Category: memories

Friday’s Theme Music

So, confession, again. I enjoy the original Mad Max trilogy. The first is the least of them, but I will watch The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome again and again without too much thought.

Which is what I did this week. Thunderdome ends with Tina Turner singing “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” Which makes sense in that context; they’ve already lost it all. Civilization has been wiped out, and they’re trying to rebuild something out of the wreckage, something more humane than Bartertown and the Thunderdome.

But I wake up and read the news, and think, we need a hero. Seems like any fucking day, someone is going to decide, “Today is a nice day to nuke! Let’s find someone and make a radioactive statement.” Then a shit storm of retaliation will fire up. Anarchy and chaos get stirred in as civilization’s plastic veneer melts, and norms, morals, and ethics get tossed.

(As an ironic aside, I first saw The Road Warrior on VHS while I was on temporary duty with the Air Force in South Korea.)

Yeah, gloomy fucking Friday, right? Not really. A hero can stop all that. I don’t see anyone riding in at the moment, but I’m always an optimistic person that eventually sanity prevails.

So listen to Tina singing in 1985, and think about it. Focus on the song’s words, “Looking for something we can rely on, there’s got to be something better out there.”

Yes, there’s got to be.

 

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Thursday’s Theme Music

I like this song for the call and response, and weird title, but this line always bugged me:

You like a four letter words when you’re ready to
But then you won’t ’cause you know that you can

Really? “You like a four letter words…?” 

Yes, of all the things out in the world that’s wrong in music, this is the piece wedged in my grammar craw. I always believe the title part, “Armageddon It,” was a piece of misheard words, like “D’yer Mak’er.”

Are you getting it? Armageddon it.

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Stabbing

You ever have an annoying epiphany that just keeps stabbing into your thoughts, like that shower scene from the movie, Psycho, complete with the music, despite all the effort you make to shut it out?

Yeah. More coffee?

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

U2 is hot and cold for me. I really enjoy The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum albums, but I was less enthused about others. This song, “Mysterious Ways” from Achtung, Baby, is my favorite track from that album. I like the mystic romantic aspects the lyrics present, and the sharp guitar hook juxtaposed against the beat and bass line. It’s a song that I crank up, and one that I sing to my cats. I sing it to myself, too, as I contemplate the world and my writing. Talk about mysterious ways.

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Monday’s Theme Music

I have an affinity for songs about rain. While some are happy songs (“Singing in the Rain”), many of them are about depression or mental illness, like “No Rain.” I like this particular song, “Only Happy When It Rains” by Garbage, because of the delivery, but also the statement it makes. This is a sad and bitter person who likes being sad and bitter. Hey, that’s so honest, and is such a mockery of so many other songs about being happy or morose, those, “Oh, what am I going to do?” songs.

It just happens that today is sunny, with hype that it’s going to be warmish and springish. There’s not a sign of rain.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

I wasn’t enthralled with Duran Duran and their music. Some of their music hit the charts in a big way, and friends like them, so I was exposed to them. Despite that, every once a song strikes a sweet spot in the day and hangs with you.

So it happened this morning as I looked out the window. It looked deceptively warm and beautiful, deceptively because my weather station warned me that it was thirty-one F outside. But it was beautiful, yet ordinary with its vistas of far, snowy tree covered mountains juxtaposed against the local greenery and blooming plum trees and daffodils. This is our every day view, so ordinary and special. Yet, changes, from seasonal movement to economic shifts and the ways of life and death, were visible from where I was.

So I streamed, “But I won’t cry for yesterday, there’s an ordinary world, somehow I have to find. And, as I try to find my way in an ordinary world, I will learn to survive.”

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Saturday’s Theme Music

My cats were singing this to me last night and this morning. Okay, it may have only seemed like they were singing (or humming, or purring) it because everywhere I went, and everything I did, they were watching me.

Here are The Police with Sting’s composition, “Every Breath You Take.”

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Friday’s Theme Music

I like Oasis, and found myself singing “Wonderwall” to myself this morning.

And all the roads we have to walk are winding
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
There are many things that I would
Like to say to you
But I don’t know how

Because maybe
You’re gonna be the one that saves me
And after all
You’re my wonderwall.

Of course, I was singing it to a cat. Technically, that means I wasn’t singing it to myself. The cat seemed to like it. Of course, they were waiting to be fed.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

I dreamed last night that I was driving a convertible with the top down on an oceanside road. I was alone, and the weather was gorgeous. The road could been the stretch of Pacific Coast Highway between Big Sur and Carmel. I saw myself and the scene from different angles, like I was in a movie montage, but I don’t know what kind of car it was. No one else was seen in the dream, just me, happily driving. (Almost seems like a pretty metaphor for my writing process.) This song, “One of Us,” performed by Joan Osborn was playing on the car radio during this dream montage.

Cheers

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Oops.

You ever approach your car in a parking lot and think, boy, I did a terrible job parking, and look at your car and think, man, it’s a lot dirtier than I realized, and then try to get into your car and discover —

Yeah. It’s not your car.

Happened to me yesterday. Meanwhile, friends told a Palo Alto tale involving two Priuses and a parking garage. One of the cars was their vehicle. They got in it, started it up, and began backing out.

The wife said, “Something’s wrong.” She looked around. “I don’t think this is our car.”

More looking around was conducted. They noticed a tissue box on the back seat.

Definitely not their car.

They pulled back into their spot, parked and exited. But, what the hell? Where was their car? They’d parked right here.

Actually, they’d parked two spots over. A large truck blocked their car from their sight during their approach. Some color and year, just a little different.

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