Tag: Al Stewart

Sunda’s Theme Music

Mood: coldasfrickinice

Winter left frosty white prints all over the valley this morning. Well, on the house’s western side. Out back, it’s green and almost springlike in appearance, until you step out and the 21 degrees F slaps your face.

This is Sunda, January 19, 2025. A freezing fog advisory is in effect but the crazy frog has vacated my area. Sunshine is instead smooching everything, causing stretches of vapor clouds to rise in the air as the frost hastens its escape with the sun’s urging. Gonna be 50 today, ‘they’ say. Well, yesterday didn’t see us get over 39 on my home’s system or my friend’s system. But today seems like it has more of a chance, if the scene outside of blue sky and sunshine doesn’t change when I look away.

News: TikTok is going dark today under the government’s orders. Three hostages were released in Gaza. Kansas City is advancing to the AFC championship game and a lot of fans seem displeased about it. The Washington Commanders shocked the NFC’s number one side, the Detroit Lions, with an almost flawless game. Another new wildfire was reported in southern California while the Palisades fire still burns, although the latter is 52 percent contained. WaPo is circulating rumors that the new administration wants to replace DeJoy as the nation’s Postmaster General. Just an aside to that, Democrats and many Republicans revile DeJoy for what he’s done to the USPS but he’s kissed the ring and threw lots of cash at Trump, so I’m surprised to hear it being discussed.

One news story that disgusted me is about Jefferson Griffin. The Republican ran for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat in 2024 and lost. Now he’s asking the state to throw out 5500 military absentee ballots. His reasoning is that they don’t provide a photo ID with their vote. Their vote in the mail. The same voting method that this character used in 2019 and 2020, BTW. Oh, and he’s only challenging these absentee ballots in heavily-leaning counties. This feels like it transcends hypocrisy. Feels like it’s absolutely venal in its naked desperation and hunger to win at any cost. If others’ rights get screwed in the process, well, that’s just too bad for them.

Musically, The Neurons have an Al Stewart song playing in the morning mental music stream. “On the Border” was released in 1977 and has a folk-rock flavor, which is flock in my vocabulary. (Folk rock, right? Flock.) There is some jazz flavoring to it as well. I have no specific reason for its inhabitance of the morning mental music stream. I was just tidying up in the kitchen some after feeding the beasts when I realized it was in my head. But these lines may have been the inspiration:

Late last night the rain was knocking on my window
I moved across the darkened room and in the lampglow
I thought I saw down in the street the spirit of the century
Telling us that we’re all standing on the border

h/t to Genius.com

And that is because many of us simply feel like the nation’s spirit underwent a significant change when PINO-elect Trump won in 2024. Particulars include a substantial number of Americans showing vast disinterest or apathy by not voting and enough supporting a convicted felon to give the U.S. a new low as a first: a convict POTUS. As billionaires and the less wealthy line up to get on his good side and laws are proposed or passed to erase decades to centuries of change, it feel likes we’re standing on the border of becoming somthing other than the founders’ original intentions. I’ve said all of this before. Now it feels like I’m just cryin’ in my coffee.

Coffee and I have brokered another treaty for the day and I have commenced sipping out of the mug. Here’s the tune. Hope you enjoy the melody and have a terrific Sunda. Cheers

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Wonderful fall day here today. Harvest moon last night. Clear sky to view it. Enjoying it all.

The weather systems have delivered gusting winds, clear skies, and a sweet balminess to Tuesday’s air. Today is September 21, 2021. We have reached autumn. Survived the year, mostly thanks to many others. Service people, yes, but I also owe some thanks to politicians, newspaper writers, novelists, librarians, farmers, police officers, firefighters, doctors, nurses, teachers, family, friends, beer brewers, bakers, chefs, truck drivers, pilots, transportation specialists, television engineers, producers, and personalities. It’s a long list of those keeping us safe and fed, managing our water, delivering things, and distracting, entertaining, and educating.

Today’s sunrise was at 6:57 AM in the valley. Sunset will come at 7:10 PM. Air quality is a delightful 4. Our high temperature today will be in the mid to upper eighties. Think 87 F. Current temperature is 73.

After another bevy of bodacious dreams, I find a 1978 Al Stewart song called “Time Passages” populating the morning mental music stream. These lyrics (with accompanying instruments) were on loop:

I felt the beat of my mind go
Drifting into time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

h/t to Songfacts.com

Can you go home again? I’ve gone ‘home’ to why Mom and Dad each separately live with their new partners, so I’m thinking, no. Not physically. In many ways, going home is a brief spiritual journey of nostalgia about what was when. In that sense, yes, going home is often a mind trip away. Going home to either of those places — where Dad/Mom live — highlights the changes between now and back then. Mom and Dad left each other and then I left them and roamed the world. Didn’t see enough, to be sure, but I came to grasp that home is a state of mind.

Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get the vax. Here’s the music, a mellow folk rock offering for a mellow day. Enjoy. Cheers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCJkbrQF88A
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Tuesday’s Theme Music

The song, “The Year of the Cat” (Al Stewart) was released in 1976. A mellow pop-rock song, I was stationed on an unaccompanied tour with the USAF when it came out. The song appealed to me, and I sometimes played it while sitting in my barracks room burning candles in a straw basket to create shapes.

On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime
She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
Like a watercolour in the rain
Don’t bother asking for explanations
She’ll just tell you that she came
In the year of the cat

I was a little bored. I’d usually sip wine or cognac while I was doing this.

Another’s post had reminded me of the song. As it streamed through my mind, I thought that cats measured time differently than we do. We establish a calendar and a clock based on what we observe. Cats declare, “This is my year,” and ignore the calendar. The year of the cat when we had Jade lasted twenty years. Pogo had a year that went for four, his year cut short by a car, while cancer ended Quinn’s year of the cat after twelve years. So it goes.

We have three  cats. Each has declared their own year. Tucker’s year began four years ago, while Boo and Papi are each into about twenty-four months of their year. I hope each has a long year of the cat.

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Today’s Theme Music

We’re experiencing unseasonably strange cold, wet weather in Ashland, southern Oregon, this week. It feels like late November, an odd juxtaposition against the full green trees, lush grasses and arrays of colorful blooms. It feels like it might snow, your mind whispers to itself, setting you into a groove of wondering what this rain is doing to the seasonal snowpack. Perchance this colder, wetter weather will diminish the wildfire season. Maybe, this year, we won’t have drought and water rationing.

But on a Sunday morning, it also settles coziness. What better things are there for cold summer weather but leisurely breakfasts inside, reading books by a fire while sipping coffee and tea, and, for us, going to an afternoon movie?

All this kicks the mental streams into retro-mood. From that morass of signals emerges an album from nineteen seventy-six.

Married less than a year and separated from my wife, nineteen years old, and experiencing my first overseas assignment in the Philippines, this album helped me keep my focus and balance. “Year of the Cat” wasn’t Al Stewart’s first album, but the song by the same name was one of his highest charting songs. Its piano-heavy folk-rock sound with mystical lyrics spoke to me as I walked around Clark Air Base and the surroundings Filipino cities and towns.

It’s a good song for a cold, quiet morning. Here’s “Year of the Cat.”

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