Category: memories

Friday’s Theme Music

Today’s music choice is a song that keeps stirring during my writing thinking session this week. I’m mulling three different novel ideas. One of them ends up with this song, “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin (1975) in my stream.

I have some vivid impressions of this song on the album that it came from, Physical Graffiti. Nineteen years old, I’d completed basic training the year before, and technical training at the beginning of the year. After that, I was assigned my first duty assignment at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. I met two other guys there. One of them had a Ford Mustang Mach I. He used to play Physical Graffiti on his car’s eight track or his room’s stereo almost all the time. He especially loved “Kashmir”.

Haven’t seen him since 1976, when I left for the Philippines. Wonder what he’s been up to.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

As I landed in Pittsburgh last night, a Smith cover of a Beatles/Shirelles song began streaming. I haven’t lived in Pittsburgh, PA, since the early seventies. I usually visit the city for about five days at a time every two or three years. But it offers that energy that says, home. My soul feels more settled among the neighborhoods nestled among the western PA. rivers, mountains, and bridges.

Here’s “Baby It’s You” (1969), written by Burt Bacharach, Luther Dixon, and Mack David, and performed by Smith.

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Flying today, left for the airport at no coffee dark thirty. Now at the second stop and awaiting the next conveyance. Naturally, my stream turns to flying and jet songs. There’s a lot out there. One immediately springing into the stream was Frank Sinatra, “Come Fly With Me”. I banished that, replacing it with Steve Miller’s 1977 offering, “Jet Airliner”.

Enjoy!

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

I’d been blue last week, you know, a few days of WTF and WTH coursing through me as I read news, experienced disappointment and weariness, took a jaunt down what’s-the-point lane, and pouted a bit in the pity-poor-me cul-de-sac. Yeah, a helluva neighborhood. Other streets include, who-cares boulevard and nobody-gives-a-damn avenue. We share drinks at the I’m-tired-of-this-shit cafe.

Some blues music periodically trickled through the street. Eventually, a song that was released in 1965, when I was nine, gained momentum in the stream. That would be Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. I listened to covers from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Harry Nilsson, and others, good work all, but the original’s rhythm and tone carried me most.

So here it be, from me to thee, courtesy of technology and Youtube. Gotta admit, watching young Bob and his signs puts a smile on my face.

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Just A Dream Snippet

Just a dream snippet remains from last night’s viewing. It felt like the dreams were on, but like the television running in the background while I was doing something else. Not much seemed noticed.

The one time that I remembering seeing the Dream Vee, I had butter on my arm. It was a twenty-year-old version of me. I laughed about that and was talking with someone else, showing them where I had butter on my forearm.

I know my dream age, because my image was lifted off a photograph that I saw not too long ago. My hair was dark and thick, but cut military short, and my mustache was dark and heavy. My wife and I had gone to a shopping mall. At her encouragement, I bought a pale yellow, short-sleeved shirt, the top that you pull over, with a three-button Henley packet. It became a favorite shirt for a few years.

While I was laughing about the butter and attempting in dream-muddled-confusion to understand how I’d come to have this thick, long streak of butter on my right forearm,  I realized how yellow it was. At that point, I heard, spread yellow light over your body.

That’s all that’s remembered.

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Monday’s Theme Music

The sadness of aging is often not what happens to you but the losses of others, from friends who age and disease, to our heroes.

I, and my generation, has seen a lot of our heroes passing away. The inevitability of death can’t be denied. It happens, but we don’t know what goes on past the door. There’s a lot of guesses and conjecture, and some promises and prophecies, but most of us need to wait until we go through the doorway before we find anything, if there is even anything there.

These reflections came as I thought about my dreams last night. I didn’t remember much except one. As I went through the exercise, though, the first lines of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” (1992) entered the head stream.

Oh, my life is changing everyday
In every possible way
And oh, my dreams, it’s never quite as it seems
Never quite as it seems

Those lines reflect my life philosophy. Nothing is what it ever fully seems. We live on spectrums of seeing, remembering, sometimes understanding with a glint of blinding insight, but more often, applying hopeful explanations to what we don’t know, all in efforts to uphold and sustain this stubborn illusion of reality. But then, hearing Dolores O’Riordan’s unique voice in my head, I remembered that she’d passed on, slipping through the next doorway when she was forty-six. She’d drowned in a bathtub. Reading about it now on Wikipedia, I learn her blood-alcohol level was .33. Empty alcohol bottles were found in her room.

So, in memory of dreams and life, here’s today’s theme music.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Sitting in the chasm between writing projects, dealing with submissions, hunting for acceptance, stamping on depression, and resisting regression. I walk along on slippery wet leaves, gold and red, fallen from trees, I hunt the moment and a song, something to sing to take me along.

I depend on music like I depend on coffee, computers, and the net, soft addictions to deal with what’s left, and what I hope to do and be, striving to leave a little self to the world’s history.

Into the mind stream jumps the Kinks, squeezing alongside Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and snippets of other song links, taking me back to decades gone, sometimes to people and selves where I felt like I more belonged. I offer you a fantasy, a song to help you escape, “A Rock and Roll Fantasy” from nineteen seventy-eight, a time when we had more hope and direction, and people weren’t warning us about civil war, strife, and sedition.

More coffee, stat.

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Today’s music choice is dream fallout. This song was in the dream stream and got kicked into the conscious stream after I got up. Now it’s stuck in there on a loop, which is driving me nuts, so it’s being shared to spit it out of the stream.

From 1987, here’s U2 with “Sweetest Thing”.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

A cat and I were admiring the night sky. Well, I was admiring the sky. He was alternatively washing and darting sudden glances at sounds that he claimed to hear. I think he was messing with me, myself.

A full, bright moon obliterated views of the stars but turning, I found some to admire, and toyed with identifying constellations while listening for whatever it was the cat claimed to hear. Besides raccoons, cats, dogs, rats, deer, and opossum, critters like bears and cougars stalk the area.

Still beauty descended from the night. With it came memories of other times when I looked up at a night sky. Most prominently came a time when Bobby and I were on Sicily. Stationed in Germany together, we’d flown down on a training mission. Now trashed, we shared a rallying cry, “The beach at dawn,” and were trying to stay up until that point. It was oh dark thirty, and the Med’s nearby lapping waves was lulling us. Above was a fantastic array of stars, planets, and galaxies, the kind of sight that whispers, “Oh, wow.”

It made me think of “Wheel in the Sky”, a 1978 song by Journey. I sang a little of it. After I stopped, Bobby said, “Oh, man, I really dislike that song.”

Man, did we laugh.

As for reasons why he disliked it, I vaguely remember him mentioning that he thought it too sentimental, sloppy, and shallow. Maybe I’m remembering wrong.

I still don’t know what the cat was pretending to hear. I went back in, leaving him to prowl the night. Maybe the sound he heard was just a promise of something enticing.

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Monday’s Theme Music

Spouse: “I’m hungry. I know it’s early, but I want to make dinner. I need to eat something. Are you ready to eat?”

“Are you kidding? I was just about to get a snack. I’m hungry like a wife.” I laughed. “I mean, wolf.”

“Okay, then I’ll make dinner. What should we have?”

Hungry like a wolf natch invited the 1982 Duran Duran song, “Hungry Like the Wolf”, into the stream. It stayed on a loop as we made dinner and ate, continuing to eat through dessert (pumpkin pie) and watching Saturday Night Live on Hulu, and on through Letterkenny and DCI Banks.

So, here it is, your Monday theme music. Blame my wolf. I mean, wife.

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