It’s raining again, a light falling, bringing up SuperTramp’s song from fifty years ago. Today is Jun 9, 2023. Friday. Last night’s thunderstorms skirting us. We could hear them like someone shouting from far away. “What?” You should back. “I don’t know what you’re saying.” You strain to hear and then just shake your head and walk away, muttering, “I can’t understand them.”
As for rain last night, it spit on us a bit a few times, but left us alone. Temperature topped 84 F locally, for the record.
Of course, yesterday started with a blue sky. Blue is as rare today as snow on a summer lawn. Clouds of different colors, depths and textures, ranging from flat white with a tincture of gray to billowing, curly, unkempt clouds edgy with dark pockets, have blanketed the sky. It’s 61 F now and the weather gurus tell us 79 will be the high, and there will be rain and thunderstorms later today. As always with weather, we’ll see.
Several songs inhabit the morning mental scream. “Wipe Out”. “Sweat Pea”. The Neurons are mixing weather, writing, and dream inputs. But I went with the song which came up after the dream sequences finished, “Fly Like An Eagle” by The Steve Miller Band, 1976.
Hope you stay pos and enjoy a most excellent Friday. I’m enjoying a most excellent cup of coffee. Establishes my baseline for the day. Here’s the music. Cheers
Now I’m at that exciting, challenging, edgy time during the writing process. I’m in the first draft, and the middle. It’s all flow, bursting out like fast-moving magma. Like witnessing a huge event. Think seeing a disaster, a political rally, a football game. It’s almost overwhelming; focus must be found and kept. Everything is sucked in for processing, to be written in coherent fashion, coherent enough to keep moving the story toward the end.
He enjoys writing, especially science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction. Been entertaining himself with it on computer since he first bought a Kaypro in the 1980s and installed WordStar. Many of those stories are trapped on old floppy disks stored in a container in a closet in his home office.
He still uses a computer but MS Word is now the program, and all is saved on a hard drive regularly backed up. One feature in Word both helpful and bugs him is autocorrect. Making up words, planets, languages, names, of course, is fun. Autocorrect usually marks it as wrong and tries ‘fixing’ it for him. What’s weirdest is when it takes one of manufactured words and turns it into a real word which he doesn’t know. Always sends him to the net to see what that word means.
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Sunshine and blue skies. Presently on the mid side of 60 F, up from 52 F overnight, we’ll be hunting the mid 80s before the sun skirmishes with the falling night and carries us into a new day.
It’s June and Saturday, June 3, 2023, for more exactitude. The cats are loving this weather, right? Mostly out there sleeping in part shade, part sun. Seeing them out there, and I drift through memories. Tucker has always been a little strange about doors. He goes to the linen door, coat closet door, garage door, pantry door. A drawn out merow is issued. His meowing is either very loud or barely a whisper. No midpoint for him. When it’s a loud meow, he draws out the sounds and employs several syllables.
I ask, “What? You want into the <insert location here>?”
Head nod (yes, by him), mumbling mew sounds, a head tilt at the door in question, his look shooting from it to me, back to it, conveying his desire.
Head shake (yes, by me). “Okay, buddy.” Sigh. Door is opened. He heads in for investigation, sometimes dwelling in wherever for fifteen to twenty minutes. He’s old now, a long-furred black and white stray who chose to stay with us, showing up with matted fur and bad teeth almost ten years ago, I think. Need to check the histories to know with certitude. Point is, these demands have been incorporated in his behavior since his first year with us.
The Neurons planted “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” into the morning mental music stream. 1966 Yardbirds song. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page on lead guitars, I thought this song was so cool when I first heard it, one of those radio offerings that had me jumping for the radio and reaching for the volume knob. Never heard it much on the radio in the years since. Don’t know when I last listened to it. But this morning, walking out of dream sleep and into the other room to begin standard morning practices, the first lines broke out of memory and into conscious thought.
Meeting people on my way Seemingly I’ve known one day Familiarity of things That my dreaming always brings
Happenings ten years time ago Situations we really know But the knowing is in the mind Sinking deep into the well of time
Wasn’t long after that before The Neurons delivered the song to a loop in my head. I think it’s a related-to-writing thing. I obsess over time, reality, and questions of what we know vs what happened vs what we think we know is one that in my novel writing. Memory is a mischief maker and history is written by the winners and then revised, leaving many of us floundering about it all. So here we be.
Stay pos. Coffee drinking has commenced. Big old cup is a quarter down already. Goes well with a cool summer morning on the patio, sunshine blazing down, cats washing in the green grass, jay yelling at us all from different perches as he surveys the yard and lands on chairs and trees. Could be a good day, you know?
Michael Seidel, writer 