At the Goodwill
My wife and I are on the Oregon coast. We ate a wonderful fresh breakfast at the Fresh Harvest Cafe. Then we hit the local Goodwill.
My wife enjoys visiting Goodwill stores. She likes bargains and she likes re-using things. She did say today, “I’m not buying anything new. I’m death cleaning so whenever I see something I want, I just tell myself, ‘You’ll just have to throw it out.'” Books are the exceptions. We bought four, two for each of us.
Killing time, I wander the store and write a short story in my head. It’s about a future Goodwill. Dystopian situation. A guy ransacks an unused house. There’s a lot of them. Finding a cache of shot glasses, he brings them to the Goodwill. They give him a small bag of peanuts for them. He sits outside in the sunshine, savoring every nut as he eats them.
My sister texted me about her grandson’s birthday. He’s already fifteen, thoroughly discombobulating my brain, which still thinks of him as much younger. His mother is still a teenager in my thoughts. To see that he’s now a teenager is too much. I do the slow math; I was fifty-five when he was born. Time, you know?
Sis tells me that her grandson went to an Escape Room for his birthday. Muses gather in my head to conceptualize fiction about Escape Rooms.
Sis interrupts with a text abut Mom. She’s taken Mom to Urgent Care for another suspected UTI. Mom complains about dizziness as she Mom gets in and out of her wheelchair and the car.
Browsing Goodwill shelves, I see things which might be in my home. I go through an aisle of tools and imagine my tools in there.
I believe I have seen the future.
Leaving the building, I breath in fresh air and smile at the sunshine on my face.
SoCS – Sweet
This week, Linda Hill’s prompt was sweet for the Saturday Stream of Consciousness. Here we go.
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Sweet, I thought, go to the coast, get away, enjoy the weather and eat something different and just be someone different somewhere doing something different watching waves, breathing the air, smelling it –
Hope it all goes well. Why shouldn’t it? Well…yeah. Life.
Maybe I should eat something. Cookie? Scone would be nice. Blueberry. Lemon.
Time to go home.
The Discussion
Four women were chatting at a nearby table at the coffee shop. Appearing similar in age to me, two women dominated the talking. One was short and slender, with fair skin and dark, bobbed hair. The other was tanner and smaller. Smiling a lot, her silver hair fell around her shoulders.
They were talking about toothpaste. Looking up from my writing, I tuned in as the first woman said, “I put a pea-sized amount on my brush.”
One of the other women, heavy, with dry brown hair that came to her shoulders, loudly, sharply scoffed. “That’s not enough.”
The first woman replied, “That’s what the directions say to use.”
The brown-haired woman snorted. “Everyone knows you’re supposed to put toothpaste on all the bristles, from one end to the other.”
The conversation fell still for several seconds. “Anyway,” the first woman resumed.
I returned to my writing.
Thursday’s Theme Music — State of things
Ashland, southern Oregon — Thursday, May 14, 2026.
It’s blue out there, full of sunshine. Clouds are absent. 50 F with a high in the mid 70s today.
Thunderstorms looked possible yesterday but it didn’t happen. Just as in the previous days of forecasted activity. After the winter snow drought, May is at 3% of its average rainfall.
Our snowpack is at about 7%. While the reservoirs are above 80%, without snowmelt to replenish them, it’ll be a hot, dry summer. Stack the El Nino predictions, many of us are bracing ourselves for a rough year ahead.
Mom’s state is not good. She wasn’t responding to my sister’s texts. Sis called the assisted living facility, Heritage Grove, to ask about Mom. They said Mom went to bed before dinner and had not felt well all day.
On the optimistic side of the board, two neighbors are reportedly interested in buying Mom’s house.
My wife and I had new tires installed. For the record, we replaced a set that we’d bought in 2019. Got 35,000 miles out of them. Not great, not bad.
We bought them at Costco and had them installed there, shopping while we waited. As we were in the Medford area, we decided to eat out and chose the Texas Roadhouse Restaurant. My wife likes the salmon they serve there.
We couldn’t eat there. The way was blocked by ambulances and firetrucks. Wondering what’s going on, we took to our phones to learn. Nothing at the fire department, alert system, social media, or local television stations could give us that info.
This duplicated a Tuesday incident, in my mind. Driving home from writing at the coffee shop, one lane of traffic was blocked off in front of an SOU building on Siskiyou Avenue. What happened? I searched for information after I got home and couldn’t find anything. 24 hours later, the answer came: a woman had driven across the median strip, up a walkway, and into a building, breaking a gas meter along the way.
Miserable headlines fill my feed. When will there be good news? I’m not sure what I mean by good news at this point. An end to wars would be nice, along with a return to normalcy. Normalcy to me is let’s take action against polluting our air and water. Action against climate change. But the cynic in me says that PINO Trump would take credit for whatever and enough brain-dead people would slurp that down and bray about how great Dozy Donnie is that I’d regurgitate everything taken in during the last three days.
But here’s the state of things in the United States nation in one sharp observation someone else made:
Your Trump Quote of the Day:
Paraphrasing, Trump lies, says this isn’t so bad, Biden! Because that worked well previously under Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL!
Enough people with brains are responding, screw you.
You started a war, Donald J “No new wars” Trump.
The economy is a mess, gas prices are rising, all the prices are rising, Donald J “We’ll cut prices on day 1” Trump, and the country is going in the wrong direction.
And you, DONALD J TRUMP, YOU ARE THE REASON WE’RE IN SIX MILLION MESSES WITH NO WAY OUT EXCEPT TO FIRST GET RID OF YOU AND YOUR CRONIES.
Now stop building the damn ballroom and release the damn Epstein files so we can feast on your political corpse.
The Neurons inserted “Mind Games” by John Lennon into my morning mental music stream. This actually came about from Papi’s state of mind this morning. I played with him and his favorite nemesis, the red dot. The play began abruptly. As soon as he engaged, I stopped for about a minute. He kept peeking left and right, waiting for it to reappear. Just as he started walking off, I blinked it back on. Off Papi went, chasing it across the room, then stalking it.
I hope your Thursday brings you some good news and fair winds, assuming you need winds to get somewhere. Like you drive a sail car and need to have wind to blow you along the Interstate.
Have my coffee now. Cheers
