Tag: cold

Monday’s Theme Music

Mood: unenthusiastic

Monday came in for me like a snail runnin’ the hundred meters. It’s October 16, 2023.

53 F now in Ashlandia, where the wine is local and the Pinot Noir is pretty damn good. An unrelenting, unhappy wind is assailing us under a dull gray sky. Rain is due. Fall is assuming its familiar form. Leaves changed color and now they’re dropping off trees, piling up again curbs and in yards, and zipping past windows on a zephyr motor.

Birthdays are pending. Cards and gifts must be purchased and sent. October is our family’s heaviest birthday month, with one past and eight due.

Mom’s birthday is one of them. I’m not sure what to get her. Sitting and conversing at Empty Bowls on Friday, someone mentioned something. I said, “Maybe I should get that for Mom for her birthday.”

Beside me, my wife brightned. “That’s a great idea.”

Neither can remember what ‘it’ was. We’re still working on pulling it out of memory. Sometimes it takes two minds to remember things. LOL.

Still sick. Stayed in from writing yesterday. Mostly read and napped, watched some NFL football.

Sore throat is gone; yea. Energy, though, is really tanked. Like someone siphoned it away. Headache was there and ears were hurting this morning. But I drank coffee to kick start my energy. Surprise, the head and ear pains fled. So hurray for coffee, once again.

Locking into my mood, The Neurons have positioned “Ridin’ the Storm Out” by REO Speedwagon into the morning mental music stream (Trademark ignored). The 1981 song emerged when I was stationed with the Air Force on Okinawa, Japan.

Okinawa is a narrow island and subject to typhoons/tropical cyclones. These were often endured with ‘Phoon Parties’. You tape over and board over the windows with what you can find. Then you raid the booze store on base and the Commissary to buy provisions. While the aircraft were evacuated, we prepared to survive a few days, possibly without electricity.

My wife and I were fortunate in our first three years. We had a tiny off-base apartment in a tiny apartment building. The landlords lived on the bottom floor, and a dozen US couples lived in the apartments. During a ‘phoon, we could visit each other via the inside hallways, so we’d play games like Uno, or Trivial Pursuit, or visit to chat and borrows stuff.

Time to light this Monday. Stay pos, be strong, and keep well. Here’s the music. More coffee, stat. Cheers

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Mood: unenthusiastic

Sunday, 10/15/2023. 66 F now, 74 F later, sunny, bluish and grayish sky with some bleak, skulking clouds, blustery.

Based on symptoms and energy level, I apparently have a cold, which is shorting my energy. Guess it’s a cold: tired, scratchy eyes. Headache. Sore throat. Some sinus congestion. Good appetite, though. Sounds like a cold, doesn’t it?

Yes, it could be something else. This all started last week, on Wednesday. I tested negative for COVID yesterday.

In honor of my physical condition, The Neurons are playing the 1977 10cc song, “You’ve Got A Cold”, carrying it on in the afternoon after starting it in my morning mental music stream (Trademark strained). They may have tapped into something, right?

Stay positive and be strong. Here’s the video. Cheers

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Tuesday’s Wandering Thought

He was hot. She was, she said, “Freezing.”

This wasn’t new.

But her fingers were white and waxy, like bloodless white candles. Their appearance stunned him into silence. She said they ached.

He merely sweated. So it was not the same thing. For her, it was pain. For him, it was comfort.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Late log in on this August 14, a Sunday in the common era human year of 2022. That’s the date according to the instruments. Looks like a decent world. I’ve already sampled the drink which they call coffee and sent a glowing report back to headquarters. Feel like I can fly back there without a ship after drinking that coffee!

Greetings from Earth! I made it. As expected, the situation for humanity is swiftly deteriorating. Few of them should remain in another five hundred of their years, making our conquest very easy. I am looking forward to it.

The data specifies that I’ve landed in a small town in the Rogue River valley in Oregon in the United States on North America – their terms. Sol, their local sun – they only have one – passed the eastern horizon as the world turned at 6:17 this morning, using their time reference, shortly after I touched down. Air samples revealed the fresh, oxygen-rich atmosphere that we’d anticipated and a temperature of 22 Gluck, cool for us but a comfortable temperature for humans and most other life firms of this small rock. I’ll stay here, where the temperature will reach 30 G until the sun sets. I want to see a Terran setting sun. I heard that pollution makes them very pretty. That sunset will take place at 8:13. Then I’ll take off and continue to my final destination, Mars. It’ll be interesting to see how Mars as changed since I’ve last been.

Meanwhile, I’ll drink coffee and listen to human music. Influences of others who’ve been to Earth are felt. Although a large spectrum of music is available, the genres and its offspring known as rock and roll most please my neurons. There seems to be a mental musical stream which this music has ignited. I have one particular song, which I’ve learned is called “Crossfade” by Cold, playing in this stream. (Sorry, I have that backwards. I don’t understand this aspect of their terminology, and why Crossfade is the band’s name and “Cold” is the song title. Perhaps I’ll study it while I’m here.) I find myself inexplicably humming this song, “Cold”, off and on as I do other things. The song came out about one hundred years after I hatched, which would make it 2005 on Earth. I do not know why it continues to play in me in this way. I’m not the first to experience this, of course. Elvis warned us about it in his report, for example.

I am going to drink more coffee now. As always, my Lygers, stay positive and test negative. Hope to be home again in a mersoon. Meanwhile, please enjoy this song which is trapped in my head. See what you make of it.

A small orange striped creature which humans call a cat is approaching. It seems to know our language! I will provide an update later.

Bleck

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Today’s is an odd song choice, driven by weather and reverie.

Opening the blinds this morning revealed a pearl gray cold world, fog and drizzle that hid the streets and played peek-a-boo with the mountains and forests.

Although dismaying, the weather captured my inner weariness. Not much to do in our little town, and gets boring. Although I then thought of “Ramble On” by Zeppelin, “Life In A Northern Town” by the Dream Adademy (1985) soon asserted its presence in my stream.

It’s an odd song to me, not my preferred listening genre, a song I know mostly from being in a car or store and hearing it. After seeing their video and its cold fog, I thought it was right for the day.

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Writing Interrupted

Ready for a rant of self-pity and exasperation? It’s all about me. Yeah, you’ve been warned.

So, sick. Nothing threatening like a terminal disease, just a trifecta of irritations, a head cold, the flu, and then a kidney stone. With each, I thought, this will pass, and then I prayed that the last one, the kidney stone, passed fast (which it seems to have done).

Three weeks mostly killed except for a few days when I caved to the obligation to defy my body, throwing ripples of confusion and discontinuity into my carefully constructed writing existence. I could little practice the rituals of writing, of  walking to clear my mind, establishing a mental framework for walling myself into a solitary zone where I coexist with word storms, of ordering coffee and sitting down to tap, tap, tap, forwards and backwards, creating and correcting, of staring out windows and trying to understand WTF the muses are trying to tell me.

Illness didn’t slow my inner writer and army of muses. Death might slow them down, but not minor illnesses. They came in waves, expecting to be released or entertained. That doing nothing routine was unacceptable, a position strengthened because my illness habits called for me to read, sleep, dream, awaken, and read, punctuated by episodes of eating, drinking tea, and the sickness processes that my body demanded in which it hurled things out. Nothing like reading to calm the writer, right? Wrong.

Perhaps, worse of all, was the limited coffee. My taste buds warred with the coffee’s flavor. Variations failed. Spiced herbal teas were substituted, but they’re not coffee, ya know?

All of that seems cleared away today. Did my walk. Got my coffee. It still doesn’t taste right, but I’ll work through it. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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The Sick Dream

I love how my mind works through my dreams. It often surprises me, and frequently amuses me.

This was a few days ago. I was sick and feverish. My head throbbed. I couldn’t breath through my nose. My lips were dry and cracked, and my nostrils were peeling and raw from tissues. Light hurt, and tears frequently blinded me as the cold hunkered down in my eyes.

Falling into a fitful sleep, I dreamed I was in a computer video game. While most details are sketchy, I recall that I was shooting things. The things were about eight feet tall. They had short legs, arms, and torsos, but a huge head with a plain, blank face. Black hair sprouted from the crown of their head.

Running across open fields, laughing as I went under a sunny but cloudy day, I would see those things and shoot, and keep going. Upon awakening, I thought, yeah, I was fighting my illness through a video game in my dream.

Not quite The Illearth War, but what a trip.

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Six Days, Seven Nights

I’m feeling so much better today. The cold seemed to have taken a cruise of my body for six days and seven nights. They really seemed to party in my eyes, for that was the worse day and lasted almost two days. The cold briefly ported in my chest at the end, and barely visited my throat in the beginning. Although I didn’t walk and exercise as much as desired, I wrote every day. There was no vomiting, and bowel movements were normal. Severe coughing only struck the last two days. As illnesses go, it was pretty mild and short, and I consider myself fortunate that I feel almost completely well today.

Thanks for indulging me as I complained about it. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time. Cheers

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Winter Skin

I go outside each morning to breath the air, take in the weather, and look around. My wardrobe is bare feet, gym shorts, and a tee shirt.

In today’s moment, accompanied by Quinn the Black Paw and Papi of the Ginger, I said, “It’s not bad out here, guys.” Quinn responded by rolling around on the patio while Papi scanned the perimeter for intruders.

After a few minutes, I returned inside and checked the temp on my small weather system. Thirty-one degrees F.

My winter skin is coming along well.

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