My wife and I are fumbling around plans to move to the northeastern US. Part of that is researching locales and checking out houses on real estate sites. Some of the interior decor ideas startle us, and not in good ways. We’ve always preferred lighter colors on our walls. Seeing them in cherry red, lemon yellow, and apple green — not infrequently in the same room — takes our breath away. We remind ourselves, it’s just paint.
Several facets strike us about these homes with brightly painted walls. They seem to be older homes, and they seem like they’re in places where cold, long winters are endured. Just saying.
It’s December 8, 2023, Friday. 37 F outside in Ashlandia, where the women are lovely and the men don’t brood, up from 29 F. We were encased in a gothic novel cover a few hours ago; fog, mist, and diminished gray light set a brooding stage of mysterious shadows and stifled sounds. We brought on the fireplace to help the furnace with the day’s early cold moisture, and it was cozyrama.
Our valley’s high will be 46 F. Snow flurries are in today’s weather blend.
Sis is going home from her operation and all was a success. That encouraged The Neurons to light up the morning mental music stream (Trademark bamboozled) with Ten Years After at Woodstock with “Going Home”. It’s a powerful old-time rocker for an early Friday morning before I’d had coffee and my mind segued to their song, “I’d Love to Change the World”. When I used it back in 2019, I wrote,
Ten Years After released “I’d Love to Change the World” in 1971 as a response to the violence, protests, emerging counter-culture, resistant establishment, and war. Gosh, does any of that have any echos in today’s world? Naw, probably just me.
Like most of TYA’s offerings, the song features some powerful Alvin Lee guitar work, which is always good to hear. Beyond the rock essence of guitar and dream, these lyrics, and how they’re presented in the song, plaintive, accepting, and reflective, spoke to me as a fifteen-year-old when the song came out, but still talks to me as a sixty-three-year-old.
I’d love to change the world
But I don’t know what to do.
So I’ll leave it up to you.
I’ll leave that up there, adding that the other line resonating with me is, “Tax the rich, feed the poor, till there are no rich no more.” Guess I’m getting more revolutionary as I age.
Stay positive, fight injustice, remain strong, help others, and lean forward. Give me more coffee and then I’ll do the same. Here’s the video. Gotta go; cat wants in. Rock on.
Michael Seidel, writer 