Thursday’s Theme Music — Fighting Fires

Ashland, southern Oregon — Thursday, June 25, 2026.

Cooler today — just 85 F — but the summer mix of blue sky and sunshine continues without interruption in our valley.

I haven’t been watching the World Cup games. Not my kind of football. But I dreamed that I was working with a gregarious black guy, trying to sell team jerseys to fans. He’d come into a large shipment of them at a discount, but he didn’t know what sizes he had. All had been manufactured outside of the US, and they weren’t using the labels familiar to me. I was using the Internet to help him size them so he could sell them.

Results are not back from Mom’s tests yesterday, except they have confirmed she doesn’t have a yeast infection. My sister, Gina, related that Mom was complaining about the sunglasses Mom was wearing: they were too big. She went on a rant that Frank probably let his sister, Joan, wear them, because Joan has a big head. She finished, “I could just kill Frank.”

Gina replied, “Mom, you do know that Frank died last year, don’t you?”

I feel like I’m in a variation of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. In that 1989 song, he recites court decisions, celebrity names, historic events, and pop culture fads and trends that took place between 1949, when Joel was born, to the current date in 1989. As I read the news, there’s a Billy Joel rhythm: Supreme Court rules, shooting leaves x dead, earthquakes, wildfires, flooding, climate change denial, Trump texts, Trump promises, Trump lies, Trump claims, distraction, distraction, distraction, fake news, elections, corruption, facts, truth, history, Epstein files, Epstein ballroom, tariffs, Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Strait of Hormuz, Musk, Venezuela, Ukraine, Russia, China, ICE in the cities, economy, jobs, prices, prices, prices, crisis, crisis, crisis!

Trump didn’t start the fire. But he threw gasoline on it and gave it oxygen. He didn’t start it but we’re gonna fight it.

The song had a lot of airplay back in the early 1990s but has since faded. Not one of Joel’s better offerings, the chorus was pretty familiar to everyone because of the airplay.

Despite those thoughts, The Neurons have the Allman Brothers performing “Statesboro Blues” in my morning mental music stream. A favorite song and cover, it has a jumping, thumping sound to it which always kickstarts my energy.

I hope you have great day, summer or winter, wherever you inhabited for now, and that all goes well for you and yours.

I’m off to my appointments. Cheers