Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Mood: Thanksthinking
Football and parades are on television. Dawn cracked open a blue sky this morning. Sunshine spilled out across 28 degrees F. It’s 43 and feels like 53, with a high of 48 projected. It gets windy, driving Papi to floofishly beat on the front door window for immediate entrance. His tail highpoints in salute as I let him in. Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah) gives the ginger blade an askance look of pity as Papi passes him.
Thanksgiving memories erupt. Going to my paternal grandparents on cold and gray Pittsburgh days. Greeting cousins, aunts, and uncles seen only four times a year. Sitting at one of several children tables. Warm house, laughter, cigarette smoke, beer, and whiskey sodas. The children are herded into the cellar to contain noise. The problem: there’s nothing to do in that cellar except mill around. One by one, we quietly sneak back upstairs.
Mom and Dad separate and divorce. Mom remarries and becomes host and cook, but man, she can cook. Thanksgiving meals are always delicious feasts around traditional offerings. We play card games after the meal and gorge on leftovers for days.
Basic training saw me in San Antonio. Luckily, I had Uncle Paul and his family there to host me for Thanksgiving. Danny White led the Dallas Cowboys to victory. Later, I’m stationed in the San Antonio area. Uncle Paul’s family still lives there and my wife and I visit them for Thanksgiving.
A Thanksgiving follows in the Philippines, where my crew invites me into their house for an American-Filipino Thanksgiving. We play a new electronic game called Pong on television.
Our tour in Okinawa is broken into two phases: pre- and post-base housing. In the pre-phase, food prep is shared between several houses. We barely fit into one of the small apartments to eat. Once we’re in base housing, we’re in a large, comfortable space where my wife plays cook and hostess in Germany. As we return to America, Thanksgiving gets more complicated. We’re alone sometimes, or I’m on shift working. Later as I become more senior in rank, we become host for young co-workers and friends. We do the same after being assigned to California.
Out of the military and tired of hosting, we go out for dinner on Thanksgiving for a year or two in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Palo Alto, California. My wife has become a vegetarian. An awful attempt with tofurkey is made. Stuffed acorn squash. We end up buying turkey breasts and having much smaller meals. Thanksgiving transitions to Friendsgiving. Friends host others like us and we collect at their homes. The meals feel like the ones I enjoyed as a child. I’ve gone full circle.
I’m going with “Alice’s Restaurant” by Arlo Guthrie for today’s theme music. It’s a staple of my existence, and The Neurons are okay with it. Alice Brock, the Alice in the song, passed away earlier this month. RIP. It plays in the background of my morning mental music stream (Trademark roasted) as I go about preparing to go to Friendsgiving at our friends’ farm. We prepared our food contributions yesterday. Corn souffle, prepared with my wife carefully watching me, is my contribution.
Coffee and I continue renewing our daily relationship. The house weather system says its 50 F out. Plentiful sunshine baths the street. Hope you have a memorable Thanksgiving if you’re participating, and a great day no matter where you are.
Cheers
I cleaned the kitty litter today. The excavated taters were shoveled into a paper bag. I then went through the house with the bag of kitty litter to dump it into the trash. As I went, I held the bag up and called out, “Ho ho ho, merry Thanksgiving.”
I thought it was good symblism for the holiday season upon us.
Mood: Foggedinmemories
We climbed into a Wednesday November 27, 2024. Day before Thanksgiving in the United States. I know a large of people who will be muttering, I don’t have anything to be thankful about.
It’s foggy and cold, 30 F, in Ashlandia, white with frost and ice, but it will get warmer, with the temperature rising to about 48 F. Blue sky can be spied through the thinning fog. I enjoyed cold, foggy days as a child. Encountering days like this in Penn Hills, PA, I’d step outside and let that cold whip my face. I found it exhilerating. And the fog made the world narrow, small, mysterious. It was also usually quieter. People didn’t go out into it. I soon knew my friends wouldn’t go out into it. Some just didn’t want to, complaining that it was cold and foggy. Others said their mom wouldn’t let them. I’d tramp on my own, verifying that the world still was beyond the fog’s envelope, feeling like an explorer. Being careful about your steps were important. Yards dropped off into steep hills and cement culverts lay in wait. I’d sometimes get lost in that fog, and when it burned off, I’d find myself surprised at where I was. I always thought it was fun. Guess that’s why I was considered a little strange, LOL.
Daily Kos delivered some news to my inbox. “If a Woman Dies from Pregnancy and Texas Refuses to Investigate, Did She Really Die?”
The Texas committee that examines all pregnancy-related deaths in the state will not review cases from 2022 and 2023, the first two years after Texas’s near-total abortion ban took effect, leaving any potential deaths related to abortion bans during those years uninvestigated by the 23 doctors, medical professionals and other specialists who make up the group.
Texas, led by Republicans, doesn’t want to know why women are dying in pregnancy-related deaths. I think they know they will find that their draconian fucking laws are killing women. Then they would need to spin that in a way that makes sense, and they know they can’t. Worse, it would provide facts about how poorly the GOP goes about ‘protecting women’. I’m sure if you read this, you recall that Trump declared as a candidate that he would protect women if elected POTUS. Now firm evidence is emerging that the climate, culture, and policies that he promoted is doing just the fucking opposite. Rather than trying to address the evidence, Republicans are doing what they do best: ignoring facts and creating a fake reality by pretending that all is well. “We just won’t investigate those deaths,” they nod and tell each other. “Then they’ll go away.” Dipshits.
Looking out at the fog this morning, The Neurons kept trying to recall a song about fog and confusion. For a while, “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today)” by the Temptations in the morning mental music stream (Trademark hazy). Then, Foghat crowded in, because it has fog in its name. But I wanted to remember that song. Not much of it would come back. I was finally forced to turn to the Internet to restore the details. With about four minutes of searching, the Meat Puppets and their song, “Confusion Fog”, was finally restored to my operating system. A co-worker at PAS in Palo Alto, California, where I worked in the mid to late 1990s, turned me on to them. It’s a unique sound the Meat Puppets provide, more like country from the early 1970s than punk to me, but I like the vocals.
Coffee and I have reached detente. The fog has burned away. Sunshine and blue sky rule the day. Hope you find a better way, to make this one to remember. With fondness, here’s the music. Cheers
Wholly in sync with my election thoughts, esp. those tariffs, mass deportation plans, and the compounded impact it’ll have on Americans.
Floofymoon (floofinition) – 1. A lunar event that seems to make animals more energetic or active.Origins: Internet, early 2000s.
In Use: “Bristol couldn’t see the moon because of clouds (and he never looked up at the moon anyway, and privately wondered why that was), but he figured whateverI it was, it was a floofymoon, because the three rescue floofs (they’d chosen him) were rebellious and rambunctious in everyway imaginable, knocking things off the desk, kitchen counter, bedroom dresser, and bathroom counter! It was a night of madness and then they slept like angels.”
2. Short time when all animals or people and animals are getting along well.
In Use: “Most of the time, Bats and Snacks went at it like Steelers playing the Browns, so there was mega levels of barking, hissing, growling, and running 1440 minutes a day, but once in a while, a floofymoon gently landed, and the dog and cat groomed each other and napped together.”
Awoke from a dream where I was swimming. Underwater with my eyes open, I Iooked up at the water’s surface from below and thought, that’s really scummy water. It was some sort of swimming hole and crowded with people. I broke the water’s surface.
I was young, in my teens, with others also in their teens. A girl my age was watching as I broke the water. She wore a red bathing suit. Grinning at her, I said something but she turned and moved away. I was with four or five other guys but none are memorable. We were talking about naming something. I had an idea about naming something and suggested it to them. They wanted more conversation about it. I told them, let’s get over in shallow water and talk about it, because we were all treading water and talking was difficult.
I tried swimming away then but dropped into the water. I thought I’d hit the bottom but the water was deeper than expected. I let myself drop and settle until my foot hit the bottom, and then kicked off hard.
I awoke groaning. I had surgery on my ankle a month ago and am still in recovery. It was now telegraphing pain and discomfort. I believe that while I was dreaming, I moved my legs and foot in real life, and kicked out, hitting something hard with my injured appendage.
Michael Seidel, writer 