Welcome. Today is the first day of the second month of 2021, a.k.a. Feb. 1. And it’s a Monday. Sunrise was 7:24 AM and sunset will be 7:25 PM, for ten hours and one minute of sunshine, in theory, here in Ashland, Oregon. Currently sitting at 50 degrees F, our weather is comfortable mix of clear sky, clouds, and sunshine with the potential for rain, clear sky, and sunshine.
January, 2021 went by like whipped cream from a can, with a lot of hissing and noise but quick. After an attempted coup and a whole lot of lies from the outgoing POTUS and the GOP, a new POTUS was sworn in. With it comes a new era. Yeah, fingers crossed on that. I know, in many ways, it’s frustrating BAU, but some sense of our values and processes are restored. Having Trump gone and Biden in isn’t an elixir; work is required.
With all these changes, today’s song came as I turned over my wall calendar. Yes, I keep a wall calendar. It’s sentimental of me. Produced by a photography, it’s of the Group 7 Can-Am racing series, the racing I most fervently followed as a young teen.
Today’s song is “Turn the Page”. Originally written and recorded by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band in 1972, it was released in 1973, but the 1976 live version is the cover I always turn to. Be positive. Test negative. Wear a mask. Get vaccinated. Move forward. Turn the page.
We’re squirting toward ten hours of sunlight here in Ashland, Oregon. The delta has become just twelve minutes. Twelve minutes. At this rate, we’ll have ten hours of sunlight by the end of January. That, my friends, is progress.
Yeah, I’m a sunlight fan.
We could use more sunlight today but stormy clouds have paraded in. The clouds brought a sharp wind as their plus one. Present temp is a chilly 31 F, which feels like colder. Today’s high will be 39, so no relief. Still, we’re faring better than places where single digits or piles of snow reign.
Today’s song, “Last Nite” by The Strokes, came out while the century was still young, 2001. Sweet and young, the new century was naive and combative, as the 2000 election showed. We’ve been fighting ever since.
How does “Last Nite” fit in? It’s all about understanding, innit? Don’t know if you recall/are familiar with “Last Nite”, so let’s paste in some lyrics, courtesy of Genius.com.
Which sums up a lot going on in U.S. politics to me, which is how the song got into my head this AM. I was thinking about how people don’t understand one another. We took about it a lot. How can anyone trust Trump? He’s a proven liar and failed businessman. I don’t understand. Meanwhile, over on the spectrum’s other end, they’ve been yelling, Trump tells it like it is. The left doesn’t understand. But, but, but, how he’s telling it are lies and bullshit. I don’t understand why they don’t see that.
Stay positive — I know, it’s hard — test negative, wear a mask, get vaccinated, and persevere. The list keeps growing.
A new Saturday has arrived.(Momentarily, The Who sing, “Meet the new Saturday, same as the old Saturday… I haven’t had my coffee. Forgive me.)
Sunset came at 7:35 AM and we expect sunset at 5:14 PM here in Ashland. It’s rained through the night and morning, leaving us with gray clouds competing with blue skies and a 37 degree F temperature. The low temp is going to be 29 and the high is expected at 48 on this 23rd day of January, 2021.
Today’s music is “Torn” as covered by Natalie Imbruglia in 1997. First, a side note: some female co-workers in 1997 really disliked “Torn”. “She’s lying naked on the floor,” one would say with vehemence. “That’s disgusting.” She didn’t think about the song and that symbolism; lying naked on the floor was too much.
Reading about QAnon members reaction to President Biden being sworn in last night after Biden’s predecessor went into hiding in Florida, those conspiracists seemed torn about what was going on. Many were asking, “What’s going on? I don’t understand?” Others, with anger displayed in caps and multiple exclamation points and sharply chosen hateful words, were torn with emotions, claiming they’d been betrayed. Others tried calming them down by urging patience because there’s more to come.
Myself, I was torn about getting out of bed this morning. Caught in that wondrous place where I’m neither fully asleep nor awake, moving seemed like a gross violation of the moment, never mind leaving the warm bed. But the cats, torn about fighting one another, jumping on me, and pawing on the pet door to be let out, finally made me open my eyes and worm out of sleep.
Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask, and get a vaccine, if you haven’t already. Here’s the music.
The more that I’m writing, the worst that I sleep. I dream more when I’m writing more, too. Yesterday produced a great writing session, a miserable night of sleep, and a flotilla of dreams.
I think that I sleep worst when I’m writing more because more of my brain is engaged in the writing process. The writing is consuming more bandwidth; shutting it down at day’s end is problematic. I keep writing while I’m doing other things, including trying to sleep.
The good news with the novel in progress is that the characters escaped Arsehold at last! How surprised me, but was totally in tone with the rest of the book. This is, of course, when writing is most fun and rewarding.
I always worry about saying too much about writing these days. I don’t want to jinx it when it’s going well, you know? Don’t want to scare off or anger the muses. I never elaborate to others about what I’m writing any more. It’s a novel; it’s meant to be read. I don’t want to explain it; I want people to read it. Sometimes it’s hard to stay true to this as excitement about the story, characters, and concept bubble up and make me happy. I guess I’m an eternal optimist that these stories and novels will come to be in people’s hands someday. Really, though, I write for me and have a good time doing it.
I’m subscribed to HBOMax and enjoying several shows. Nevertheless, I have a complaint about the service. Every time I select it, the first thing that comes up is, “Who is watching?” My name is right there on top. It’s the only name. Below it are options to add other profiles or to add a kid. Seriously? Why must I answer this every friggin’ time? Just accept, I am the one watching, and get on with it. If I want to add someone else, I can go into options or the account, you know. It shouldn’t, I suppose, but it irks me to no end.
COVID-19 vaccinations are increasing among friends and family. I know ten people who have been vaccinated. Three different states – Oregon, Texas, and Pennsylvania – are involved. All who were vaccinated except one were seventy plus years old. The one exception is in her forties and is in the healthcare industry, although she’s in research. Both vaccines have been employed among this small sampling. None have reported significant adverse reactions beyond a desire to nap and mild fevers. Let me know how your vaccination goes, please.
My wife and I are a year apart in age, which adds another spin to our vaxsit. I’m sixty-four and a half. I turn sixty-five in July. I’ll be eligible. But do we want to do it if we can’t do it at the same time? Part of our formula about whether and when is that I have hypertension and she has RA. I suspect that we’ll be included as part of a group that’s fifty years and older later this year, making our one year difference moot.
I mentioned oatmeal in another post, and the huntress commented on oatmeal. Her mother made it very thin. Soupy thin. I think of that as gruel. Yeah, I know it’s not the same. While that’s how my wife eats it, I’m not a fan of it. I make my oat meal so thick, it’s almost a soft cookie.
I grew up putting brown sugar in my oatmeal. Well, it started as white sugar but once I had it with brown sugar, the game was done. I then learned to add raisins and nuts. Now I put all manner of things in my oatmeal. I currently add cranberries and walnuts in my oatmeal, and granola as a topping. I like the contrasting crunchiness and flavor.
When I was first served oatmeal at my wife’s house while in my teens, they surprised me by adding butter and bacon on top. I’d never heard of such a thing! That surprised them, because that’s how they always ate it. Adding bacon and butter to my oatmeal wasn’t something that I adopted. My wife doesn’t add it to her oatmeal, either.
The world seems weirdly calmer with Joe Biden in office as President. Is this my imagination? Am I just reading less news? That doesn’t seem to be the case. Have news outlets shifted how they’ve reported? Perhaps. Or is it that there’s less bad news, or it’s being less reported, or not catching my eye… Maybe we’re just in an intermission in the bad news cycle.
Or maybe it’s some sense of numbing of normalization to bad news. Locally — specifically, in Jackson County, Oregon — COVID-19 positive cases have been declining. We haven’t had triple digits in several days. We’re trending down, but we trended down in November. Then we had a Christmas spike. Meanwhile, people aged 20-29 are the most positive cases here, but those aged fifty and older dominate the hospital beds, inline with what’s been seen elsewhere, and what’s generally expected.
Okay, got my coffee, actually my second cup. No mid-morning treat to go with it. No cookies, pastries, or doughnuts. Nevertheless, time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Today is January 22, 2021. Sunrise is 7:33 AM and sunset is 5:13 PM in Ashland, Oregon, moving us closer to ten hours of sunlit. Our temperature is 37 F. Choppy layers of clouds, like pieces of clothing being sorted and stretched, are moving as the weather finds itself. A storm is shyly crowding in. We might have snow next week. We’ll definitely have colder weather.
Hammerin’ Hank Aaron passed away. Hammerin’ Hank broke Babe Ruth’s MLB home run record in 1974. I graduated high school and joined the military that year, so that’s childhood’s end for me.
When I think of my childhood, Hank Aaron and baseball were a large part of it, almost as big as music and politics. Music was defined by its growing presence on television and the increasing number of festivals and stadium shows. Other things from that era include the Doomsday Clock and the chance of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. using nukes, the Vietnam War and the peace talks, Watergate, student protests and riots in the 1960s, the oil embargo and gas shortages, and the explosive spread of cable television. Reasoner, Smith, Rather, Brinkley, and Hunt gave us the news at night. We were sending rockets with men in them to the moon and talking about the future of computers where everyone would have one in their home. The EPA had been created and the ERA was still a possibility, acronyms which were regularly discussed in school and on talk show panels.
It’s nice having President Biden in the White House. Nice not waking up to see what madness Biden’s predecessor was saying. Been a while since I read about a Karen employing privilege to insult and attack others. Coincidence? No.
Today’s song comes after another busy dream night. In one dream, I and others sometimes say, “There she goes,” in response to someone we’re looking for. In the course of thinking about that dream and phrase, the LA’s 1991 song, “There She Goes”, jumped into the thoughts. I guess my mind thought that would be helpful. It wasn’t.
Anyway, “There She Goes” is a strange song to me. It feels and sounds like something that should have been a hit in the early seventies or late sixties due its simple structure and sound. It’s also a brief song, under three minutes. Growing up with pop/rock, songs on the radio were typically three to four minutes long, so this song is ending just when you expect it to explode with something more. It doesn’t, leaving me asking, “Was that it?”
Here we go. Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask, and get vaccinated. Cheers
Sunrise came at 7:34 in Ashland on this twenty-first day of 2021, 01/21/21, and sunset, if the machinery works right will come at 5:11 PM. While it’s 37 F now, a high of 53 is expected. It’s a cloudy sky, which usually accompanies warmer temperatures at this time of year. It’s when the sky is clearest that it becomes coldest.
I enjoyed the musical entertainment provided the nation during President Biden’s inauguration celebrations. Several stood out for me, but I especially soaked in John Legend singing “Feeling Good”. Pow. Knocked me into the next year.
Demi Lovato covering Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” was another performance that touched me. Bill Withers was from my area. I lived outside of Beckley, WV, for three years, graduating there, and Bill was raised there, so he’s our native son. Covers of his songs always stirs memories of him and that area and time.
What of you? Any particular song or performance touch you in a way?
The inauguration day’s celebration theme was pretty much new day, new times, right? That’s what I took. Maybe I missed the mark. I’m thinking, how do you top any of those songs as theme music.
Well, today, I don’t. I’m just listening to John Legend “Feeling Good”. I’m familiar with the Nina Simone 1965 cover, but I’m staying with John Legend’s powerful rendition.
It’s a new dawn It’s a new day It’s a new life for me, yeah It’s a new dawn It’s a new day It’s a new life for me, ooh And I’m feeling good
Today is January 20, 2021, a Wednesday. Sunrise was at 7:34 AM and sunrise is coming at 5:10 PM. Between them, the weather looks hazier than yesterday but still sunny. It’s currently 34 degrees F but we expect warmer.
Congratulations to President Joe Biden, forty-sixth POTUS, and Vice-President Kamela Harris. The inauguration ceremonies in D.C. were on the television at the same time as my wife’s Zoomercise class. There’s usually seventy to eighty people present; today there were twenty-eight. The rest were off watching the inauguration, we suspect. My wife exercised but kept the television on to hear President Biden’s speech and the Vice-President’s speech, and the rest of the pomp.
I walked two miles yesterday in the late afternoon, masking when I encountered people but trying to stay to routes that let me avoid them. Going up allowed me the privilege of gazing across the valley to where sunshine bathed green and brown hills, evidence that we’re creeping out of winter and toward spring. An Oasis song from 1996, “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, came to mind and stayed with me. I thought that it should be today’s theme music.
Slip inside the eye of your mind Don’t you know you might find A better place to play You said that you’d never been But all the things that you’ve seen Will slowly fade away
So I start a revolution from my bed ‘Cause you said the brains I had went to my head Step outside, summertime’s in bloom Stand up beside the fireplace Take that look from off your face You ain’t ever gonna burn my heart out
Monday in Ashland arrived with thin but all-encompassing fog and a thermostat hovering around 37 F. Sunrise was at 7:39 AM, evidenced by growing light but no visible sun. We’ll see if it shows before sunset, expected at 5:04 PM.
Looking out at the fog, I thought about what a gray day it was. No immediate gray songs leaped into the mental stream, but the 1978 Foreigner song, “Blue Morning, Blue Day”, filled the space. This song about lovers growing apart doesn’t fit anything about today, unless I stretch it as a metaphor for the United States and its political positions growing apart. Or, taking it further, I can apply it to a growing gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Or — stay with me here — the song can be about people losing touch with reality, getting swept out of their heads by conspiracy theories.
Naw, doesn’t really work. It’s just about lovers.
Still, the song is in me head, so I’m putting it out to you. Be positive, even when the weather is gray and cold, test negative, and wear a mask, now more than ever as these COVID-19 variants rise and spread. Hey, that’s an intriguing book title: Rise of the Variants. Someone should go write it.
Today is Sunday, January 17, 2021. Four percent of the new year has passed. Sunrise in Ashland was at 7:39 AM and sunset is expected at 5:04 PM. We creep toward the longest day of the year. The cats have been outside and report that although the temperature is 44, the sunshine is endless and warm to the fur.
Our 1985 Mazda RX-7 was featured in my dream. My wife and I bought it new when we returned to the U.S. after serving four years on Okinawa. With that in mind, I trawled memories for a song that might work today. I came up with Tears for Fear, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”. Yes, a lot of people want to rule it for various reasons. I’m not sure I want to rule anything.
Sometimes, when I think of this song, I substitute words. Recurring themes are, “Everybody wants to pet the floof.” Especially so if an animal is around. I’ve also been known to sing, “Everybody wants a glass of beer.” Wine and cake have been subbed there on occasion. Another variant is “Everybody wants a piece of cake.” It’s a versatile song.
The weather is a quick-change artist. I sat to type and lo, the sun has skidded behind full-sky cloud covers. Showers dampened the street and walks, and a wind has launched.
Checked our toilet paper supplies this morning. Sixty rolls on hand. There are two of us. We average eight days per roll per bathroom, so we are, relatively, rolling in TP.
Stay positive, test negative, and eat healthy. Oh, and wear a mask. Cheers
Todays sunrise in Ashland, OR, was 7:40 AM. Sunset is 5:04 PM. A light gray overcast sky keeps the sunshine at bay. The temperature is 42 degrees F but a high of 56 is projected, along with light rain.
Today’s theme music is “Animal I Have Become” by Three Days Grace, 2006. I chose the music on behalf of the United States and the nation that it’s become. Torn by division, rhetoric and activity turns more violent and urgent. As blacks have been killed by police, people took to the streets to protest the deaths. Many of them were senseless, but officers were exonerated. Several particularly infuriating people, like Breonna Taylor, unarmed, in bed, innocent of everything but being black, killed by police in their zest to ‘serve and protect’. There was also George Floyd, killed by an officer who was busy serving and protecting, by kneeling on his neck until he died while his fellow officers, serving and protecting, looked on. This was apparently for a report of a crime of passing a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. Numbingly, those are just two examples that fueled the anger and protests that swept the nation on behalf of justice in 2020.
Meanwhile, on the right, they got busy protesting those protests, screaming in response, “Blue Lives Matter”. That blue lives really didn’t matter to them became apparent (as if we weren’t sure) as Trump supporters, who are quite right wing, conservative, and white supremacists, battled with the police in support of a coup attempt, beating many police officers, killing one. On the right, they believe that the 2020 election was stolen by ‘the left’. They think that there was all sorts of fraud, uncounted ballots, and thrice counted ballots that helped propel Biden to his landslide (in Trump’s words, as Biden won the EC by the same number as Trump did in 2016). Trump himself, and GOP cohorts, continue feeding this lie. They insist that evidence exists.
This evidence has never been shown.
On the right, they claim the evidence will be shown, and we’ll all change our tune. What’s keeping them from showing this evidence anywhere is the response given by the rest of us.
One note that has everyone (outside of the people who believe that the 2020 election as stolen) shaking their heads, is why would this all-powerful election-stealing apparatus only steal the presidential election? Why would they not steal the Senate and House? Why wouldn’t they also steal the state elections? They use the same ballots. Apparently, though, while the right believes this election-stealing apparatus is all-powerful, it’s not powerful enough to steal those elections. Yeah, SMFH.
With Trump impeached again, Trump unwilling to concede, little change to police policies and practices, and FBI reports that the right have violent plans to change the results of the 2020 election, “Animal I Have Become”, a song about a man struggling with drug addiction, seems right.
On a WordPress note, they appeared to have fixed some issues, in my experience. The site published properly yesterday. Of course, today when I went to post, I couldn’t bring up a page. Took three tries, and the whole ‘post/block’ sidebar had vanished and needed to be called up.
Stay positive, test negative, moderate your drinking, and wear pants (and a mask) when appropriate. Cheers
Michael Seidel, writer 