Category: politics

The Waves Dream

Dreams last night were like energetic kittens wrestling and playing: lot of action and motion, and not too linear. 

But one sequence’s sharp focus overpowered memories of the rest. I’d gone upstairs in a house to shave. We lived by the ocean on a bluff. Wanting to look out at the day (and the sea), I raised a white blind. When I did, I saw a huge blue wave breaking. The wave was the windows height, and splashed against the glass. Startled by its height, I lowered the blind and left the room.

Rushing downstairs, I told my wife about the huge wave. It impressed because our house was set back from the bluff’s edge by over twenty feet. For the wave to travel across that distance and still break on the second story window was amazing.

I ran back up the stairs to the bathroom. Raising the blind again gave me time to see another enormous bright blue wave racing toward me. Taller than the last, I realized it was going to break over the house.

Before I could close the sash, the wave broke. The house shuddered with the impact. I expected the window to break, but it didn’t. Halfway through shaving, I went to check on the property. Everything seemed fine, except my car, a 1968 Chevrolet Camaro, was gone. The wave took it, I thought. Other than those enormous waves, it wasn’t storming, but calm.

That dream sequence ended.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

A mellow tune for today, one that I thought of while looking at the mountains across the way. Cold and clear, we were in the shadows on a mountain on the northern side. Over on the southern mountains, sunshine looked warm and inviting. It seemed like two worlds.

I wondered what could bring those worlds together, knowing that those “two worlds” that I saw were one, divided by who was in the shadow. It seemed a proper metaphor for life. People live in the shadow of the information and myths – and sometimes, disinformation and lies – that dominate our world. Amazing how the shadows can affect it.

From that came thoughts of songs about people coming together. There’s a bunch of them that were made in the 1960s, a time when trying to come together seemed important to many artists. Out of the pool, “Get Together” by the Youngbloods (1967) rose to the top and took over the stream.

 

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Sunday’s Theme Music

I’ve been reading a lot about walls in recent months for some odd reason.

Walls. Are they needed? Do they work? Are they being built? How much do they cost? Can’t we just buy a DIY at Home Depot?

Wondering why there’s all this talk about walls was obviously an invitation for “Wonderwall” by Oasis (1995) to slip over and around my walls and into my stream.

It fits as a song for the times, though; wonderwall, in the modern urban sense, is about a person you’re infatuated with.

Lots of people seem infatuated with walls these days.

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

News stories stayed with me late yesterday as I finished walking and headed home. Too many tales about murders and suicides, impeachment and politics, wars and disease. It all felt a little heavy.

Some lyrics stole into my stream:

Been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

It’s been too hard living, but I’m afraid to die
‘Cause I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky

I couldn’t remember more of the song, and worked on that as I reached home and made lunch. Other pieces came in but not enough for attribution. It seemed like an old song. I was finally forced to Google to find it.

There it was, Sam Cooke, “A Change Is Gonna Come”, from 1964. It’s dismaying to think of that song being written in the early sixties because of what he endured in Shrevesport, LA, one night. How humans treat others because of their differences remains a sad situation. We’ve made some progress on this, but we’ve also slid backwards. At times like these, I fall back on Parker’s quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.” Parker was a clergyman in the 1800s. I always thought the quote belonged to Martin Luther King, Jr., but I found in reading that he was quoting another.

No matter who first said it, it endures. As Sam Cooke wrote and sang,

It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gon’ come, oh yes it will

I’m indebted to Metrolyrics.com, Songfacts.com, and Wikipedia.org for refreshing my memory.

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Differences

I was thinking about how different people think, how approaches vary, from the balls out risk-everything, take no prisoners approach to the more cautious haste makes waste angle. Each of us develop preferences. We evolve and refine these from watching and listening to us, and then addressing our approaches based on our results.

I remember a philosophy class I took decades ago. The professor was a good friend. We regularly socialized outside of class before I ever took any of us classes. He and I were of very like minds, and I expected the class to be similarly aligned.

Most were. These were University of Maryland classes on Okinawa. Most attendees were military members or dependents. In this class, one woman, a security police airman who was a few years younger than me, was fearless about stating her positions.

I found her positions pretty shocking. For fun, she and her friends liked to drive around at night and deliberately run over animals. She yearned for days like the ‘wild west’, where if you thought someone was guilty, you called them out and shoot it out.

Those were two of the more extreme examples of how her thinking diverged from mine. The final part, however, was how she declared herself to be a good Christian. While I could appreciate and understand someone having views different from mine, and accept (with much disgust) that they thought so lightly of life that they killed for fun (and regaled us about how she and her friends thought it was so funny), I couldn’t grasp how she reconciled her views as a Christian with these attitudes toward killing and justice.

I still don’t.

And as I think of Donald Trump, and all that he’s been shown to have done, from his marriages and affairs, bankruptcies, attacks on others’ service to the United States, repeated lies and empty boasts, I think of his supporters. Like that woman in my philosophy class, I do not understand how they reconcile what they see, hear, know, and believe. I try to understand, partly from intellectual curiosity as well as trying to satisfy for myself that I’m not missing something, that I’m not living in a silo. I also try to understand it from a motivational point as a writer, feeding my characters.

Reality can be stranger than fiction, but I imagine that many of them don’t understand me and wonder how I’ve come to be a progressive liberal, because they think I’m destroying the nation, if not the world. Possibly somewhere, there’s a novelist trying to understand how I think, so they can feed their character, too.

 

5

Monday’s Theme Music

I went out to call in a cat last night and found a surprisingly clear night, full of stars. Quiet, the air felt mildly warm. I breathed it all in and scanned the stars. That brought the Foo Fighters’ 2003 song, “Times Like These” into my stream as the cat popped up over the fence, leaped down and ran across the yard to me.

I’m a new day rising
I’m a brand new sky
To hang the stars upon tonight

It’s an upbeat thought.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Suffering from a cold caught while traveling. So today, blowing my nose while coughing and shaking my head, I was like, “I just want to be okay.”

I’m doing much better and expect to be okay today. That popped the song, “Be OK” by Ingrid Michaelson (2008). It’s a bouncy tune with not much depth, perfect for my mind, which isn’t deep.

A light song is good for today, though, as I surf political news, roll my eyes, and walk away to take a break from the world. It is Sunday.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

I’d been blue last week, you know, a few days of WTF and WTH coursing through me as I read news, experienced disappointment and weariness, took a jaunt down what’s-the-point lane, and pouted a bit in the pity-poor-me cul-de-sac. Yeah, a helluva neighborhood. Other streets include, who-cares boulevard and nobody-gives-a-damn avenue. We share drinks at the I’m-tired-of-this-shit cafe.

Some blues music periodically trickled through the street. Eventually, a song that was released in 1965, when I was nine, gained momentum in the stream. That would be Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. I listened to covers from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Harry Nilsson, and others, good work all, but the original’s rhythm and tone carried me most.

So here it be, from me to thee, courtesy of technology and Youtube. Gotta admit, watching young Bob and his signs puts a smile on my face.

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Floofws

Floofws (floofinition) –  Recently received or noteworthy information about animals, particularly about important events.

In use: “By careful culling, he made floofws almost all that he saw on the net, reading, gathering, and posting humorous stories or daring rescues involving animals. After five decades of following politics, sports, and the economy, he was tired of the craziness and inclined to move to the comfort of the floofws.”

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Flooftweet

Flooftweet (floofinition) – 1. Tweets about animals. 2. Tweets made by animals.

In use: “Many flooftweets (about a pet) could be flooftweets (made by a pet), as animals love secretly gaining control of people’s phones and computers and sending messages. As people never suspect animals are behind it, they often accuse others of hacking their accounts.”

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