Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Summertime. Good book, good Gershwin song, interesting cover by Sublime, “Doin’ Time”, a most excellent song to stream while walking around, enjoying summertime.
Know some places are having some summertime heat struggles. Hope y’all survive to have a better day.
Last night’s dream shook me. I’m not certain why.
I was with my spouse. We were at her mother’s property, with her mother. Her mother passed away in Feb., 2018, after several years of illness. Her illness and care were instrumental in a family schism with one sister. The property is over twenty acres in the countryside.
The estranged sister wasn’t present. I had an impression that it was she who’d passed away. My wife, mother-in-law, and I were talking in general. As the conversation progressed, I was inspecting the house and thinking about what needed to be fixed and how that would be done. We were mostly talking about the dead sister’s husband. He was planning to stay on the property (he and his wife had a home on it) and would continue taking care of it.
I went outside to walk around. It was a gray, quiet, chilly day. While there was a lawn around the houses and outbuildings, fog swathed the woods. Tree trunks obscured with a gauzy swirl.
Weirdly, I still heard my wife and her mother talking, even though they remained in the house. While walking around, I saw a large, gray or dirty white curly-haired dog cross the property. To me, it appeared that the dog had dragged itself out from a hole under one of the outbuildings. When I went to check that out, I saw another dog come out of a hole from under another building. That was soon happening in every direction. There were quickly seven or eight dogs of different sizes, colors, and breeds running around.
I spotted a small ginger tabby cat. Seeing all of these, I ran back to tell my wife and her mother about the animals. They either didn’t understand or didn’t believe me. I kept repeating what I was telling them, and then insisted that they come out to look. They finally agreed, and when they looked, the number of dogs seemed to double, and then two ginger cats were there standing up and looking back at something. As if a signal was given, the cats dropped to their feet and darted away. Seconds later, the dogs did the same. For several moments, it was a helter-skelter scene of dogs racing to their holes.
And then they were gone.
End.
Sometimes I feel like I’m Goldilocks, judging and assessing things for which one is just right. Yesterday was the first day of summer in Ashlandia. We had beautiful weather, if it’d been the first day of autumn. As summer weather goes, it was windy with a chilly breeze. Walking through it, I thought, seventy-one degrees is too cold for summer. It’s also a drop-off from our legit eighty-three degree average for this time of year. That would have been just right.
But, thinking about, talking to meself about summer, I thought, this is too cold. “She’s So Cold” by the Rolling Stones (1980) rushed into the stream. Good bopping walkin’ song. I did shuffle lyrics a little to, “She’s too cold.”
I like this video. They seem to be having fun.
Courtesy of Martha and the Vandellas (1963) and Mother Nature (2019), a little “Heat Wave”.
Update Note: Sorry, I was time-shifting and lost track of the days.
The heat is rising. For some reason, my music stream suddenly feels with songs about heat and fire. Johnny Cash’s “Burning Ring of Fire” flexes its tones. Glenn Frey steps up with the Beverly Hills Cop tune, “The Heat is On”. The Lovin’ Spoonful brings in “Summer in the City”. Nick Childer steps into the stream with “Hot Child in the City”. Ella sings “Summertime”, and then a chain of other summer songs stream in.
But, dudes, this is about the heat, not the summer. Today is projected to be 105 F. The song that firmly plants itself is Robert Palmer fronting Power Station with “Some Like It Hot” (1985).
Feel the heat, pushing you to decide
Feel the heat, burning you up, ready or not
Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on
Some feel the heat and decide that they can’t go on
Some like it hot, but you can’t tell how hot ’til you try
Some like it hot, so let’s turn up the heat ’til we fry
Read more: Robert Palmer – Some Like It Hot Lyrics | MetroLyrics
Let’s all be careful out there.
June slips over us
whispering, summer, winter
come, visit us now
Peaked mountains of clouds
Peeked over green and brown peaks
Piquing my concerns
My wife pursues an eternal quest to improve our health. Frequent new food stuffs are introduced to the home. I usually try them to observe what impact they seem to have on me as well as how they taste.
Not all work out. Our pantry has a shelf of forgotten foods and drinks that neither of us adopted as part of our normal diet habits. I think one jar is marked “Best By Oct 2003”. We can’t bring ourselves to throw it out. We’re just too sentimental.
Today, I give you beetroot juice.
Beet juice, according to WebMD, is supposed to be terrifically healthy. Well, juice from the root is supposed to be even better, a superfood that will amaze you.
Okay, we said, buying some from our local heath food store. Amaze us.
It comes in a fine, whitish powder form, like chalk. Adding the desired amount to a glass of water and stirring gives you a red drink that looks like cherry Kool-Aid.
It don’t taste like cherry Kool-Aid.
It tastes like beets. That’s not a problem, if you like eating soiled old socks. I know that I probably seem old-fashioned, but I take exception to the taste of socks in my mouth.
But holy-moly, the beetroot juice has a kick.
The first time that I drank it, it was like I’d been injected with niacin. I felt flushed and hot. Every pore was utilized to let the sweat burst out of me. I drank it late in the evening. That wasn’t a good idea; I then had too much energy to sleep, as if I’d had a quint-shot mocha right before going to bed.
We’ve learned that this isn’t an uncommon reaction. Besides that, we discovered that our beetroot drinking should not be done around the same time as our coffee drinking. Some people suggested drinking beetroot instead of coffee. Oh, how we laughed as we plotted on how to eliminate people making such cruel suggestions.
The coffee wasn’t given up. I moved my beetroot drinking to the late afternoon. My reaction isn’t as severe as that first venture, but let me tell you, it’s like my brain has been vacuumed clean and my senses have been blown out. My thinking and memory both seem sharper. My creativity level seems to have been kicked to another level, too.
I’m more ambivalent about its impact on my dreams. I already dreamed and remembered my dreams (or imagined that I did), and this beetroot juice seems to have me dreaming with my clarity and remembering them with more details.
It could be a coincidence, but my writing output jumped after I started drinking the beetroot juice. I typically typed about twelve to fifteen hundred words a day. Now I’m typing twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred a day. I’m typing an extra half hour because I just don’t want to stop. That’s a significant difference over a ten day period.
It also helped my walking output. I’d been riding a streak of sixty miles per week the day that I began drinking the beetroot juice. I frankly didn’t think I’d be able to sustain it for another week, which was a bummer. But the beetroot juice revitalized me, so I’ve now gone six weeks averaging sixty miles a week.
The one drawback that I’ve noticed is that the beetroot juice doesn’t go with other foods, especially anything sweet, and especially bananas. I swear, I’ll never eat a banana and drink beetroot juice again.
Bank on that.
Michael Seidel, writer 