Well, hello. Here we are. At the end, the beginning, a break, a start, a finale.
This is New Year’s Eve day. Tonight we’ll count down to a new year.
I mean, most of the western world will count down. Others use different calendars and count down at another time of the year. And we’re only counting down to the end of the Julian calendar year, and not, say, the fiscal year, although some use the calendar year and the fiscal year as the same year. It’s not likely to be your natal year, though. So you won’t be celebrating that new year, nor a wedding anniversary, which is another new beginning that’s often celebrated.
But here we are, celebrating this day that doesn’t quite align with the seasons,businesses, or our lives, but here we are, the masters of our domain.
For this day, I selected a soft, questioning song. ‘The Freshman’ by the Verve Pipe from 1996. It encapsulates a lot of thinking about human nature IMO. Perhaps I’m generalizing by my circle of relationships but this is what I’ll testify that I saw. We began by thinking we knew so much. Then later, we question, what did we really know?
How did we miss the signs?
How could we end up so wrong?
We end up marveling about how we came to be the relationship that we are or were, conducting forensics on our behavior and running audit trails on what was said and who said it. We look for clarity in the murk about what was meant by tone and meaning in the context of gestures that happened before and after.
Some are content to never question. “It is what it is,” they answer with tautological finality. “Ours is not to question why; ours is but to do and die.”
“That’s just the way it goes.”
Perhaps they question but never admit that they question, or limit the circle of who knows about their questioning. Some consider that questioning is a sign of weakness.
They don’t want to be seen as weak.
I’ve always been the questioning sort. I guess that makes me weak. I’m envious of those who find a trajectory of ignorance and remain true to its path, never veering or questioning but riding that comet with the certainty that they have the golden truth, convinced that nothing else other than what they believe can be true or correct.
Older material is housed in my mental jukebox his week. A little more Etta James was played yesterday, followed by Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. But today’s theme song outlasted them all.
I haven’t heard the song, ’96 Tears’ or the group, ? and the Myserians, in decades that I remember. Then, again, as I write, I realize that it’s connected with the same era as my cousin, who appeared in my dream. Some subconscious excavation and exploration is underway.
Here it is. It’s easy to sing along in your head. I hope you enjoy it.
No particular reason for this song today. It’s a classic R&B tune, flows through the head like an unraveling thread, easy words to remember and sing, with an appropriate key and subject matter. It helps you have a legendary singer and group performing it.
Here is ‘Shop Around’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, 1960.
First, the disclaimers, the buts, ands, and the so, and the lists of ‘I know’.
I know it’s a holiday, and actually the day of one of the jewels of the holiday crown.
I know many hold this holiday sacred.
But I like this song.
And it’s been stuck in my head since I heard it on the radio yesterday.
I like this group a lot; their albums were part of my teen-age year go-to rotation. I may have posted this song before. I don’t know; I don’t track what I’ve listed. And theme music can be repeated.
And I like the blues. So, really, I’m just spreading some joy.
So — here it is, the Allman Brothers with ‘One Way Out’. For all we know, the man down there could be Santa Claus.
I’ve probably posted about this before but it is my most favorite Christmas memory, so I remember it again.
I was young, don’t know how young, but I don’t believe I was attending school yet. There were three children. My little sister, now a double grandmother, was the baby. She was at least toddling.
Dad was stationed at the Pentagon, I think. We were living in Virginia. Christmas was coming. We, the children, were very excited. I remember that the basement was finished as a game room. Along the stairs going up was a laundry room. Off that laundry room was another small room. In that small room, my older sister and I found the Christmas treasure. She had actually found it but left me to explore it.
Oh, the toys. I remember my excitement and delight. There were so many toys in there.
Then – disaster. We were caught. Mom came in to do laundry. She was forever doing laundry, transferring clothes from a basket to the washer, from the washer to a dryer, or to lines to dry, then fluffing, ironing and folding, and carrying them off and putting them away, returning with more. That and cooking seemed to consume all her hours.
My sister and I knew our exploration was a risk. My older sister was supposed to be the sentry. Clearly she’d failed and could no longer be trusted.
Mom pulled us from the room, locking the door and lecturing us about not getting anything for Christmas. I wasn’t certain that she was telling me the truth. She was Mom. Mom was my protector and saint. But she always told the truth.
Didn’t she…?
The wait until Christmas was agonizing. Beautiful, white thick snow fell, invigorating our hopes that Santa would still bring us something. I don’t remember going to bed but I remembered waking up. I could hear bells, I swear to all I hold dear. They were jingle bells. Rushing to a window, I heaved it up and peered into the sky.
Frigid air blew in. Thick snow obscured everything. Santa could have been out there but you could never tell with that heavy snow coming down. I tried leaning out to look up on the roof. Everyone knows Santa lands on the roof.
Commotion below drew my attention. The front lights were on, illuminating the snow filled front yard. And there was Mom and Dad going through the snow, carrying things from the car. I think I was excited and yelled something about Santa Claus.
We were noticed then and ordered back to bed. I think Mom returned to enforce the order and close the window.
But, oh what a magic. I still believe Santa was out there somewhere, at least on that night.
I’ve long adhered to a few basic ideas. I want to think them out, so I need to write about them.
First, I have basic cycles. Yes, this is the basic emotional, intelligence and physical bio-rhythms. I know, and can feel them, waxing and waning.
I can tell when they all plummet together; at those times, I can’t get my shit together. It feels like I’m on the verge of spiraling out of control as I bounce through near-calamities, barely avoiding disastrous results.
It is not a good time.
I’ve become more aware of these cycles as I’ve aged. I don’t think they’re increasing in strength but that, as I’ve become aware of them, I’m paid greater attention to them, and from doing so, can sense their changes.
I can tell when they all come together; I feel fantastic and optimistic when they all rise and converge.
But, besides those cycles,I’ve recognized a few more energies within me: dreaming, social, writing, memory and creativity.
After observing my dreaming cycles for the past few months, I saw the pattern today. While I’m a veritable dream machine, the intensity, number and ability to remember them fluctuates. A pattern has emerged of going up and down through several weeks.
Social energy is harder to define. I think it has a pattern as well, but I have a naturally low social energy. Another blogger pointed me toward a post that queried, “Are you empath?” Of their thirty points, I was nonplussed to see how many seemed to apply to me, or that I applied to myself. One of the aspects identified was how being around others drain me. I’ve always known that. I find being with others hugely taxing. I find corners and the edges, where I can avoid the rest and shield myself from their energy and guard my own.
Which ties in with my creative energy. I’ve always been aware ‘on some level’ of my creative energy. I feel it most powerfully when it surges, and have always felt it. There is a cause and effect relationship inherent in it; I enjoyed being creative as a child. Being creative was encouraged in school and by the family. Drawing, painting, musical instruments, writing short stories, they lived it all, so I did it all. Besides that, creative activities could be done in solitude and solitude was accepted for these activities. Pursuing them allowed me to avoid socializing, which drained me. I ask myself, though, if I hadn’t been creative, encouraged to be creative and then pursued being creative, would I be more social? Perhaps so, but in reflection, exercising creativity has always been a joy. I think being creative is my natural path.
Writing energy is a bit different from the others. I’ve coaxed and nurtured my writing energy to develop. It seems like it resides in me but it’s a latent energy that needed to be brought out. Writing energy is harder to maintain because it is even more solitary than creative energy. I’ve learned a few tricks through the years to identify and maintain my writing energy but it seems to have sudden rises and plunges. I’m still learning to see and feel the rises and plunges coming on, and I continue to probe myself for the cycle.
All of these energies, however, are dependent on having enough sleep, eating properly and exercising. When these areas are taken care of, then I’m able to maximize an energy when it rises. Conversely, if I don’t take care of these areas, I’m not able to maximize them. Worse, when I’m in a trough, I feel it more acutely.
Writing and creativity energy are waxing now, so I blame them for this post. See, I’ve been intensely writing and creating. I woke up thinking about Hendrik Lorenz and Chi-particles.
Songs are bouncing through my head. Why today and now?
I don’t know.
They’re happening against the writing, dreaming, holiday, marriage, and life background. Each of those arenas inject their own spectrum of influences. All feel equally strong this week but writing is affecting the others. I’m deeply involved in the novel writing process, so much so that I’m losing track of the calendar and holiday, and I’m withdrawn into my thinking and writing. This, unsurprisingly, triggers my spouse’s deep irritation and some resentment.
I see her point. Yet, that is me, an emotional cripple, and a writer. I write to explore what I think but also what I feel. It leaves me at the crossroads at midnight, waiting to consummate a deal with the devil. I can’t abandon thinking about the novel and its elements of chi-p, Pram, Brett, virii, time-travel and the like. It’s too late for that; the novel’s presence is embedded in my psyche and will likely remain there until the story is fully told.
Yet I look for the leap from my life cycles to the song cycles. I wonder how songs are connected to smells and smells are connected to sights and sights are connected to emotions and emotions are connected to intelligence and intelligence is connected with memory and memory is connected to songs. It’s all wired together but something charges the wires, making some wires come alive, opening and closing switches, and taking me to unexpected places.
Like these songs.
Against the backdrop of writing and living, I’d been thinking about Mike Posner’s song and his lyrics.
I took a pill in Ibiza To show Avicii I was cool
And when I finally got sober, felt 10 years older
But fuck it, it was something to do
I’m living out in LA
I drive a sports car just to prove
I’m a real big baller ’cause I made a million dollars
And I spend it on girls and shoes
But you don’t wanna be high like me
Never really knowing why like me
You don’t ever wanna step off that roller coaster and be all alone
You don’t wanna ride the bus like this
Never knowing who to trust like this
I was particularly hooked on the lines, ‘But you don’t wanna be high like me, Never knowing why like me’. From there, drifting through the lyrics last night, I awoke today singing:
Tell you ’bout a dream that I have every night
Tell you ’bout a dream that I have every night
It ain’t kodachrome and it isn’t black and white
Take me for a fool if you feel that’s right
Well I’m never on my own but there’s nobody in sight
I don’t know if I’m scared of the lightning
Trying to reach me
I can’t turn to the left or the right
I’m too scared to run and I’m too weak to fight
But I don’t care it’s all psychobabble rap to me
Tell you ’bout a dream that I have every night
It’s in dolby stereo but I never hear it right
Take me for a fool well that’s alright
Well I see the way to go but there isn’t any light
That song is ‘Psychobabble’ by the Alan Parsons Project. The album containing the song was released in 1982. I listened to it on cassette tape while I lived and worked on Kadena Air Base on Okinawa.
I can see how the two songs, Mike Posner’s ‘I Took A Pill in Ibiza’ and Alan Parsons Project’s ‘Psychobabble’ fused in my mind. There’s a thread of questioning identity in both and reflections about our minds and choices. It’s more a question of why those songs nestled into the thinking and feeling about everything else this week.
And as I wrote it, I saw it. These songs arose from the morass because I’m conflicted; because guilt assails me. Because responsibilities and desires are torn and my frustrations are running high.
I thought one of these songs should be today’s theme music for my day. I finally decided to go with ‘Psychobabble’ because it’s more recent. See, it’s the latest one that I’ve been singing.
I was stationed with the 7405th Ops Squadron at Rhein-Mein AB in Germany in the late 1980s. This song, ‘Roxanne’ by the Police came out in 1978. The movie was featured in ‘Beverly Hills Cops’ with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in 1984. Yet, here we were seeking it at a fundraiser five years later.
We had an charity unit, the Tipplers. Joining the Tipplers cost five dollars. The Tipplers subsidized purchases that were then sold to members at cost. This things included our squadron coins and memorabilia, and the squadron wine. But this organization was mainly about charity. We supported an orphanage in Spain and another one in Germany. We also supported the annual Marine toy drive for Christmas and a few other charities throughout the year.
I was the Tipplers secretary for a few years, an elected position, at was so at this particular event. Several organizations on base had donated money, time and material to build a booth that could be used for these things. Setting up the booth on a cold sunny morning in the Main Exchange parking lot, we were grilling hamburgers and cheeseburgers and selling them to people entering and leaving the exchange.
I have a habit of singing to myself. On that morning, as I manned the service counter and awaited customers, I began singing ‘Roxanne’.
Except I was doing it like Eddie Murphy’s character in BHC, slightly loud and off key.
And my unit decided to sing along with me.
I laugh even looking back at it. Bunch of people in jeans, jackets and hats, trying to keep warm, grilling burgers and selling them, singing ‘Roxanne’.
Back into the wayback machine for this choice – which puts in mind the fantasy, wouldn’t it be cool to have a wayback machine? “Yes, but the paradoxes, what you would do to time,” naysayers moan. Yeah, let’s suspend logic; suspend physics, quantum mechanics, all the thinking and all the relative theories. Just pretend you’re a child and play with ideas of all the time travel variations possible.
Here’s one.
Just about every house is getting one. It’s the hot holiday gift, and it’s on sale in dozens of places. You, disliking crowds and cold weather, and feeling bored, restless and wanting a change, surf the net and turn to Amazon to check out the offerings and read the reviews. They come up immediately: Wayback Machines. They’re priced at just under six hundred dollars. If you order today, sites claim, “Receive this by Christmas with Free Shipping!”
Okay, but six hundred eggs. Cards are already heavy with spending for the season for toys and clothes, dinners out. But you’re intrigued. You read.
“What’s included: computer interlink, two bracelets, headgear and software.” You skip into the specs and the system requirements, bringing up your system’s information and running a mental checklist.
You have the computer speed, the computer power, an approved OS, the USB ports, everything needed. Well, hell, you should, you blew a wad on this laptop just a year ago for your own special Christmas present because, WTF, you deserve it.
“This is not virtual reality,” a review says. “This the real thing. You are there.”
Yeah, you’ve read the ads, seen them on television during football and baseball games for half the year, talked about them at work while waiting for meetings to begin, swapped information with friends over wine and beer. You know what it’s supposed to be, what it can do.
So you order your Wayback Machine.
Three days later, it arrives. Boxes are in boxes. You’re usually so organized about opening and unpacking boxes, especially things like this, but you’ve become really excited about what it can do.
“Where the fuck is the quick start?” you ask, and it’s right there, the very first thing you pulled out after opening a box, a DVD. There are cables and the headgear, which looks like one of those half-helmets, the small console, the size of your first Roku, resembling a blue and black cigarette back, and the silver and black bracelets.
It’s a clean set-up and install. Breathlessly you power everything up, starting as the program booms, “Welcome,” even thought it’s a soft female voice. Lights are green. The program shows up on your laptop’s screen. You’re sweating and trembling. Well, the heat is running. It’s snowing outside. The wife, children and grandchildren are all out shopping. Then they’re eating somewhere and going ice-skating. You tell your phone to turn down the heat.
Snow falls more heavily outside past the windows. Inside, it’s just you. Your anticipation amazes you. You hope you won’t be disappointed. You put on the bracelets and headgear. The system checks you out. The Wayback program asks, “Do you want to sync with your Fitbit and smart phone?” Hell, yes.
Thirty seconds later, that is done. “Select a year from your life,” the program says.Feeding off a memory, a hope, a dream, you select 1964.
Then shoves now aside. It feels a little violent, more violent than the reviews said it would be like. Your pulse breaks out into something appropriate for finishing a hundred yard dash. Your body –
Oh, my god, you’re back in it, you’re ten years old ago. You’re so skinny. Jesus. It’s amazing how much you look like your grandson, Yuri.
Your young entity is reading a book. The pages swim into your understanding: ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’.
You tear your attention from the page. You’re back in your parents house, Jesus, a place they sold during their divorce in the mid-1970s, back in the wood-paneled game room, built from the finished basement downstairs. In the corner is your father’s bar, positioned back there where he can see the television or play pool. You’re on that leather sofa he and your mother bought for the room. You remember, “This is where the dog barfed,” a disgusting moment that will happen in another year. You won’t even have the dog for a few more months.
There’s the big console TV. Brand new, the huge Zenith can broadcast in color. Taking over your young self – he doesn’t seem to notice – you pick up the remote control, amused at the differences between the technology of your youth, when color TV was new, and the technology of your life, using a computer to come back here. How the fuck is that even possible? You want to explore but you begin carefully, by turning on the television.
There is a show on in black and white. OMG, it’s the Kinks. Jesus, are they still even alive?
Then, releasing everything but enjoyment of the moment, you’re ten and watching the Kinks in your basement in black and white. Everything old is young and new, and you are free to believe that you can change the world.
An usual choice for me today, this song isn’t my favorite from this band, and I don’t consider it their best. It was very different from their preceding work, and I thought of it as a sell-out at its debut. The lyrics draw me more than anything. It’s a bit sad, though, but the refrain, “But I don’t ever want to feel the way I felt that day,” is an empowering theme to sing to yourself when you’ve made a decision, if you’re a romantic.
Michael Seidel, writer 