Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
I’ve returned to a place where I once lived. Reconciliation becomes a an algebra problem. There are so many unknowns. Solve for X.
The undertones remain the same. Nothing changed in those frequencies.
A song begins because I’m a nostalgic romantic.
Glenn Frey wrote and recorded it. I learned it in 1985.
A suddencat is a wily beast moving with the sound of fog without a whisper of wind. You’re there, alone, when a suddencat abruptly leaps onto your lap, slides across your calf, or sits down, asking questions with whiskers and eyes.
Ah, today, we have a classic. Ray Davis took his music seriously. I’ve done one of the Kinks’ songs before, but it’s time to bring on ‘Lola’. I vividly remember talking about this song with my sister and my neighbor, John. Sis was two years older. It was a warm summer day in 1970, and we were in our backyard in Penn Hills, PA.
I later saw the Kinks in concert in Germany. We were in a pink marbled concert hall. It was so damn elegant, it was amazing, washing the Kinks concert experience with a surreal veneer.
Catschief is feline behavior that causes annoyance or difficulty, but often with a humorous slant, such as coupdepaws like stealing your piece of cheese, pizza, or sock, or entertaining themselves via cattipping.
Today’s song is right out of the American pop-rock scene of the nineteen seventies. It’s by a Canadian group who had a handful of hits and multiple excellent albums.
That’s the Guess Who. Love those rock band names. Today’s song is ‘American Woman’. People have argued about the lyric’s intentions since it came out. I once read one of the song-writers quoting John Lennon to the effect that a song’s meanings emerge after they’re recorded and that someone else needs to interpret them. I was writing a paper comparing the writing styles of Kurt Vonnegut and Mario Puzo at the time. I’d read some comments by them about how readers find meanings that the writers never intended. That doesn’t make those meanings wrong or illegitimate.
I was beginning to see and understand that in literature, art and music. People find their own meanings. It’s always fascinating then to hear people argue about these things as though they’re absolutes, and not shaped by own lives and dreams.
And it reminds me of eating food. People are always insisting to others, “Try this, it’s great, you’ll love it!” But tastes buds are also tastes, aren’t they? Sure. Try convincing others of that. They take your disagreement as a personal insult.
That’s what many Americans did with ‘American Woman’. They disagreed with what they saw as the song’s meaning and rejected it. I’ve had people tell me that they hate this song, because it was about hating America to them.
I’m working on the chapter, “Ice Cream Headache”, which is part of the science fiction novel, “Long Summer”. I’ve been writing about the cheeseburger and beer ice cream that Carla once made for Brett.
Unlike many things in their society, her concoction wasn’t compiled, but was handmade. As an expert in Earth culture with an emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first century in America, she likes sampling ‘the real thing’. The cheeseburgers are one inch in diameter, with real cheddar, bacon, onion, mustard and pickle, as Brett likes them. After freezing them, she made ice cream with Venus Mon IPA, folding the frozen cheeseburgers into it, “Just like they did in state fairs,” she says.
She scoops it into a malt cone ‘that she made herself’. Brett restrains himself from his observations about her use of bots. She’s always using bots but claims she does things herself. In a flash into the future, he knows he eventually tells her this, causing a rift that can’t be mended.
Before letting him sample the ice cream, Carla asks if his taste buds are turned off. See, the sensory input from taste buds in the future can be controlled so you never taste anything foul by your standards. But she wants him to have the real experience, not something filtered by his taste buds and his preferences index. He lies, telling her, “Of course, it’s off,” while checking with his systems to turn it off. Then he samples the ice cream.
The sample is not the one I described, but another one, a moderately dark chocolate flavored with bourbon, with small chips of bittersweet chocolate, nuts, and marshmallows and swirls of salty caramel. This is one of the problems with being shuffled through moments of now. One thing is being experienced and then details change.
For some reason, after writing all of that, I now want a cheeseburger and beer, followed by some ice cream.
Time to go eat.
I was a racing fanatic when I was young. I followed NASCAR, Formula 1, Indy, Can-Am, Trans-Am, SCCA amateur racing, and sports cars racing, such as LeMans.
Nineteen seventy-three was a disaster for the Indy 500. Rain delayed the race. Several fatalities happened in practice and in the race. Among them, Swede Savage was killed. ABC Sports was showing the race. They put a montage of images together about the race and used James Taylor’s song, ‘Fire and Rain’, as the soundtrack. Gordon Johncock, in a Patrick Racing Eagle-Offy, was eventually declared the winner.
At the same time, I’d moved out from Mom’s house, and in with Dad. He’d been in the USAF. We lived in Ohio, at Wright-Pat, but he retired, and he and I moved south, to West Virginia. We lived with someone else for a bit until we got a place. It burned down within a month of moving in. All our possessions were gone. Among the items burned was the check to the insurance company. Nothing was insured. It wasn’t a good start.
I’d had a crush on a girl, Susie, and she liked me, but moving away ended all of that. The song ‘Fire and Rain’ had a line, “Susanne, the plans they made put an end to you.” I took that personally when I heard that song during that tragic race. I knew Susie and I had changed. Never very socially engaged, in a new school with a curriculum that was a few years behind what I knew, I became more withdrawn.
I knew the song from its nineteen seventy release. That’s when Susie and I started hanging out together sometimes. Its connection to the tragic and disastrous nineteen seventy-three Indy 500 and my life changes shifted the way I think about that era, and that song. Yet, the song is a comfort. Although I emerged more withdrawn, I think I emerged more thoughtful, mature and independent. But, now, from the vantage that times’ passing can give, I see, too, that I became more emotionally detached, and I remain like that.
This is not what I thought I’d share today. I guess it just comes from where I’m at in the moment.
I dreamed I was flying.
Well, flying was my first impression. After awakening, I realized that I sometimes traveled through the air as though I flew, but I never saw wings on me, nor did I see me flying in classic Superman fashion. In fact, sometimes I had the impression I was teleporting, perhaps by mental acuity.
The thrust of it was that I was again, as in other dreams, going around and finding pieces to put things back together. This time, it was cars. Huge chrome bumpers, grills, hoods, basically exterior body parts, were sprawled across an otherwise green and pastoral countryside. The weather was sunny, with a few clouds, but warm. The parts were not heaped but each was separate on the ground. All were in excellent shape. Most were from the nineteen fifties, it appeared to me – yes, the decade I was born.
Seeing a part with my amazing vision that I recognized, I would go to it, sometimes by flying, sometimes just moving myself. I’d collect the part with happiness. That’s the gist: I would find a part, go to it and ‘collect’ it, but I never knew what I did with them. That wasn’t shown.
I awoke befuddled. Leaping up, I looked around, trying to understand where I was, beginning to work under an urgent impetus that I needed to recharge. As I was saying that to myself, I was asking myself, “What the hell are you talking about? Recharge what? How?”
Yes, how, I was trying to remember. How did I recharge? Where did I plug in? What did I plug in? What buttons needed to be pushed? What systems were used?
Astonished and horrified that I couldn’t remember how to recharge, attempting to remember how I’d recharged yesterday, I went into the bathroom to relieve my bowels, I slowly accepted that I wasn’t supposed to be recharging anything, that I’d had an anxiety dream. I’ve had these dreams before but they’re as rare as lightning in a snowstorm. Funny enough, during the dream itself, I felt fantastic and happy.
It was only when I’d awakened that I felt anxious. The entire experience provided me with much to ponder.
Meowfluence – The effect wherein the meowing sound cats make replaces words in song.
In example: Michael was meditating, only to discover he was under the meowfluence. Meow had replaced his mantra, and he was now chanting the “Meow Mix” cat food commercial jingle to himself. On the other hand, he felt relaxed and a little drowsy now, but had a slight craving for a small treat.
I’m starting five chapters today:
Virus
Everything
Nothing
Ice Cream Headache
The Others
With each, I’ll put up the chapter title as a place holder. I’ll add the date beneath it in parentheses, and then a summary of what the chapter is about. I’ll highlight this in yellow and add <TK at the beginning, to help me remove it later. I know what I see and hear as the opening lines for each chapter, and I’ll add those lines. They will probably not be the first lines to the chapter but they’re a nugget around which to build the rest. After that process, one of those chapters will more sharply call, so I’ll take it up.
I always use <TK as an editing tool. Sometimes it’s a placeholder to insert some piece of necessary information, or to clarify or rewrite a passage. Sometimes I know the nugget, the critical piece that I want to immediately write, but know that I need a bridge to the rest of the novel, so I’ll insert <TK and explain what’s required.
I started and wrote five chapters in parallel before. Why five? I’m not certain. It’s not anything magical nor planned. Ideas are germinating. These all sprouted at the same time. I want to cultivate them so I can press on.
I suspect eight or nine chapters remain to be written in ‘Long Summer’. That includes the five I’m starting today. I suspect that means I’ll write about thirty thousand more words. I won’t bet on whether I’m right but the beginning of the end of the first draft is cresting the horizon.
Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Michael Seidel, writer 