Tuesday’s Theme Music
Hi! Welcome to Shootday, April 12, 2022.
I’m sorry. Shootday! Ha, ha. What a slip of the head. It’s not Shootday, it’s Tuesday. That whole Shootday slip came from reading news of the many shootings. How many dead, where, when? Hard to track them all. Of course, if we did have a day of the week for shootings, our challenge would be deciding which day. It’s always Shootday in America, folks. Clearly, what is needed are more guns. As the old adage goes, speed kills, so give us more speed. Same logic for increasing the number of guns, isn’t it?
Why, no, gun advocates say. Our idea is that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun. Everyone in a dance club should be armed; that would stop someone from walking in and shooting anyone else. Also, everyone in school. And everyone in the family should be strapped, because family members shoot and kill one another. Toddlers should be armed because you never know when Daddy is gonna snap and shoot you. And that four-year-old killed by the two-year-old sibling in the gas station parking lot should have pulled and shot their little brother first.
Yep. Solid logic.
Okay, that snark front has moved through. On to normal muttering.
It’s 34 F now. We expect to hit 44 F. Sunrise came, lighting up the snow, at 6:35 AM. And the sun will move out of my sky area — skyrea? — at 7:49.
Yeah, we got some snow yesterday. Though we’re below two thousand feet and the warnings were for the snow level to be above 2500, snow pummeled us throughout the afternoon. The snow lacked solid temperature support at that point, with the thermometer indicating it was 33, leaving us with a sketchy snow offering today, an inch plus in some places, nothing in others. Yes, it was more spectacle than result for us. Hopefully, enough snow struck and stuck on the snowpacks to give us more water this summer.
The cats quickly sized up the weather situation and seized on the strategy of staying in, staying warm, and sleeping. Smart felines
An STP song — that’s Stone Temple Pilots and not the racer’s edge — is circulating around the morning mental music stream. “Unglued” came out in 1906. Hah! I kid. It wasn’t that long ago, but in 1994, which is only (mumble mumble) years ago. It’s directly related to my writing efforts yesterday. I was struggling with focus and concentration, a struggle abetted by interruptions from others in the household. That prompted the line, “I got a feeling coming over me,” to, um, come over me. The line is used in “Unglued”. The neurons recognized that and uploaded the song into the mental stream.
Stay positive…and so on. You know it, right? Here comes the song. Now I’m up for coffee. Cheers
A Move Is Made
I was settled in and writing — but —
First came the cat, Tucker. The big black and white long-furred character kept muttering about something. Food? No. Not a desire to go outside into the cold wind, surely. Nope. Water? No, not water. Just give me attention, he suggested.
“Sorry, but I gotta write, buddy,” I told him. “I’ll brush you later, I promise.”
Tucker was like, okay, I understand. He jumped up on the desk, went to the hand holding the mouse, and went to work on it with his head as a huge volume of purrs rolled through the space. “I love you but that’s not conducive to writing, buddy,” I said, moving my hand and mouse away.
Well. He sat a while, considering my response before resigning himself to a nap on a stack of papers a foot away. Writing like crazy commenced again.
My wife arrived home from her exercise class about ten minutes later. Energy bubbled out in vocal expressions. Setting into her office space, she began playing videos on a high volume, laughing aloud at what she went, turning to him to say, “You should see — oh, sorry, never mind, you’re writing.”
After four of those interruptions, I needed to find a writing refuge. The laptop was tucked into the backpack, the winter coat and gloves donned. The real question was, what’s the destination? Ashland’s coffee shop scene had changed during the pandemic. Two favorites had joined my longtime haunt, The Beanery, on the rolls of places that used to be. A new place had opened, not conveniently located, but run by a person I knew who used to run one of my favorite coffee shops. Named Moxie, I’d try it.
I walked in. “Michael!” everyone inside shouted.
I started, embarrassed to be in the spotlight. The owner was behind the counter. “Michael was one of our favorite regulars at my other coffee shop,” she explained to everyone. I knew three of those people. The other six were smiling strangers.
Not a large space, Moxie had gone through a soft grand-opening as furniture and style is acquired and employed. It had key ingredients that I need in a coffee shop: a table with a plug. Coffee. A good vibe.
After catching up with people, I settled in with a double-shot mocha. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Michael Seidel, writer 