Friday’s Theme Music
The wheel keeps on turning, and the day is Friday again. February 11, 2022. It’s another stunner of a sunny day out there, already up to 55 degrees F, according to my office weather station. The earth turned us into the sun at 7:13 this morning and will turn us away at 5:38 PM. They tell us it’ll hit 76 in the valley today, which would be a new record. Maybe, but my part of the valley didn’t see the 75 they claimed yesterday. We’re now into a historic stretch of dry weather, a sad promise that the drought will probably continue and deepen this year.
I have a strange one in the morning mental music stream: “The William Tell Overture”. I’m speculating that it’s because of the horses in a dream I had. Though they were tiny horses — smaller than a cat — they triggered a memory of “The Lone Ranger”. That was a television show that played on Saturday mornings in my youth, alongside “Sky King”, “Looney Tunes” (featuring Bugs Bunny and the gang), “Mighty Mouse”, “Tom and Jerry”, “Deputy Dawg”, and “Top Cat”. What glorious morning television! Then, eat fast, dress fast, and bang, out the door, often on my bike, unless the snow was too deep. In every season except winter, my baseball mitt hung on my handlebar, so I was ready and available for any pickup baseball or softball game that I came across.
“The William Tell Overture” is associated with “The Lone Ranger” because it was used as the theme music. A teacher took note of this and used it as a teaching moment, introducing us to classical music. From “The William Tell Overture”, we ended up exploring “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, “Peter and the Wolf”, and many others. She’s the same teacher who prodded me into reading more and expanding my reading interests. I owe her a huge debt.
So, let’s return to those thrilling days of yesteryear. It’s a rousing, heroic melody, ideal for your weekend beginning, weekend, whatever. Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, when needed, and get the vax and boosters when you can. Here’s the music. Hi-Yo, Silver, I’m galloping off for some coffee. Cheers
Monday’s Theme Music
Monday has popped in. Only plans to stay for a day.
Sunrise on this Feb. 7, 2022, came at 7:18 this morning. It was another fine exercise in bright sunshine and mountain blue sky. The impressive color values and clarity could have been featured in a beer commercial. Was 35 degrees F at sunrise but it’s 43 now and we’re under the impression that it will reach 65 before sunset at 5:33 PM. Of course, we were promised 70 yesterday. Only 64 was achieved, so don’t get yer hopes too high.
Today’s music comes from my wife’s exercise class. Conducted by Zoom by her friend operating from the local Family Y, she sets up her laptop on the dining room table and exercises in that room. The dining room is part of the ‘great room’ and that portion affords her the space to move freely about. This morning’s exercise music was a medley of Beatles covers. Well, I was in the adjacent kitchen, making breakfast when “Eleanor Rigby” came on. The morning mental music stream sucked the 1966 song right into its environments. Soon I was singing it as I fed the cats (with some mods to the lyrics for the activity at hand).
I fondly remember the song. It came out when I was ten and my elementary school music teacher had my class singing it as well as discussing its aspects of weddings and loneliness. Some schoolmates’ parents were appalled because *gasp* death and a funeral are mentioned in the song. *What kind of song is that for children?*
Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, get the vax and jabs when you can, and have a cuppa coffee with me. Mine is black and fresh. Here’s the music. Cheers
Saturday’s Theme Music
Night drew back its filmy, star-studded sheet, slowly revealing day. The time was 7:20 AM and the day was Saturday, February 5, 2022. Night had waited eons for this encounter, surmounting fears and doubts to finally look at day. He’d been chasing her for centuries. She didn’t know why. Their movement had evolved into obsession. She wanted to know who it was chasing her. Ironic, but she had originally been the chaser, pursuing another on the other end. He’d been fleeting and fast, always just ahead, beyond the horizon. This one, though, was coming toward. If she could just wait and see…
But the forces that kept her moving, moved her on again.
Our low was 30 degrees F when night attempted to find who chased her. No clouds mar the sky blue crowning the valley. It’ll be 60 here in the dead of winter, twelve degrees above our average high, before night comes around after the sunsets at 5:31 PM.
I have a song from 1966 by The Outsiders, “Time Won’t Let Me”, blasting in the morning mental music stream. Yeah, it’s an oldie but so am I. Listen to that driving rhythm, though, that brass, that rising tension and soft counter-tension. Ah, classic rock.
Why this song today? Don’t know. Maybe it’s something I ate or drank. Perhaps a dream inspired it. Could be modern frustration or nostalgia that called it up. The neurons that could shed light have gone AWOL. Maybe they’re pranking me. I can imagine those neurons giggling and snickering, calling up a song and then scattering, laughing at the mischief they’ve done. Oh, those cheeky neurons!
But, as with any song that’s stuck, it must be shared to get it out of my head, so here it is. Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get yer vaxxes and boosts when you can. Coffee is in hand. I know what I’m gonna do. Cheers
Wednesday’s Theme Music
Rotating and orbiting as the planet has done for billions of years, we now come to February 2, 2022. A Wednesday, it may be memorable to many people for many reasons, but how does it compare to the past trillions of days? Our human lifespans are so short compared to the universe’s life scale that little of what we do is memorable in the cosmic sense. It’s why we narrow our focus down to our personal spaces and calendars. Contemplating the greater scale may well lead to nihilistic conclusions or heavy consumption of coffee, alcohol, or other drugs. Or eating disorders. So let’s just keep focus on our smaller but amazingly impactful days. They are impactful on us and that’s what builds our memories and experiences and skew our emotions.
Anyway, the sun ‘rose’ at 7:23 AM and will ‘set’ at 5:27 PM. I’ll drink some coffee and eat some food. I’ve already done some of the latter. You’re probably doing something similar, eating, or thinking about what you’ll eat, even considering, perhaps, who you’ll eat it with. Here in Ashland, it dropped to 28 F last night. Now it’s 36 with a high of 44 expected for the day. Dollops of congealed gray and white cloud float on the blue sky. We do not expect rain.
I haven’t done any of my daily games. They’ll come soon. I guessed my first word in Wordle in two guesses yesterday. On the other hand, it required all six in two games. Four other games took three or four. Yeah, I like Wordle. Getting it in two is luck. For instance, in the first game when I guessed it in two, the last two letters of my first guess were green. On a whim, I entered poppy as my second guess. That was the word. Yea for me.
Weirdly, I have a song called “If Not for You” living in the morning mental music stream. Bob Dylan wrote and recorded the song. Then George Harrison recorded it, followed by Olivia Newton John. I had the albums for the first two performers. I heard the ONJ version on the radio one day and then turned around and pulled out the vinyl 33-RPM album to listen to Dylan and an eight-track tape to listen to George’s version. Doing that back then in my bedroom in Pittsburgh somewhere around 1973 (all of the versions were out by 1971), I never imagined the technology that would allow me to sit at my computer and pull up the same songs. Trippy, innit? Just think of how it all might be in another fifty years or so, right?
Part of me thinks about memories like this and wonder why it stays so sharply in my memory today that I can look around that room from my vantage here and see and hear the details of my life then. A sliver of me muses that maybe there’s some cosmic entanglement taking place. Another facet of me shrugs and mumbles, who knows?
For today’s theme music, I’ve selected a recording of Dylan and Harrison playing it together. Makes me smile. Stay postive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get the vax and boosters when you can. I’m off for coffee now. Looking forward to it. Here’s the music. Cheers
Sunday’s Theme Music
Sunday. A hazy day, with strips of white clouds torn off and hanging on the blue sky. The sun seems diminished, and the air feels chillier. The dueling high and low pressure systems that’s been delivering our pleasant weather streak seem to be moving. Although it’s 44 F, it feels different. Today’s high will ‘only’ be 53, instead of the sixties that we’ve been hitting. Rain is forecast for tonight. Tomorrow should be ten degrees cooler. For historic purposes, our January average high is 48, and we’ve been consistently exceeding sixty. The sun popped in at 7:26 AM and will pop out at 5:23 in the evening.
Today’s music comes from yesterday. It hit as I checked out the day. “A Beautiful Morning” by the Rascals was released in 1968. Mellow, relaxed, it’s good accompaniment to walking on a nice day, which yesterday was, all sunshine, birds, and mild breeze. But although the sun sets at five twenty something, the mountains block its presence about seventy-five minutes before that. It gets cold in that shadow. While it’s entertaining to look across at the lucky people in sunshine on the valley’s other side, brown but sun-blessed at this time of year, I’d rather be walking in it.
Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get the vax and boosters. I’m getting my coffee. Black, straight up. Cheers
Friday’s Theme Music
Some call it the end of the business week. The last working day. Others call it the start of the weekend. In this 24/7 world, it’s none and all of these. We can agree that it’s Friday, January 28, 2022.
The sun’s golden light silently came up and over the valley’s horizon at 7:28 AM and will take its light and leave at 5:21 PM. Our mild temperatures, a result of stalled systems, continue. Last night’s low was about 36. It’s now 56 and pleasant, and we expect a high of 62. Meanwhile, I’m reading about the bomb cyclone hitting back east, also known as winter storm Kenan, about to do a massive white dump on the U.S. Two feet of snow in places, flooding, possibly hurricane level winds. That, friends, is winter.
I have a David Bowie song fluttering through the morning mental music stream. “John, I’m Only Dancing” was limited in release. Just too risqué for the U.S. in 1972, the very important people in charge (VIPIP) pronounced. I heard it through some small Pittsburgh station who liked rebelling against such restrictions and then I later owned it on Changesonebowie, which came out in 1976, a terrific album for Bowie fans. I could listen to it forever and a day, as Mom would express it.
Here’s the music, and my coffee, right on schedule. Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get the vax and boosters when you can. Cheers
A House Dream
I was split about what I was calling this dream because of its varying facets. WTH.
I was a teenager. I’d biked back to visit an area where I previously lived, to see the friends still living there.
But my friend wasn’t home. Platinum blonde and white, with hair and clothing styles lifted from the 1960s, aunts and older female family friends were there and told me, “Make yourself at home.” I was in the kitchen with them and felt uncomfortable because it wasn’t my place. They scoffed away those protests while they stayed busy chatting and doing things.
The large, bright kitchen was fresh, airy, and uber-modern. Hidden doors and cupboards were everywhere. The refrigerator opened and unfolded like a transformer toy and held an amazing amount of food. My astonishment rabbited higher with every revelation.
One aunt was looking for cheese. Announcing, “I can’t find it, I have to go to the store for it,” I replied, “Wait, no, I know where it’s at.” I showed her some unfolding refrigerator section that she didn’t know about where the cheese was tucked away.
After that, I walked around the home’s bottom level. My friend’s mother returned home at that point. Short and fair, blue-eyed, with pink lipstick and white gold hair cut like Marlo Thomas in “That Girl”, she told me that I was welcome to stay as long as I like. I demurred but walked around because the house fascinated me. The living room had two large, comfortably furnished conversation pits, but the back of the living room had two natural reflecting pools surrounded by cliff walls. I saw my friend’s Mom take her bikini top off and sit back, relaxing and meditating, but looked away, not wanting to impose on her.
Going on through the house, I found a large green lawn adjacent to the living room. No walls separated them. Another front door led into that area from the outside. Two front doors! I was quite impressed and thought, every house should have two front doors. It made sense.
I had my bike now, and pushed it toward the house’s back, where I encountered the ocean. Yes, there was a large beach, reminiscent of central California, inside their house, or the house wasn’t closed in on that end. I couldn’t decide which it was as I enjoyed the crashing waves and different bird varieties.
My friend still hadn’t returned. I decided to head home. I pushed my bike back up into the living room. Seeing his mother, still topless by the reflecting pool, I called out to her, “I’m going home now. Thanks for everything.”
She came to me, putting a tee shirt on as she did, and asked questions about my planned route home. Announcing she was going that way, she said that she’d ride with me, and pulled her bike out. She was doing some shopping that way.
We rode our bikes along a rutted narrow dirt road filled with potholes and talked. She asked me why I liked her. I told her because she was intelligent, clever, charming, and beautiful. I raved a bit about her house, which I thought was amazing. She was distant in reply; I realized she wasn’t paying attention but was focused on riding her bike.
We arrived at a little market where she wanted to stop to buy bubble gum. Small wicker buckets at angles on wooden platforms abounded in a cramped, small stall. She told me to pick out some gum for myself and then said, “Oh, I need to get tongue for the dogs.”
“Tongue?”
She was holding up several packages. “Oh, yes, they love it.”
I was bewildered. “But isn’t that bubble gum?” Then I thought, who would make tongue-flavored bubble gum? I must have misunderstood.
That’s where it ended.
Tuesday’s Theme Music
Sunny and windy, and a little chilly are my first descriptors for today. Add in a weak sun — all things being relative — and a thin layer of fading white clouds, and our current axis and place on the Earth, and you arrive at a winter day that’s 46 degrees F and will get fifteen degrees warmer. Sunrise came for us on this Tuesday, January 25, 2022, at 7:31 AM and the setting will come at 5:16 PM.
I have an old song by the American Breed rolling around in the morning mental music stream. The American Breed had a hit with “Bend Me, Shape Me” in 1968. I was twelve, living in a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA known as Penn Hills. Going to Washington Elementary School. We took buses to and from it every day. My best friends were my cousin, Rick, who lived up the street, along with Bruce, Curt, and John. The five of us hung around a lot in those early years. I had crushes on Vicky, Joy, and Marla, very smart and pretty girls. I was learning the guitar then with dreams of being a rock store, but I didn’t have the focus and discipline to keep playing. I’d rather daydream, read, draw, or play sports.
Ah, good times. Groovy times. Don’t know what prompted all that to spirt up out of my head today. But there it is. Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get the vaccine and boosts. Oh, and watch out for Opposite Day. Yes, today I Opposite Day in the U.S., but don’t take it too seriously, you know? Here’s the music. Guess I’ll get the coffee. Cheers
Monday’s Theme Music
Monday found me. It wasn’t a hard search, apparently; Monday found me in bed, still in dreams up to my head. Told me she’d come back in a while, but I just closed my eyes and slumbered.
It’s January 17, 2022, which means there’s only about nine months until the holiday seasons begin for 2022. It is also Martin Luther King Day in most parts of the U.S. Labeling it a holiday seems misguided, given his spirit of service and change, and his assassination. Many reference it as a day of service, an opportunity to meditate on equal rights and justice, and how to help one another. Meanwhile, the sun rose as expected, striking my sliver of existence with sunshine at about 7:36 AM. Temperatures were hovering around 30 F then. They’ve jumped up as the sun scaled the sky. The temperature is now 47. We expect to feel 57 before sunset closes the sunshine down at 5:06 PM.
I awoke with a Santana medley swimming through the morning mental music stream. Carlos has been around a few years as a talent and has given us some impressive tunes. After sorting through them and singing one to a cat, I’m going with “Evil Ways” from 1969. I was singing it to Tucker in a joking manner — “You’ve got to change your goofy ways, kitty, before I stop petting you.” Just a little give and take between two loving animals, me and the feline.
Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get the jabs when you can. Meanwhile, I’ll get some coffee when I can; I feel a bit sad that I’m dependent on this brew that’s dependent on such energy waste and ill treatment. Sigh. Here’s the music. Take care.
Michael Seidel, writer 