I’d fed the cats, done some dreamflecting, emptied the dishwasher (and put the stuff away), and was making breakfast (and writing in my head) when some neurons took a sidebar to discuss today’s theme music. Without any apparent deliberation, they decided it’d be “American Woman”.
Why? “That’s why,” they answered. My neurons can be so immature.
So now, “American Woman” is rumbling through my head. Which version? Oh, several. Lenny Kravitz led off, but the neurons switched back to the original version by The Guess Who (1970), followed by the Butthole Surfers’ cover (which is always interesting). In the end, the original led the way.
Here we go. I selected several of the versions as theme music at least once before, so this is a redux, but the neurons have spoken. Here we go.
Some people still believe COVID-19 is a hoax. Even as they’re hospitalized and intubated, they can’t believe they have COVID-19, according to nurses in several states, because COVID-19 is a hoax. Surreal.
But it’s getting real. For many people, it doesn’t become real until a family member, close friend, or celebrity has it. Well, read the news. Another Pentagon official is positive, and another U.S. senator. Actor Ben Platt was positive. Do a net search and you’ll discover more. NFL teams are experiencing it at an increasing tempo. The Vegas Raiders have at least eight defensive starters on the COVID-19 list. The Steelers have several, while several others passed the protocol and can practice and play again. The Denver Broncos announced, no more fans in the stands after this Sunday. The NFL said that all teams must use intense COVID-19 protocols. That includes masks, distancing, limiting occupancy, and using Zoom for meetings.
The fatality rate and positivity rates are both climbing. A NYTimes article points out that there’s not a single U.S. state or territory where COVID-19 is declining. We now experience over two hundred thousand new case a day, and it’s increasing fast. More governors are ordering mandatory masks, shutting down activities, and limiting gatherings. Except, in South Dakota, of course, home of Sturgis. Although they’re facing the nation’s highest positivity rate and fatality rate, and has become one of the nation’s most intense COVID-19 hotspots, the governor still dismisses taking any actions.
And superspreader events still take place across the nation. As a for instance tale, there was a wedding in Ohio on October 31st. Of eighty-three guests, half are now positive for COVID-19, including the bride and groom. Three of their grandparents tested positive, with two grandparents ending up in the ER. Yeah, I understand that you want a special day for your wedding. It’s a celebration, but c’mon, man, have some sense. They did try, providing masks and hand sanitizer liquid, but as the bride was walking down the aisle, she realized nobody was wearing a mask.
Meanwhile, out in hard-hit El Paso, they’re trying to find workers for the many temporary morgues that they’ve set up. They were using convicts for the job.
Writing continues to entertain and satisfy me, so hurrah for me, right? Yeah, that’s my little ray of sunshine.
Some days, I just cannot write fast enough. A scene takes maybe a minute to enter my head and bloom. Dialogue, setting, action, characters, it’s all there. It takes twenty to thirty minutes to type up such scenes, trying to get all the moments right.
Getting the moments right means finding the words. I often just hammer it out, then return, correcting pacing and tenses, adding and refining details, and aligning the arc. That’s about the only way to put it.
Thanksgiving in the United States is coming upon us, and we’re preparing. It’ll be the two of us at home, a huge break from the last several years. Good friends have been including us in their celebration. It’s always a good time. There will be a Zoom Thanksgiving cocktail party this year. It’s better than nothing, right?
For food, we’re doing an early Sunday morning Trader Joe’s raid. Many options were investigated before deciding on this path. TJ’s ‘vulnerable shoppers’ time begins at 8 AM. We plan to be there by 8:15 with our list in hand.
Contemplating our plans fires Thanksgiving memories. I was in Basic Training in 1974. Fortunately, my Uncle and his family lived nearby. I was authorized to go spend Thanksgiving with them, and watched the Dallas Cowboys and Detroit Lions play. For Wright-Patt in Ohio, in ’75, we drove home and visited with family. When I was serving unaccompanied in the Philippines in 1976, my co-workers invited me to their house, and I had a great time. Paying it back, my wife and I often included single or unaccompanied personnel in our T-day celebrations.
Memories stack up by bases and countries: Onizuka in California, Kadena on Okinawa, Rhein-Main in Germany, Osan in Korea, Randolph in Texas. When we were stationed at Shaw AFB in South Carolina in 1985, we headed north three hundred miles to my wife’s family in WV. A few hundred more miles, and we were at my mother’s place in Pittsburgh, PA. When I retired and we lived in Half Moon Bay, we joined in large Friendsgiving celebrations, just as we’ve mostly done here in Ashland.
All of these places and years are memorable, though; all of them. They were different places, different people, and different experiences, but all enriched my existence.
Need more coffee, as it’s time to write like crazy, at least one more time. Have four scenes circling in my head. Time for them to land on a page. Have a better one, and please wear a mask.
World seems almost black and white out there with this dense fog smothering it all. No chameleons lying in the sun, because there’s no sunshine. Just the bleah.
So, this rocking, simplistic song with this driving beat seems a fine song for a COVID-19 Friday. Run runaway.
Once again, a cat is inspiring the theme music choice.
Today’s song arrived with a cat’s request in false dawn’s weak light, “Hey, feed me.”
“Eat kibble.” He’d awakened me, so naturally, my bladder said, “Well, as long as you’re awake, you might as well get up and pee.”
I eyed the kibble bowl as I wobbled past. “There’s kibble.”
Sitting down outside the bathroom, he waited. When I came out, he gave me a look with hungry eyes. “Please, sir, I am oh so hungry.”
I sighed. “Come on, youngblood,” a nickname for Papi, my young ginger.
Oh, the joy he displayed. Tail shot up as he dashed past, purrs and mews filling the space.
So here it is, “Hungry Eyes” by Eric Carmen, 1987. I’m probably as familiar with it as much from the movie, “Dirty Dancing”, as the radio. Starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in the prominent roles, “Dirty Dancing” was a large hit. We ended up with the album of songs from it, so I heard it alot.
It’s raining this weekend. I like a nice, solid rain, which is what we’ve received. Brew some coffee and chill with relaxing rain sounds. I shouldn’t be surprised that a song about rain entered the mental stream yesterday. That it was Bob Dylan and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35″ surprised me.
I was finishing up shaving and such when I thought out of nowhere, what’s Bob Dylan’s real name? I came up with Zimmerman but took a few more seconds to remember Robert. And then the song began.
I used this song as theme music back in October, 2017. Its mocking, rambunctious nature always entertains me. The song came out in 1966. I was ten, so the song passed under my radar. But when I became aware of it a few years later, I thought, yeah, this is about getting high. After doing a paper for a pop culture class years later, I appreciated the play on words, how people are throwing stones at others for imagined slights.
Pretty appropriate for these years, in which stones are slung for every damn thing, right? Have a good one. Wear your mask. Enjoy life.
You ever think, “Boy, I could use somebody to…” do X? Complete the sentence. Fill in the blank.
I haven’t thought those words in a long time. When I managed people, I often thought that. Juggling resources and priorities was a constant. Not too infrequently, it ended with, “Boy, I could use somebody.”
This came to mind yesterday, after Veteran’s Day in the U.S. As a veteran, I have many veteran friends. Photos of them back in the day rolled into Facebook.
So I was remembering when with some of them. One in particular was an intelligent but withdrawn guy when he worked for me. He seemed like he lacked self-confidence, that he could be a lot more than what he was showing. Another section came to me and said those words, “I could use somebody…”
This guy was the choice. The officer with the need was dubious, but my guy blossomed. From that, you could see the change in him manifest. It was something to behold. Leaving the military after eight years, he went into tech, where his talents and intelligence were applied and rewarded.
The phrase itself, “I could use somebody”, cropped up when I was shopping for cat food during my day out. A woman said that to a store employee. That then triggered a foray into mental writing as I went about my business, creating a scene that I wrote after I returned home, centered on the phrase, “I could use somebody.”
Lot of disparate thinking to reach today’s theme music. But each time the phrase, “use somebody” passed through the mental stream, my strangely wired neurons said, “Playing ‘Use Somebody’ by Kings of Leon, 2008.” So, really, this is about getting a song out of my head. I enjoy Caleb’s enunciation of the phrase in the song. It’s a good song to sing when it hits the radio and you’re alone in the car. Just sayin’.
We drove over to Medford for some errands yesterday. It’s just four Interstate exits away, less than ten miles as the Mazda rolls. While there, songs about being in a city topped my mental stream during quiet moments.
I like cities and their energy but admit, I think of them as a good place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. The city’s energy steals too much of my energy in general — it’s the people, you know. But Medford is not a large city. It’s a very comfortable experience outside of the current COVID-19 restrictions and limitations. Not bad at all, though were were there for only two hours, including the drive to and from.
Amazing number of excellent songs about cities and being in the city. An old Joe Walsh favorite percolated in. “In the City” (1979) was originally by him and put into a movie, The Warriors. Joe joined the Eagles. They liked his song and included it on their album. Now, you often hear it attributed to the Eagles.
What interests about the song is how it’s a soft reflection of the city not being a very nice place. Yet the refrain, “In the city,” is a gentle, wistful wind throughout the song. Well, that’s how I hear it in my head.
Hope you have a good one. Wear a mask, please. Cheers
Several times a month, a song or fragment hits my auditory stream and lingers. Some call this an earworm. I call it an annoyance.
Once in a while, I post those as my theme music to get them out of my head. It seems to work. Sometimes, though, the stuck song isn’t deserving of being the day’s theme music.
That’s the case today. This song isn’t the theme song, but I’m sharing it with you. It’s from a famous movie, so you might now it.
Yes, it’s “The Thermos Song” by Steve Martin from The Jerk (1979).
I don’t want it for today’s theme music.
As The Jerk came out in 1979, I started thinking about that year. While placing myself in that moment, my mind had a perverse idea, introducing The Smashing Pumpkins’ song, “1979”, from 1996, in my head. Oh, that brain, what a rascal.
It’s been over a year since I used “1979” for a theme song. (Yeah, I looked it up.) Why not, I thought. 1979 was a simpler time for me. Not for others, of course. As we slide over the time spectrum, time and life, and their impact on us, shift. Sometimes things skip off his like a stone skimming across a still pond. Other days, news whacks us like an asteroid taking the Yucatan Peninsula.
For me, though, best memories are not the ugly ones, but the sweet ones where I remember laughing with friends, getting ready to go out, and generally worrying about things other than drought, war, pandemics, politics, and climate change. It was like a day of freedom from stress.
Not all people have such stress-free days, but I’ve had some. Some of them were back in 1979. Mind you, that wasn’t a stress-free era. We still lived under the threat of nuclear war. Mr. Jimmy Carter was POTUS, and the Iran Hostage crises was the story of the day. But besides all that, I went to the movie theater with my cousins and wife in San Antonio to watch a movie called The Jerk.
I watched some NFL football yesterday. As I feared, the Pittsburgh Steelers played down and made it too tight as they played the Dallas Cowboys. The Steelers pulled it out, but damn; do they need to take it down to the last second almost every week?
The Seattle Seahawks and Tampa Bay Bucs weren’t able to redeem themselves, though, and went down. Injuries, penalties, miscues, bad luck, good luck…
Which is where today’s music arrived. A 1980 song by Kurtis Blow, “The Breaks” employs wordplay and a refrain that I enjoy. “These are the breaks. (That’s the breaks. That’s the breaks.)”
Yeah, that’s often how life goes, like a football bounce, chaos theory in action, fractals made real. These are the breaks.
Former Vice-President Joe Biden has been declared the winner over Trump. Mr. Biden will become the next POTUS.
Many have cried, “At last, the four-year-nightmare is over!”
Yeah, no.
I’ve seen this movie before. Just when you think the Terminator was dead and Linda Hamilton was safe, here he comes again. When you finally believed John McClain had vanquished the terrorists, one more shows up with a final effort to shoot and kill him.
That’s where we’re at in this election scenario. It’s not time for the credits yet.
Trump embraced America’s worst ideals and created a nasty legacy. Raising conspiracy theories and outlandish challenges to science and common decency to new levels he’s enabled the same in people who would otherwise be mostly decent, friendly, capable members of society.
He wasn’t alone, no. Fox News remains out there amplifying the trumpshit. Trump’s GOP enablers, like Mitch McConnell, were re-elected. The slug who screwed the United States citizens countless times during Mr. Obama’s terms, who has stonewalled legislation, remains in office.
Trump and his minions will be out there on Twitter and Facebook, continuing their shameless litany of absurdities and outright garbage. And Trump is still in office for a few more months. As petulant, petty, hateful, cruel, and shallow as he is, I don’t expect these next few months to go without incident. He’s also not likely to accept the results, but continue going to court, demanding recounts, and posting lies about the situation. And his supporters will lap it up and amplify it. So, no, it’s not over.
Chris Rea had the perfect song for it, though. Here’s his 1978 hit, “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)”.
Fool if you think it’s over ‘Cause you said goodbye Fool if you think it’s over I’ll tell you why
Michael Seidel, writer 