Author: Michael Seidel

Science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer. Singer (sorry, no shows) & nudist (in my home). Beer, cat, cheese, coffee, pie and wine friend. Left IBM and Silicon Valley for the southern Oregon life but I miss the ocean. We're too far inland. Gotta move.

Wednesday’s Theme Music

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.

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Floofsanity

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.”

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Food Suggestions

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.

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A Short and Startling Dream

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.

1

Tuesday’s Theme Music

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.

 

 

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Floofvice

Floofvice (catfinition) – the things humans say to cats and other animals as help.

In use: “”I have some floofvice for you,” he said to his bored tabby cat. “Don’t eat your fur. Just lick it off and spit it out of your mouth. Just because it’s in your mouth doesn’t mean that you have to swallow.””

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Heard On the Radio, Read on the Net

A radio announcer said she’d read a survey of millennials between twenty-one and thirty-seven years old. The results said that fifty-three percent of them expected to be millionaires and the average millennial expected to retire by age fifty-six.

I read today that millennials are the worse tippers. Ten percent of them don’t tip at all when they eat out. Their average gratuity is fifteen percent.

Guess they’re saving up to be millionaires.

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The Writing Adventure

I slipped into the groove today when I was writing. It’s a fun, satisfying, and rewarding place to be. Words fly and the story unfolds with that amazing sense that I’m transcribing what I’m watching. Finishing is a little sad because it was so enjoyable. I sit for a while, reading what I’ve written, thinking about it, and considering what I know comes next. I’m doing that to kill time because I wrote so fast, with such focus, that most of my coffee remains. I only wrote for about fifty minutes, but wrote fourteen pages, about three thousand words.

My fingers are tired. Looking around the coffee shop, I feel disconnected from this place  and uncertain if it’s real. These people and this place aren’t as dynamic as the characters and setting that I just left, but then, these folks are concerned about seeing plays, the weather, and what to eat. None of them seem intent on saving someone else. Maybe they’re hiding it well.

Good day of writing like crazy. Time to return to life’s mundanities.

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