Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
I’ve experienced the same while novel writing. You’re thinking hard about scenes, chapters, and plots, and you just turn something subconscious on. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. Things you hear and see flow in and connect with what you’re working on.
My wife and I read that coffee lemonade is the latest hot new thing. Sadly, no businesses around here are offering. People that I speak with are not even aware of it.
It’s sad to live in such a backward and remote part of the world. I guess I’ll need to travel to a metropolitan area to sample coffee lemonade.
Quick check: what alcohol should be added to coffee lemonade to give it added zest?
It’s what you get when you start out feeling fantabulous but walk two miles in the heat and end up drenched in sweat.
Soap is great for washing up in the shower, but you ever notice that if you get it in the wrong place, it turns on you?
I was thinking about transitions that I’ve gone through. Like, I left the military, bought a restaurant, started going to college, got sick, lost the business, and went back into the military.
It was a hell of a year.
So, back in the military in 1980. It was a time of terrific music. I was stationed at Randolph AFB in Texas. I worked in the Command Post in the building that was called the Taj Mahal.
My uncle and his family were there, along with an aunt and her children, so we had a lot of family support there, and lots of good times. The time we were stationed at W-P AFB in Ohio and that time at Randolph were the only times we were near family.
We were only at Randolph for about twenty months before heading to Okinawa. But it was a good assignment, and there was some great music to enjoy.
Floofsanity (catfinition) – 1. Internet slang for crazy cat behavior. 2. A cat who drives you crazy with their behavior.
In use: “In the latest iteration of floofsanity, he’d left his sock drawer open before he left the house. When he’d returned, he found the cat had taken all of his socks out of the drawer and scattered them around the house like a surreal variation on an Easter egg hunt.”
Have you ever been reading something, and the characters are eating, and you find yourself wanting what they were eating?
In a book I was reading, the main character had oatmeal and avocado. Now I want to try oatmeal and avocado.
I also enjoyed the many times in the book where the hero showed up and handed others coffee, and they were all, “Coffee!” It was instant, but still.
I rocked up from sleep to look around.
The house was quiet. Everyone, even the cats that I saw, were asleep. Everyone except me.
3:25, according to my Fitbit.
The dream remained a fresh flow in my thoughts. I’d been at some ill-defined place. I remembered green grass as well as glass and cement. Awake, I thought, school, office, cemetery, mausoleum, hospital? None quite fit.
Wherever and whatever it was, I was there, along with other people. Everyone else was on their backs with their arms at their sides. I thought they were asleep. I didn’t know any of them. I thought there were eight people.
(And there was eight in my dreams again, I noted in a sidebar. Eight frequently comes up in my dreams.)
I thought everyone was sleeping but as I didn’t hear snoring, I began suspecting that they were dead. None of them moved.
It was cool. I was fully dressed in jeans and a polo shirt and shoes. Everyone I saw was dressed, too, and had shoes on. As I walked, I realized that I was in a small section of this place. Turning a corner, I saw thousands more people like that, all on their backs, not on beds, but on what seemed like stretches, like the EMT uses. There were orderly rows and rows of them.
I was shocked and concerned. Nobody was moving. Trying to puzzle out what was going on, I looked for documentation or equipment that would provide clues, but there were only massive rooms with white walls, shiny tiled floors, fluorescent lights, ceilings with acoustic tiles, and windows that revealed manicured grass lawns and a bright blue sky outside.
I started checking. Are these people dead, or…
It seemed like they were breathing, but everyone’s eyes were closed. Nobody snored. I touched a woman and a man and found them warm. Nobody seemed injured. I didn’t recognize anyone. Most were white and middle-aged. There were men and women. I didn’t see any children, and it was absolutely quiet. The only noise I heard the entire time was the sound of my steps when I walked.
Panicking, I thought, maybe this is a ward for a disease. Maybe these people were being quarantined. As I thought these things, I looked around and concluded that it wasn’t a hospital, but I didn’t know what it was. That didn’t mean that these people weren’t in quarantine, because they could be using a school or office for it because something big had happened.
Struggling to understand it, I tried recalling how I arrived there, and failed. I retraced my steps to see if there was a space where I’d slept. Unsure where I’d been, I kept walking and searching for where I’d started. I didn’t see any empty beds. Nor did I see any doors.
Realizing that, I thought, there’s no way out, and then thought, how did I get in here, then?
Then I awoke, sweating and alarmed. It all seemed so ill-defined that it bothered me.
It took some time before I went back to sleep.
Today’s music comes from a confrontation with a spider.
We captured and identified the master bath spider, verifying that it wasn’t a black widow. We relocated it anyway, because it was large, and it bothered me to stick my toes into its web in the mornings.
This morning, I addressed the big black widow web out back. Just off the patio, she used a bush and the hose cart as her anchors. I took it down with a broom with a promise to return with some peppermint spray. Spiders, it seems, don’t like peppermint spray. As we don’t kill spiders, we periodically spray peppermint to drive the numbers down and clear some areas.
As I went back in thinking about it, I imagined the black widow already planning to rebuild. I believe when she heard about the peppermint spray, she said, “Hit me with your best shot.”
Cue Pat Benatar. It’s stunning to think of this song as almost forty years old. Just imagine when our rock classics reach the century mark.
Fire away.
Michael Seidel, writer 