It’s the fourth day of the year, Jan 4, 2025. Satrda. 38 degrees F. Cloudy. Blue sky has been banished. The meek, subservient sun does little to warm and light us. We’re prepped for another day of rain with a high of 48 F. But, corresponding with my sister in Plum, PA, it’s not bad. They received a few issues of snow yesterday and then dealt with a snow squall. Monday is forecasted to be a heavy and cold snowy day for her. She’s worrying about patients canceling and travel issues. So, rainy and gloomy will suffice.
Today’s music is “Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers. Came out in 1968. I was twelve. The song became a hit and was rotated on all the regular pop stations heard on transistor radios and car radios. With all that exposure, I remember it well. Don’t know why it’s in my morning mental music stream (Trademark old). I slept heavily last night after feeling pretty gloomy yesterday evening. Didn’t have any cat visitations that I know of. No wind or wife disrupted my Zzzs. No need for visiting the bathroom during the night, and nothing amiss with my foot and ankle broke into my sleep. Only one dream floats around my noggin, and tambourines aren’t featured. The song just rose up as I went about opening blinds on another dull day, feeding cats, and making breakfast and coffee.
I enjoyed this video. Such a black and white throwback, including a sexist commercial for ‘Neet’ hair removal cream. Look how young Dick Clark appears. Check out the clothes and dancing. Trippy.
Coffee and I are doing our daily two-step. Hope your weather and fates are kind to you wherever you are. Here’s the music. Cheers
It’s raining again. Alexa notified me at 8 PM (or 2000 hours if you prefer) that it was going to start raining near me, starting around 12 AM and going intermittently until 8 PM. About 1.3 inches of rain was expected.
I was listening to the rain hitting the roof, pinging off the vents, splattering the windows, and asked, “Is it raining now?”
“Rain is expected to start at 9:30 PM.”
“Alexa, feedback. It’s 8 PM and it’s raining now.”
Rainy, gray, it’s warmish again, 50 F with a high of 52 F suggested and a low of 46 F. The gray light slanting in through the windows does nada to brighten my mood. Fog swirls around mountain pines and peaks. Dark and pretty in a tragic “Wuthering Heights” sort of fashion.
A perusal of news headlines has me opimistic for 2025. (Yes, that was snark.) Things like the costs of owning and driving a car are jumping. This was a California story. The average price paid for a new car was over $47K. Now it’s jumped to over $52K. And insurance is climbing as well. Again, it’s California, but what happens in California usually ripples out. And, this is before any PINO Trump tariffs are issued.
Then a jolly story covered how the Alum Rock school district is closing or consolidating schools. Oh, boy, let me quit reading that.
Another story told me eggs, already pricy, are going up because of the bird flu. And a related news article informed me that animals were dying from being infected with the bird flu from eating tainted meat.
Next came a recounting that those anti-vaxxing efforts in Louisana are having an effect. Louisana is seeing cases of the flu climb. Surprised? No. They’re one of two states in a ‘Very High ILI’ category. The other state is…Oregon.
What? My state. WTF? Chasing that down, I learn, gosh, vaccinations for COVID-19, RSV, and the flu are trailing data from last year, which was already trailing data from the year before. So the flu, etc., are up.
Grrrrrreat. Yes, that is sarcasm.
I got out of the news before I turned to the national and international scenes. Mood was cratered enough, thanks.
The Neurons already had music picked out and going in the morning mental music stream (Trademark sagging). “Forty Days and Forty Nights” is a 1956 blues number by Muddy Waters. The Neurons had it in my head solely on the line, “Sun shinin’ all day long, but the rain keep falling down.” Yes, it hasn’t been forty solid days if I judge on empirical evidence; it just feels like it to the wife, me, and others who engage in conversations about the weather. The ground is saturated. Rivers and creeks are up. Flooding is possible. On the possy side, our drought seems over for our part of Oregon. Other parts of the state remain abnormally dry.
Could be worse, I remind myself. We are not snowbound, etc.
The Forty Days version I selected was a Steppenwolf cover. Mom bought me the album, Steppnwolf 7, for Christmas in 1970, when the song and I were both fourteen. It has sentimenal attachments to me, see.
Okay, coffee and I have worked out an arrangement for this morning whereby I’ll brew it and pour it into my mouth and swallow. Seems like I’m doing all the work here, but I benefit from it. I don’t think coffee gets anything except perhaps some emotional satisfaction from helping me through the day. Here’s the music. Cheers
It was a dark and gloomy night but dawn broke as a bright, sunshiny day. Rain clouds knifed in during the intervening hours between now and then, thwarting the sun’s stalwart efforts to give us light and heat. Today is Frida, December 27, 2024. We’re surfing a 54 degrees F day, which t’aint a bad temperatures. The winds that scoured us last night have retreated. A kittenish breeze teases the trees.
Dreams rocked my night. All of ’em were quite personally oriented. Awakening from them had me thinking long and hard about them and what they meant, if anything. That’s often the issue with dreams: any meanings which your brain could be sharing gets wrapped and warped by confusing elements. Do they mean something, or are they just neurons gaming your consciousness?
Ran into a friend this morning. Well, not literally; we encountered on another. We’d not seen each other since October. I may’ve mentioned in posts here that I had ankle surgery in October and then immobolized by the recovery process. He didn’t know that and wondered where I’d been. I presented him a situation précis, with the main point being, that’s life. Afterward, walking away, The Neurons brought up a Dire Straits fave of theirs, “The Walk of Life”, into the morning mental music stream (Trademark aging). I originally associated the song with sports, especially baseball. Listening more closely, I recognized that it was about someone singing songs, and several references to rock and roll songs are heard throughout. An interview with Knopfler, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist behind the song, later confirmed this. Now I associate the song with anyone trying to make good through strife, keeping on toward a goal. This is life; you do the walk.
Days of 2024 vintage are trickling away. 2025 is coming up like a full moon over the trees. Time to rock on one more time. Here we go with the music. Cheers
Today is Thursday, December 26, 2024. Five more days to the year. A year stamped with historic and personal significance. Wonder how 2025 will compare at this time next year.
Gray. Rainy. Chilly. Call it 44 F. Light rain. This is winter in Ashlandia. Snow hugs things above three or four thousand feet, looks like at a glance. Down here, we’re stuck in the gray. Sunshine muted through gray clouds from mountain to mountain to mountain. Gray clouds as far as I can see, looking down into the valley. And rain.
Yes, I’m complaining.
The cats are not, however. After a night of howling wind and incessant rain, Papi dragged in his wet Butter Butt and found a warm space to sleep off the day. Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah) had already set the example, staying in, finding a comfy zone, nodding into slumber.
Late post as I spent the morning writing. One of those days when the muses arrived early. The house was quiet and the coffee was hot, so. Seated myself at the laptop and added 2,500 words. Excited by the twist added. See if it stands revision, editing, and further thinking.
Today’s music selection was made by The Neurons after a friend’s comment yesterday. A decade older than moi, she’s not known for her colorful language. But there she was making a risque, off-color comment at the Christmas bash. As we reacted and laughed, she turned as red as Santa’s outfit. Net result: The Neurons have “Dirty Mind” by the brilliant Prince playing in the morning mental music stream (Trademark filthy).
Well, deep breath. Dredge up some positive energy. Here we go again. Let’s start with the music. Cheers
My wife and I were in the car when the ‘Charlie Brown dance music’ came on. This is that lively piano- dominated music supported by a bassist and drummer used in so many Charlie Brown specials. When the music plays, all the Charlie Brown characters develop big smiles and happy feet.
I guess I should backtrack to clarify that I’m talking about the music used for Charlie Brown cartoons. Charlie Brown is a round-headed kid who is part of the Peanuts gang. Peanuts was a syndicated comic strip created by Charles Schultz. It features Linus, a precocious Biblical scholar who believes in the Great Pumpkin and always has his security blanket alongside his sister, Lucy, the psychologist who charges $.05 to dispense advice, who is also known to entice C. Brown to kick the football, only to yank it away at the last minute. There’s also Sally, Charlie Brown’s sister. Athletic Peppermint Patty and her friend, Marcie. Pigpen, who generates and attracts dust and dirt. And Schroeder, who plays the piano and admires Beethoven. That’s just the nucleus of the group. There’s also the world-famous Beagle, Snoopy, who sleeps on his back on top of his dog house and pretends to be fly a Sopwith Camel as a WW I flying ace, and Snoopy’s buddy, the bird called Woodstock.
That’s the nut of it. Going back to the music, when it hit us in the car from the vehicle’s stereo, my wife and I laughed and talked about how evocative it was. Energetic, it wants you to immediately move in response to its beat and imitate the Peanuts gang. I thought the jazzy tune was written by a jazz musician but had no idea who it was. Had to look it up when I got home and learned it was Vince Guaraldi.
The song’s correct title is “Linus and Lucy”. First heard by the public in December of 1964. It’s a cool tune, Charlie Brown.
Friday morning, December 20, 2024, has arrived. It crowned us with fog, wind, and surprisingly warm temps. While weather services claim our temp is 46 F, my system say 56 F. I went out there to check and agree with my system. Meanwhile, in the space to think and type that, I turned around and the fog was gone. A white slate has been dropped onto the valley. Sunshine squeezes through where and when it can.
We went around town doing stuff yesterday. People were frequently overheard or encountered remarking about the short day. We’re all eager for the solstice to arrive so more sunshine will fill our days. Just a few more nights to endure.
So much news to digest and comment upon but my brain is warning, no, slow down. Back away from that toxic stuff. But watching the Musk call the shots for the inept GOP as they try to game the system to favor PINO Trump threatens to plant a permanent scowl on my mien.
Meanwhile, a fellow blogger reminded me of The Specials, and a terrific ditty they wrote back in 1982. “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum” is gleefully playing in the morning mental music stream (Trademark sedated). A Canadian in the U.S. military who was a dozen years older than me introduced me to group and this song. The of us, along with a third, and the four children — two boys and two girls — were camping out at Okuma on Okinawa. End of a good day, a fire going as the Pacific lapped at the beach a few hundred yards away, sipping cognac, he played this on the boombox. It’s the perfect song for now. While it’s a mellow, lazy bouncy flow, the words are ideal. To wit:
The Cowboy has told us to go nuclear,
who am I to disagree?
Remember, back when they wrote this, Ronnie Reagan was the Power. Now with PINO Trump, we have a perfect crowning line:
Cuz when the madman flips the switch,
the nuclear will go for me.
Between Ronnie back then and Putin and Trump now, that’s a real fear. Putin doesn’t give a shit and PINO Trump is too empty-headed to understand the consequences of going nuclear. But the song goes on to capture capitalism’s insanity in another verse:
I’ve seen the faces of starvation,
but I just cannot see the point.
Cuz there’s so much food here today
that no one wants to take away.
Yes, there is so much wasted food in the world, often because people are overeating in restaurants or it’s prohibitively priced, goes unsold, and gets tossed. Meanwhile, people starve and beg around the corner.
Gotta move on. I introduced coffee to my neurons today, and they’re getting along well. Here’s the music, and I hope you enjoy. Here we go. Cheers
Today is Thursday, December 19, 2024. A temptation to change Thursday to Throughsday almost conquered my fingers. ‘Throughsday’ because the week is almost finished. I didn’t change it, as I’m disinclined toward misinformation and confusing people.
In other morning news, a crowd of zombies went through our town. Ha, ha, just kidding. It wasn’t a crowd. Just a couple.
Our weather today looks as if someone delivered elements of fog, clouds, sunshine, and rain. All were tossed together in a big blue bowl. Now they’re up there, waiting to be mixed and blended.
Just after observing and writing all of that, Papi the ginger blade floof, returned with a scouting report. He didn’t need to say anything. Fog had shut down the sunshine, clouds, and blue skies. 46 F out there, it ‘feels like 38’, with a high of 57 dangling over us.
I met with my beer buddies last night. Two new members joined us. She is a retired teacher and physician’s assistant. He is a retired electrical engineer. They have a daughter who works for NASA, and he was a big science fiction fan when he was a kid. Others told him that I sometimes write science fiction. He shifted over to sit by me later in the night and discuss the genre. Lot of fun remembering the novels we had in common which influenced us.
Today’s theme music arrives on the shoulders of a conversation I had with several women last night. They expressed deep disappointment and frustration that more women didn’t turn out to vote in the 2024 election. I didn’t have any insights into that and they couldn’t cite any stats. Young me from several different groups were the dissappointing difference to me. I read interviews with and stories about young black men, for example, who thought Trump would be better for the economy. That still makes me shake my head.
Anyway, after returning home with that conversation in mind, “American Woman” by the Guess Who from 1970 rose into the morning mental music stream (Trademark peeling) today. I always thought the song was about the United States, represented by a woman, seducing countries to be like the United States. The singer was resisting because the United States was a war machine filled with ghettos. The ‘colored lights’ referred to in the song was Hollywood glamor. Remember, the Vietnam War was underway and protests were taking place in the U.S. In light of that backdrop, my interpretation made sense to me. But different interviews with the Guess Who band members painted a different story. The songwriter and vocalist, Burton Cummings, said it was just a comparison of women from the U.S. and Canada.
“What was on my mind was that girls in the States seemed to get older quicker than our girls and that made them, well, dangerous. When I said ‘American woman, stay away from me,’ I really meant ‘Canadian woman, I prefer you.’ It was all a happy accident.”
I became fourteen around the time of the song’s release. It’s uptempo beat, rich bass, unique riffs, lead guitar, lyrics, and vocals all worked for me. Cummings sang it with an angry, contemptuous sneer in my opinion. That spoke to my own burgeoning contempt for how our world and society works. Ah, to be young and idealistic.
Coffee and I have negotiated arrangements and I’m taking advantage of that to warm my throat. Time to light the candle on another day. Here’s the music. Cheers
I was a young man. And I was at some kind of car race where I was to be a participant. Several emerging factors swirled and fell and rose. Nobody was expecting me. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I then confirmed, gosh, I am in this race.
Employing strange dream logic, the race was sometimes played as a card game with a board track. Other times, it seemed like a slot car setup, but then it was sometimes full-sized race cars. I’d seamlessly skip between those motifs but the dream itself was mostly centered on race control where I’d check the time sheets, find out where I was on the track, and learn my position. The people populating race control were all tall, older, and white. Most seemed British. I never saw any of the cars so I can’t comment on their colors or livery. But I would identify them. Like I told some once that another driver was piloting a Porsche 917 and another was driving a P3 Ferrari. Someone else was wheeling the Silk Cut Jaguar XJ9.
I swapped cars. I don’t know what I was driving but I suddenly announced, grinning, “I’m driving a Ford GT.” This is a car which won LeMans and the world championship in the mid 1960s and helped seduce me as a racing fan when I was nine. I didn’t specify which variant I was driving.
I learned that I’d qualified fourth but some bureaucratic snafu shuffled me to the pack’s tail end. That didn’t bother me; I shrugged it off with a grin. I was confident that I would win, as I’d qualified fourth with minimal effort. Now, recalling, I actually did have one segment where I was in the car, on the track, during the race, passing clusters of other cars. I then left the car, blink, and was back at race control to check my standing. They didn’t know who I was. I was certain I was leading but they dismissed it. I was told that I’d done something incorrectly and my laps hadn’t been counted. I didn’t know I was supposed to do that, I protested, but that wasn’t their issue.
None of that fazed me. Grinning, I told them, “But I have all these chits.” The chits were small red paper rectangles, like the old-time ticket stubs given at movies in decades past. I received them every time I completed a lap. As I told them about the chits, I held up a fistful of them. Expressing astonishment, they counted the chits and announced that I was in the lead.
I met the news with a happy grin and readied myself to keep racing. Dream end.
I enjoyed discovering this footage of the 1966 LeMans race featuring the Ford GTs. Nice to hear the voices of Bruce McLaren, Dan Gurney, Denis Hulme, etc., and see them. Of course, the staged Ford 1-2-3 finish was made famous in the movie Ford vs. Ferrari, where Ken Miles (played by Christian Bale) was first across the finish line but was deemed not to be the winner because another car started further back, so it covered more distance.
Wind and clouds dominate Ashlandia’s Monday morning, where it’s 38 degrees F. Blue sky and sunshine have worked their way into the scene. At least the rain has stopped. Snow tops ranges and trees located over 3500 feet, offering us some wintry scenery. December 16, 2024, winter solstice is rushing our way.
We went south into higher elevations yesterday. Up there in elevation, down there on the road, the snow accumulaiton over 3,000 feet looked like six to eight inches. This was eight miles from our place, a twelve minute drive. My wife and I agreed, it was nice to visit the snow and admire the beauty of the white dusting the tall pines over the craggy white-topped mountains bathed in sunshine and backlit with blue sky, but leaving that icy scene behind was also nice.
Over in Europe, governments are losing votes of confidence. France already went; now Germany has joined them. Just to lift my spirits (please note the sarcasm), I read a NYTimes opinion piece, “A Mild Defense of Lara Trump”.
Fair enough. But before anyone gets super sniffy about Lara Trump’s fitness for high office, I feel I should remind everyone of Tommy Tuberville.
Honestly. Whether defending white supremacists or blockading hundreds of military promotions for months, the gentleman from Alabama has not exactly covered himself in glory. And when it comes to sycophancy, it’s hard to imagine Ms. Trump would be much more pliant than Mr. Tuberville, who recently declared that it is not Republican senators’ job to vet Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks. So much for “advice and consent.”
But no need to dogpile Mr. Tuberville. When it comes to jelly-spined Trump toadies, he is not alone in the Senate. Josh Hawley? Ron Johnson? Mike Lee? In so many ways, the coin has already been devalued.
Yes, let’s start a cheer *snark*: Lara Trump is not the worse senator in a chamber full of crappy voter decisions. That’ll cheer us up.
The Neurons surprise me by introducing with a poem learned in high school. William Wadsworth, of course, because that’s who I mostly learned in that era. Syliva Plath, Edna St. Vincent Millay, ts elliott, Billy Collins and others came later.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
That’s all I wanted to remember: ‘The world is too much with us, getting and spending’, and ‘for this, for everything, we are out of tune.’
That’s my feeling today. I’m an guitar set aside, gathering dust in a closet. My strings and frets are worn, and I feel out of tune.
Despair not, for Der Neurons immediately introduced a song to the morning mental music stream (Trademark sagging) to address my feelings.
I’m singing this note cause it fits in well with the chords I’m playing.
I can’t pretend there’s any meaning hidden in the things I’m saying.
But I’m in tune.
Right in tune.
Yes, it’s the Who, one of the bands of my youth, coming through with “Getting in Tune” from 1971 and their epic album, Who’s Next? The present is just an echo of the past, isn’t it?
Ah, maybe I just have a case of the Mondays. I offer this Office Space clip for elucidation.
Let’s get on with this. Coffee, stat! Here we go. First, the music. Cheers
‘Sun’ day is just an honorific at this point today. It’s a beerlovers’ choice out there, cold and frosty. Parts of the streets are drying as the rain has finally ceased. Traces of snow have migrated in when the rain was petering out and the temperaures descending. Was 28 F when I rolled out on his ‘Sunday’, December 15, 2024. Now i’s up o 33. Ten more degrees and we’ll be at the high.
Last night’s Swedish Smörgåsbord was entertaining. Delicious food (although I passed on the lutfisk) and bracing Glühwein. Our hostess reminded me that they serve the same thing every year, part of their Swedish heritage, so she’s had some practice. Conversations revolved around the Gospel Choir concert which we’d already attended. My wife was singing its praises and several others had tickets for today’s matinee. Beyond that, last week’s quake and tsunami warning was discussed as two people were at the coast when it happened. Next, we went into the anticipation of a dark and depressing 2025 under Trump. One woman, a Quaker and Peace House member asserted that she was going to maintain a positive attitude no matter what happened. A second woman insisted that we would not see a 2026 eleciton as Trump and the GOP would go into full Hitler mode. I disagreed with that extreme pessimism. I think Trump’s adminstration, filled with alpha billionaires, few with government experience, will self-destruct with a flailing economy, and Republicans will turn on Trump. While I hope I’m right, I’m too often wrong. Fingers crossed, right?
We’re off to Sunday brunch in a little while. Up into the southern elevations where some serious snow already resides. Then back home to get cozy, read, watch football, and decompress. I like to say decompose rather than decompress; my wife always corrects me.
Today’s music was gonna be “Ventura Highway” by America. Started with the line, “You can always change your name,” in the morning mental music stream (Trademark decomposing). I don’t know why that song or line were called up. However, I walked into the living room. Sunshine was beaming in at all the windows. Flipping a switch, The Neurons called up, “Good morning, mister sunshine. You brighten up my day.” Then, yes, we were off with “Lonely Days” by the Bee Gees from 1970. The song’s variations between what almost felt like a dirge to its upbeat, jazzy rhythms always stirred me. I remember listening to it on an AM/FM radio alarm clock I had. I’d asked for it for my birthday and Mom granted my wish.
Get positive if you can. My coffee buddy helps lift me in that regard. Here’s the music. Hey ho, let’s go. Cheers
Michael Seidel, writer 