Category: memories

Today’s Theme Music

I enjoy stream-of-consciousness writing. This song, by Suzanne Vega, came out in 1982 but I didn’t become aware of it until the early 1990s, when I was stationed at Onizuka in Sunnyvale, California. Then, after hearing it, I kept trying to learn the name of it, and failed for a long time. People were vaguely aware of it but nobody was certain of who performed it nor its name. Eventually, the Internet came along. A successful search led me to answers: ‘Tom’s Diner’, by Suzanne Vega, and the rest.

‘Seinfeld’ was my favorite show for a long time, and remains my favorite comedy show. I liked Jerry before he was big. When his pilot was first announced, my wife told me, “That comedian you like is getting a television show.” I saw the pilot air on Armed Forces Radio and Television Services through our local channel in Germany. I enjoyed it but didn’t know what happened to it, as we didn’t get the series for a while. Eventually a few episodes of the first half year were shown. Then I returned to America and discovered it was a weekly series.

The connection between the song and the series is Tom’s Diner. Tom’s Diner was a place Vega frequently as a college student and was the setting, as Monk’s, for many ‘Seinfeld’ scenes. Learning that, I thought, This must be a great diner.

BTW, a famous actor is mentioned dying in the song. People figured out from when the song was written and various other clues that the actor was William Holden, someone she’d never heard of. Anyway, after that laborious intro, here’s the song, ‘Tom’s Dinner’. 

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A Chair

It begins with the chair. I’ve always preferred a hardback chair. We have none in our house. Sometimes I see old chairs for sale for a few dollars and think that I’ll buy one to have for this purpose.

But our dining room chairs are okay for my meditative purposes. I began meditating while stationed in the Philippines in 1976. I was very regular and disciplined about it for several years before drifting away from the practice. Sometimes, though, the urge to sit quietly in a chair in loose clothing in a silent room and followed the process comes to me. The practices are familiars and comforting. My mantra, established for me by my guru decades ago, still resonates with my core.

Meditating cleanses and focuses me, relaxes and calms me. It lets me listen better and think more clearly. It instills patience and distills my angers and frustrations while reinforcing my will and determination.

I only meditate for twenty minutes any more. Upon emerging, colors are brighter and softer, more vibrant but more separate. I see and hear more clearly. I usually meditate after making my coffee but before drinking it, as I like that smell swirling around me as my breathing deepens.

I’ll sometimes have an out-of-body moment. The first time it happened, six months into meditating, startled me, as I was suddenly looking down on myself from above. More often, my body will do small corrections, and feeling them will bounce me into conscious thoughts and out of the meditative state.

I always end by standing up and stretching. I always feel renewed. It’s not unsurprising to end a session and discover one of my cats contemplating me, just sitting and watching. I feel like the process attracts them.

Or maybe they’re coming over to see why I’m not moving, and are trying to determine if I’m still alive.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song came out of a 1975 Art Garfunkel album, ‘Breakaway’. My wife and I loved this album. We owned it on cassette and it was a regular road trip album.

There were a lot of road trips in those days. I had completed basic training and tech school the year before. Now, in 1975, I was assigned to my first duty assignment, HQ AFLC at Wright-Patterson AFB. My wife was still in high school in a neighboring state. I broke Air Force rules to jump into my 1968 Camaro and drive down to see her. She moved in with me, and we married in August of 1975.

‘Breakaway’ is rich with memorable songs for us. ‘The Waters of March’ is the one selected for today’s theme music. Written by Antonio Carlos Jobim about the rainstorms of Rio de Jainero in March, it’s been covered by many. Wonderful versions are out there. But I selected the Garfunkel version for its personal connection.

A mellow, meditative performance, it’s a good song to stream in your head while walking around in the rain.

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

This song popped into my head yesterday while cleaning in the bathroom.

I don’t know why.

I rarely understand what causes the selections that stream into my iBrain for me to watch, hear and think about. It’s a bona fide mystery.

But it’s a fun tune, a bit older, of course. I know it from the movie, ‘Earth Girls Are Easy’. That was released in 1988. Let’s see, call it a romantic, science-comedy with musical overtones. It was an astonishing cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, Charles Rocket, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, with others.

This song is ‘Cause I’m A Blonde’, by Downtown Julie Brown.

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Today’s Theme Music

I was sent on a secret mission this morning. I’d tell you about it but I assume that if you’re reading this, you understand what secret means. Perhaps I’ve erred.

Naturally I needed secret mission theme music. The world abounds with such music but I dropped back to an early favorite. The TV show, ‘Secret Agent Man’ with Patrick McGoohan, played in the US in the mid 1960s. Dad was back in the country for a period then, and I remember watching the show while visiting him at my grandparents’ house.

Here it is, that 1966 hit, Johnny Rivers singing ‘Secret Agent Man’.

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Personal Windows

Friends, prompted by curious, started grilling me about some of my past life the other night. Those were my super-secret military days.

Since their questioning, I’ve drifted along currents of wonder about living amidst change and how small our windows of knowledge truly seem. Change is fast and constant. The military commands I worked in thirty years ago no longer exist; the weapons systems introduced during my career are being retired. Bases have been shuttered. They’re trying to retire the nukes I once controlled (a good thing, in my mind). God knows what’s going on in space.

I ended up in a medical start-up after my military career, first in sales operations, running customer service and spewing out reports about sales trends. We were part of a nascent business, per-cutaneous transvascular coronary angioplasty, moving into stent delivering systems for coronary applications and radiation therapy to cope with re-stenosis. After that, I moved on to another company in search of ways to cope with chronic total occlusions.

Life found me in Internet and computer security in my next phase, and then onto analytics. Whatever. I drifted through choices, jumping through windows when the opportunities arose, and was fortunate to have someone on the other side of those windows to pull me in and show me around.

The windows in our lives are always so small. They open and close so quickly. Technology accelerates the speed with which the windows open and close. For examples, consider how we now conduct war versus how it was conducted in decades and centuries past. Consider how we make, experience and enjoy music, and how we entertain ourselves. Yet, each window and moment is treated as though this is a permanent solution. Consider the plight of the coal industry, for example. They think it can be legislated back but technology and market forces have moved past them.

We, as humans, can only see and understand so far, and we argue and debate about what we see, what it means and what we need to do about it. Yet, each person’s life is defined by their personal windows. These are shaped by their culture, heritage, education, genetics and personal experiences, yes, but they’re also shaped by much larger forces. We often barely glimpse the shadow of such forces.

Sometimes – no, hell, often – I think we’re going around understanding the world backward; we believe reality shapes us, and we investigate how we shape it.

Maybe we shape reality. Maybe there is no past or future, there is only the window into Now.

Jump through it and keep on going.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Weird dream last night, featuring ear wax. Ear wax! I was so thrilled that this ear wax came out of my ear, like a quarter teaspoon of ear wax. The way I acted in the dream, excited and pleased, it was like I’d found a bonanza. And my friends and family with me were also very excited, gathering around to look huddle and wonder with hope, “Is there more in there?”

Oddly, too, the dream, or circumstances, lead me to awaken with a song in the mental iPod. It’s a song that means little to me, so I pulled it up, looking for connections to my earwax dream or my life. Found nothing. I blame the song’s presence in my head to serendipity. Between the song and the ear wax, it’s a strange morning.

But in thinking about that song and the dream and their connections with my life, another song arose in the playlist. I like it better, so here it is.

Say hello to John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band presenting ‘Instant Karma’ in 1970. It’s a song I sometimes hold onto as a hope and a wish when I see people mistreating, killing, abusing and cheating others.

Oh, but to dream.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

I’ve decided it’s time to upgrade. In accordance with that decision, I’ve replaced my mental jukebox with a mental iPod. Yes, I’ve gone digital.

That required me to transfer all my music from the old jukebox to the iPod. That required a lot of time. Although the mental jukebox was old, it still performed pretty well, only occasionally not playing something correctly. It was pretty full, though. Mom loves music and so does my older sis. The two were feeding me songs from the beginning. They influenced me to continue the pursuit of listening to music throughout my life.

This might have a tangible effect on these posts. I may end up repeating some songs and memories. Sorry about that. These things sometimes happen during upgrades.

The song chosen today was influenced by that realization. It also features a performer who’s had a long, impressive career. This selection strikes me as apropos for these backslide sidestep shuffle politics that seem to be permeating global legislatures. I know you’re reading with bated breath and asking, Seidel, what’s the song already?

I’ll tease you no longer.

Well, maybe one more paragraph. This song was enjoyed while I was living in Mountain View, California, commuting to work at PAS in Palo Alto for my first employment after retiring from the Air Force. I retired in November, 1995, and started working for them in December, 1995.

Here it is, then, from 1998, Shirley Bassey and the Propellerheads with ‘History Repeating’. 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

My CD collection is a decent size. It’s amusing to talk about these things in the days of iPods and streaming music via iPhones and smartphones. I have two CD players; one is a Sony turntable style that houses two hundred CDs. It’s full. It plugs into a six CD Bose speaker that’s part of my home theater. Then I have another couple hundred CDs stacked and shelved inside the cabinets. The CDs replaced the cassettes, eight tracks, reels, and thirty-three and forty-five RPM records. Being an organized person, the CD collection on the is alphabetized, although blues, Christmas and symphony collections have their own sections. I have a print out of an Excel spreadsheet that tells me where a particular CD is located in the Sony turntable.

Today’s music comes from an album over thirty years old. It came out while I was stationed in Europe. I developed an immediate and long-lasting infatuation with it. It ended up joining albums from Who, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan, among many others, as one I can listen to again and again. It’s part of the Sony CD turntable. It’s CD number 98, part of section four. The album is not for everyone but that’s the nature of music, isn’t it? One person’s joy revolts and disgusts another.

Here is ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, from ‘The Joshua Tree’ album by U2, 1987.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is another one of those heard while racing around the SF Bay area on the work-shop-errands-eat-sleep-repeat treadmill. Interested in words and unfamiliar with the artist, I kept listening for it and searching for information about her. Of course, this was around 2005. Google and other search engines were strong. They were less about shopping and marketing and more about getting information back then.

I’d already learned the singer-songwriter was Scottish and that this was her debut. Eventually, I found more about the lyrics and then discovered her comments about them.

She said, “’Black Horse’ is inspired by old blues, Nashville psycho hillbillies & hazy memories,” says KT. “It tells the story of finding yourself lost on your path, and a choice has to be made. It’s about gambling, fate, listening to your heart, and having the strength to fight the darkness that’s always willing to carry you off.”

Ah. I get that from the song. Hope you do, too. Here is KT Tunstall with ‘Black Horse & the Cherry Tree’. 

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