Thinking, thinking – Page 179 – Michael Seidel, writer

Hello, all you sentient beings. Welcome to November 2, 2021. It’s officially a Tuesday for everyone scoring at home.

It’s another dullish, fallish day in the southern Oregon valley where I reside. Rain dribbled throughout the night in sufficient quantities to wet the land and irk the cats. The sun made a feeble entrance at 7:45 AM and will slip away at 6:03 PM. Despite heavy clouds, wet clouds, and Winter’s determined effort to take over, the temperature is 52 degrees F and a high of 61 F is hoped for. Tomorrow is expected to be warmer, 67 degrees, with light rain, so that’s something to look forward to.

You’d think that with all this rain, rain songs would be in heavy rotation in my morning mental music stream. I mean, outside of love, there seems to be a gajillion songs about rain. Most of the rain songs deal with depression, heartbreak, and insanity. Perhaps my enjoyment of this rain is holding such songs out of my mental Alexa’s playlist. I’m instead preoccupied with a 1968 song by Blood, Sweat, & Tears called “Spinning Wheel”. It’s one line of lyrics playing foremost within me:

Talkin' 'bout your troubles and you, you never learn
Ride a painted pony let the spinnin' wheel turn

h/t to Lyrics.com

See, what I was thinking about was the inability for many to learn. We’re still neck deep with COVID-19 deniers and anti-vaxxers here in the U.S. People who don’t trust the medical community, then rush to them when COVID-19 strikes them down, and then demands that the medical community treat them using treatments that they’ve read about on the net, instead of the medical professions’ proven protocols and procedures for the best outcome. It’s crazy how it spreads over the net — this was on a nurses’ forum — that patients are telling one another that when nurses remove you from ventilation is when they kill you. It’s all a great big conspiracy of crazy.

So, they never learn. They jump on that painted pony. Then the fates spin the result.

Not saying that following everything — vax, social distancing, masks, and the medical procedures for COVID-19 — is a perfect cure-all. No. It’s not. Underlying conditions and health issues will exacerbate treatment and recovery, as will age, race, and sex, given the collected data. Sadly, these deniers are not capable of learning this. Not a question of intelligence; it seems to be more about indoctrination. Frustrating for the rest of us, but it’s not new. Nor is it unusual.

Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, socially distance, and get the vax and boosters when you can, if you can. Coffee time again. Here’s the music. Hope you enjoy it. Cheers.

A bitter chill haunts the morning air. Sunlight blighted by gray clouds wearies its way through the windows, casting dull shadows from the partially nude trees. Welcome to Friday, October 29, 2021.

The temperature hovers around 61 degrees F right now but my skin whispers, it’s not that warm. The high today between sunrise at 7:40 AM and sunset at 6:09 PM is just forecast for three degrees more. Like the sun is saying, “It’s Friday, and I don’t feel like giving as much today.” Beautiful colors that burst into the leaves are all acting spent, fading by the hour, dropping from the trees, filling streets and lawns, turning to brown and crumbling.

Today’s theme music was inspired by food. Truthfully, it was a food pick-up. Called in an order to a local establishment, then ‘ran out’ to get it by getting into the car and driving over there. But my wife said, “Why don’t you run out and get it,” and I totally understood it would involve the car.

So I was taking food on the go, which my brain shifted to say, on the run, and voilà, I was thinking that I’d take food on the run, which led to REO Speedwagon’s 1981 song, “Take It on the Run”, to slip into the mental music stream, where it still resided this morning. I like the song’s rising guitar sound and embellishments as the tempo increases before it crashes back down to a soft note, and a final outro, “Heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from another, you been messin’ around.”

Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get the vax and booster when you can. I’m gonna listen to the song again and sip my coffee. Here’s to ya. Cheers