Day: December 2, 2022

A Little Thanks

I belong to a beer group. Tongue in cheek, we refer to ourselves as Brains on Beer because the original founders were smart individuals, usually retired engineers, physicians, scientists, and professors who met to drink beer and talk science, the arts, and technology. Most of the original group passed away. Now there’s me and some worthy replacements, but you know what’s said about any organization that will have me… Anyway, each week we collect donations after we pay our beer tab to fund local STEAM projects. (Yeah, it used to be STEM.) Throughout the year, we keep searching for causes to support. We received a nice little thank you letter from one of our 2022 projects this week.

Makes me smile into my beer.

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Friday’s Wandering Thought

His name is Michael. It’s a common and popular name in the U.S. That mildly irritated him on a tiny, personal island of thought. Sharing a name made him less special, knowing how silly such a response was. But there it was.

He couldn’t stop himself, though, from looking up and seeing what Michael was like whenever his name was called in a coffee shop. He frequently wanted to tell them, “Hey, my name is Michael, too.” The other Michaels usually looked like confident and intelligent people. He wondered how they would view him.

His complicated thoughts about his own name often made him chuckle to himself. He wondered if the other Michaels felt the same.

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The Writing Moment

The muses were busy. A blizzard of epiphanies stormed him. Insights about scenes, connections, story, character development, plot. Now the challenge was to hang onto them, find where they go in the book, and get them written down.

That’s always his fiction writing’s challenge. Discovering what’s to be told and telling it. Many writers agree with him: that’s the challenge. Well, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it, wouldn’t they?

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Friday’s Theme Music

Visions of heating bills danced through my head. They warned us it was going down to 22 F last night but my system said it only declined to 29 and it’s already surged to 0 C (32 F). A high of 39 F is eagerly anticipated.

Welcome to December 2, 2022.

A hazy shade of winter dominates the blue sky. A smattering of snow on the grasses and trees tell on the season but the streets and walks are clear. It’s a Friday. Sun splashed some amazing merlot and tangerine through the morning medley before the sun cleared the horizon at 7:21. Daylight will have its place until 4:39 this evening, then we’ll likely see another orgy of clouds and color as the sun salutes us and leaves.

Got a little old rock n’ roll in my head, an offering from Bruce and the E Street Band. The song is “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” from way back in the early 1970s. I think Der Neurons found it in my cellar memory when I was addressing his ginger lordship, Papi. Papi was expressing a desire to leave the house through the door to go outside. I was telling him that he probably didn’t wanna do that because of cold and snow, but you know cats. So I let him out and back in, once, twice, thrice, as the floofverb says animals should do. I guess Les Neurons picked up on that whole door vibe. I confess to not understanding how The Neurons work. We just live together.

Song starts slow and then takes off. It’s a recording of a live rendition with young musicians. Hope you hear or look up or know the lyrics. Like many Springsteen lyrics of that period, the poet in him has listeners asking, “Wait, what did he say?”

Stay positive and test negative. Coffee is ready to warm my gizzard and infuse energy into my being. Hope your Friday is a wonderful day free of illness and woes. Here is the boss and his band. Cheers

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The Formal Garden Party Dream

I was hosting a formal garden party at my estate. Apparently I was quite wealthy and famous. It was catered and I had nothing to do but make decisions.

Servers were in white jackets and black pants. They were a humorous good lot. Attendees, which were mostly women, wore formal gowns. Jewels and pearls abounded among them, along with bare shoulders. Men were in suits or tuxes. Settings were elegant, with fine china and gold flatware, beautiful place settings around large round tables, linen napkins, flowery centerpieces, and lots of crystal for wine, water, champagne and other drinks.

Meanwhile, I was dressed in old shorts and a shirt, and sandals. I was lending my place and my name but I wasn’t specifically attending. Everyone else was working there or paying to attend. All proceeds went to charity. I was to give a talk but that was to come later.

They were asking me to sign things, an impromptu effort. Sign this for so and so because it would mean so much to her. Things kept going hilariously wrong with that. This pen is red ink; do you want me signing this in red ink? We had no proper paper to sign so I was tearing small bits off different things and trying them out. Then I put in the wrong name. Misspelled words. Silly things. I laughed at all of it.

A special dessert was brought in on large silver trays, to be served later. A young black man, tall, good-looking, and my friend, was overseeing this. After he had them set up, he picked one up; he gave me a nod and winked. I selected a yellow rose, took the dessert from him, and then walked through the gathering. Everyone noticed and watched, growing silent as I randomly chose a woman at a table and gave her the rose, along with the special desserts, which just looked like a small baked thing to me. She gasped in delight and others begged me to give them one, but I walked back out in my shorts, shirt, and sandals.

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