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.

Sa’day’s Theme Music

Talk around the coffee table yesterday was that everyone wants to go see Asteroid City. Terrific cast. Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Tom Hanks. If you’re a Wes fan, critics suggest you’ll like the film. If you’re not his fan, you might want to pass. We are his fans, so we might go. The subject is in the air. Don’t know where the currents will take it.

It’s Sa’day, July 8, 2023. Lots of room left in July at this point. Summer has slowed for us here in Ashlandia, where the day gets hot and the nights get cool. 66 F now, we’re expecting 92 around our homestead by mid-aft. I miss the annual blueberry pickin’. It would’ve already been done, and we’d have pints of fresh blueberries in frig and freezer. Some baking would’ve been done. But the drought and wildfire smoke killed it two years ago. Too hot, too dry, then too smoky. All conspired to take production down. Bushes died, and COVID took the heart out of it for the folks running it. Gone are those 6:30 arrivals at the gate, sipping hot coffee in cold mountain air as the sun pulls itself clear of the mountains and turns on the heat. Gone is the cold feel of wet berries in your fingers and the hunt down the rows for a bush that speaks to you. Gone is the hushed laughing and gossiping, more expected in a church than in a field picking berries, but all seemed to approach it as a solemn event. Well, almost all. There seemed to be one each year who had to be talking loudly on their cell phone while picking berries.

Thinking of those things reminded me of “My City Was Gone” by The Pretenders. Released in 1982, it’s about change. I’d been discussing change with others on a previous evening. I’ve seen change in Ashlandia, a shift in priorities, the decline of traditional events, the rise of doings that don’t matter to us. Our connections with the city and area are loose and breaking. We’re drifting away from it and no longer feel like we’re a part of it. Not as we were before.

I thought of Mom’s place in Penn Hills, PA, after that conversation. Her place has changed through the years, certainly. New siding, porches replaced, etc. Yeah, those physical changes took place, but its essence has remained steadfast. That’s what disillusions us with Ashlandia: its essence seems to be changing. Anyway, Les Neurons wedged “My City Was Gone” into the morning mental music stream, so here we are.

Well, stay pos, and muster the courage and strength to do it again. I’m building my energy to get out there with a strong dose of coffee. It’s what’s for breakfast, along with oatmeal. Here’s the music, and awaaayyy we gooo.

Cheers

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A Space Dream Again

I dreamed again that I was in my home office but my home and yard had been lifted intact to travel through space. I dreamed that, as I had done in real life, I awoke and looked at my open windows. For a moment, in the dream, I worried that my windows were open to the vacuum of space and that all would be sucked out and destroyed. Then I knew, no, a bubble around the house enclosed and protected me. It provided me air and kept me and my household and its members safe even as we flew through space. Stepping to the window, I raised lowered my blinds and gazed out as the house rushed through black space, destination unknown.

I woke up happy.

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Parroof

Parroof (floofinition) – ‘Parrot Floof’: an animal or bird which enjoys resting on people’s shoulders.

In use: “Barry became known as Parrot, because the parroof was always seeking to rest himself on Klein’s shoulder, which wasn’t bad when Barry was a puppy barely larger than Klein’s hand, but more daunting when the Tibetan Mastiff achieved his full growth.”

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Friday’s Wandering Thought

He pulled his car up to the stop sign and stopped. No cars were visible on the mile long slope in either direction. He pulled out, going left, heading toward town. A car pulled up on each road that he came up on, left and right side, and pulled in behind him after he passed. It was almost like they were waiting for him.

A paranoid person could really worry about that.

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Friday’s Theme Music

I’m sitting at my desk at home, sipping hot black coffee. A cool breeze washing over my back through the window. Machine noises are carried in. Sounds like excavating equipment is hard at it in Ashlandia, where wine is made on one side of the valley, and beer is brewed on the other.

It’s a summer morning, Friday, July 7, 2023.

A weary state of mind has overtaken me. Just read about dark waters and the pollution causing cancer to humans and animals. Companies like DuPont do this to communities and fight against taking responsibility, while manipulating laws and lawmakers to make more money, more profits. They epitomize the worse of corporate greed. Unfortunately, they’re one of many. And our hugely right wing Supreme Court goes and guts laws to protect water and people and animals, and the right wing shouts, “Hurray. Freedom.”

That article was atop reading about the proliferation of shootings across the nation on this holiday week. How these murders are enabled by the NRA, with right-wingers heartily going along with it, shouting, “Hurray. Freedom.” Death doesn’t mean much to the pretend ‘pro-life’ party called the GOP.

The GOP party has become the party of minority rule — meaning a rule of one. One person in many GOP led states can complain about a book and have it taken off shelves. One person can take up an automatic weapon and go shoot up a school, a synagogue, church, workplace, neighborhood, resulting in deaths and the ruination of many lives and that party will continue to shout, “Freedom.” They write into laws against others, and shout, “Freedom.”

Naturally, thinking of all of this, my neurons sink back to Janis Joplin’s magnificent cover of the Kris Kristofferson song, “Me & Bobby McKee” from 1970. The lines so many of us remember from the song, the one I was reminded of as we celebrated a nation’s beginning that is supposed to be founded on principles of freedom, democracy, and equality, are, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose. Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free.”

Stay as positive as you can as we endure this era. Try to look forward to what we can build, and don’t be dissuaded or disheartened by those trying to create something other than a land of freedom and equality for all. Or as it’s written in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The coffee is half gone. The breeze is fading and the heat is rising. 71 F now, it’ll be in the low 90s before the sun slips out of view. Time to take this show on the road. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Still In Bed With Mr. L.

Ron.'s avatarSCRAMBLED, NOT FRIED

Too hot for barbecue.
Too hot for peaches.
Too hot for coleslaw.
Too hot for beaches.

Too cool for poetry.
Too cool for words.
Too cool for rhymers.
Too cool for nerds.

Just right for justice.
Just right for peace.
Just write a slogan.
(Did I mention peace?)

Act like a big boy.
Pull up your pants.
Think about changing.
Give peace a chance.

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The Writing Moment

I walked around for days like all was alright. Although I smiled and engaged with others, I was an empty puppet, dealing with anxiety. The writer was agitated. The novel’s finish was supposedly in sight. That was the theory. He — the writer — knew the scantest bit of what was supposed to happen, like saying, you know it’ll snow this month because it’s winter and that’s what supposed to happen. That’s how nebulous it all was. So I kept thinking about it. What’s going to happen? Different avenues were considered and tossed out almost at once for different reasons.

I told myself, “I need to think about this.” No, I answered; overthinking matters, overanalyzing them, is your biggest weakness. Trust yourself, the writer. Trust the muses trying to guide you. Trust the emerging story. Don’t think. Just sit, drink your coffee, and write.

That advice actually worked. Two hours and almost sixteen pages later, what emerged astonished me. Never saw it coming at all. Yet it built on so many throw-away elements I’d embedded in the story as small pieces of verisimilitude.

Trust. Hard to win, hard to keep, even when it’s only with yourself.

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