Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
We’re celebrating thirty years of Microsoft Solitaire.
The news surprised me. Thirty years? That’s all? Why, I’ve been playing that game for half my life. Let’s see…it was introduced in 1990..when I was thirty-four, and I’m sixty-three now, so…huh.
Yeah. Almost half my life.
Masked up and went walking yesterday. Of the ten pedestrians I encountered, one was masked. So, about eighteen percent are masked when out and about, contrary to guidance.
Our little town has a reported ten COVID-19 cases. That’s an unofficial count. The county has had fifty-two cases. Social distancing and sheltering-in-place has been practiced, but most only wear masks when in stores, because the stores demand it. So, I suspect our low count is due to our rural nature, limitations on travel, and luck. I hope it all holds.
While out exercising my legs, I realized I was humming a song and identified it as the Rush song, “Freewill” (1980). I have one friend who was a devoted Rush fan and another who can’t stand Rush because they don’t like Geddy Lee’s voice. The Rush lyrics rushed in with these memories (sorry for the pun).
A planet of playthings
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
The stars aren’t aligned
Or the gods are maligned
Blame is better to give than receive
[Hook]
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear, I will choose freewill
h/t to Genius.com
These lyrics are taken in different ways by different people. (Well, words, right? That’s how it goes with words.) I’ve always thought that the song referred to thinking for yourself. I like to believe I think for myself. I wear a mask because that’s recommended; studies show it helps reduce viral transmission.
Maybe I am sheeple, as non-mask fans charge. Perhaps my twenty plus years in the military conditioned me to obey orders without question. Don’t think so, myself; I was known for challenging orders.
Then again, we select and frame the information and memories that best suit what we want to know as the facts, don’t we? We’re each in our own bubble. We try to control what comes in and goes out but there’s quite a bit beyond our control.
Nebulous? No, complicated. One thing that I’ve discovered as I’ve aged is that I’m not the person who I think I am. My window into myself is as limited as my windows into others. My body is often doing things that I don’t know, responding to chemicals in ways that science knew but I didn’t, and my brain often reacts before I think. We depend on surface impressions and isolated moments to inform our decisions. Some of them are magnified in importance – in our heads – rising on waves of emotions and intellect.
Such complicated beasts we are in a complicated world. Which takes me back to “Freewill” and Rush. You make a choice. Sometimes it seems to work, other times, it seems to flop, but a lot of times, we’re forever waiting to learn the results.
So many diverse dream elements last night. Here’s two of five. It’s too exhausting and time-consuming to recount more. These left the greatest impression. First, the game show.
A flood had wrecked a place. I felt it could be salvaged. Seeing how it could be done, I convinced the network to give me a chance to execute.
Things immediately started going wrong but I kept persevering. I ended up with two basketball hoops at one end. Two young women were assisting. I had a nerf basketball. Then I started attempting explaining what was supposed to happen. As that’s going on, it was announced time’s up. You’re going live.
I wasn’t supposed to be on the air, but there I was, throwing the nerf ball and falling miserably to make a basket. I kept throwing the ball to the hoop; it fell well short. I then decided to bank it off the backboard. That fell well short.
“It can’t be done,” I said. “We need a different ball.”
One assistant replied, “We’ve been doing it with this ball.” Another man stepped up, threw the ball and made a basket.
Everyone was laughing at me. Embarrassment and frustration flooded me. The network said, “Hey, people are watching you. They’re enjoying this. You have a hit.”
The next segment took me into the kitchen. My wife and I were cooking. She put a pot on the stove and turned on the fire. The pot immediately boiled over. Calling my wife, I removed the pot from the stove and turned off the flame. The yellow flame didn’t go off, but spread, going over other food and dishes on the counter, horrifying me. Then the flame went out.
My wife came in. I told her what’d happened but she made a comment, took the pot, announced, “That’s done,” and left, telling me to turn something else on.
I reached for the stove. Yellow flames sprang up and spread. I withdrew my hand. The flames went out. Nothing was burning; it was just flames.
Outside now, in a new section, my wife, friends, and others were talking. My wife had won something and had a large clear bag of stuff. “I don’t know what’s in it,” she said. I suggest we open it and separate it.
We found car parts. Toilet cistern repair kits (which looked nothing like it should, but I knew what it was). I was suspicious, thinking that several piles had been mixed together, but didn’t voice that. My wife took what she wanted and tossed the rest.
A friend came by, complaining that another friend had lost some things and telling me where the other friend said he’d left them. As he went off, I called after him, “Was it car parts and toilet parts?”
The other friend kept walking away. The dream ended.
Floofnosis (floofinition) – Trancelike state experienced by people, particularly pet owners, induced by animals that makes people readily susceptible to the animals’ suggestions.
In use: “Many house pets find themselves forced to use floofnosis on their owners to get more treats as owners become convinced (often by insidious observations made by vets (in the animals’ view)) that the animals are overweight.”
White petals blushing with pink had drifted into piles. Snowflake sized, you wouldn’t think they’d do much, but like snow (and rain), pour enough into a place or a moment, and you start to have something. Add precipitation and time; let sit.
The rain had finally ceased. I’m not one to do yard work in the rain unless it’s critical (what could possibly be critical enough for me to do it in the rain?) so here I was, laboring against a chilly wind. Milky sunshine, lacking any sunshine, made sunglasses a necessity.
I’d had a vision: get out my blower/mulcher and rid my yard of the browning petals, part of the general cleanup. The petals had decided they liked it there. Bunching together and flattening out to endure the rain, they’d developed thick, communal layers. As I pried them off the driveway along the lawn, I found they’d turned into paper.
Nature’s paper. Dizzy implications struck. Something like this had probably been a prompt to paper’s invention. With time, heating, and more pressing, something like the petal paper could be done on a large scale. I gazed back into my imaginary past where people gathered to consider this petal paper and began thinking about what to do with this new stuff. Why, they could write on it with some berry juice.
The petals only come around once a year. What else could be used? I imagined them foraging and collecting new materials, processing and testing them, scaling up their new invention.
Temptations arose: I could treat these petals and try to develop paper. It could be an interesting experience.
Laziness prevailed. I returned to the yard work. After all, paper had already been invented.
Whitefloof (floofinition) – Hard floof rock (flock) band prominent in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, known for their ballads and power chords.
In use: “Whitefloof’s most well-known song among floofs is likely, “Here I Floof Again” (1982), which was a major hit in the U.S.A.”
An old familiar song entered my head yesterday as I did yard work. Written by John Fogerty, the Status Quo cover of “Rockin’ All Over the World” (1977?) kept me coming.
The mind introduced the song toward the yard work’s beginning. Addressing an issue that I had to do, I told myself, “Here we go.” That invited the song’s refrain, “Here we go, here we go,” in. Once invited in, like a vampire, it can do whatever it was; I’d let it in.
It’s a simple rock song, upbeat and happy, a throwback to simpler times. Your impression of simpler times will vary according to your mileage and mindset, but it works for me.
