoss” Taylor Jr. We had our first poem columnist Jason Wright, but I’m not sure if James Van Looy (It’s All One Thing) will have a poem this Thursday. We should have both Janet Cormier (Bamboozled No More!) and Bruce Wise (Wise Words) on Friday, with that surprise I promised and didn’t deliver on two weeks in a row finally popping up to end the week.

Oddball Show Presents The Week That Was

A deeper look at last week’s Oddball Magazine. We’ve done two shows in the new format, and it’s working well. Jason Wright and I try to have fun. Give it a listen.

Miscellaneous

Check out my website and get a lot of the news before it winds up in this email.

Check my blog out for exclusive content and poetry news not related to Stone Soup.

Check out my Medium. Excited to be working on a comics-related essay.

My latest TikTok is up. More coming!

Consider my Patreon. Hoping to complete my Tuesday Poem series by October.

Thanks for reading down this far.

Chad