I’m in the coffee shop this week. Conversations swirl like loose leaves on an autumn breeze. I zone in and out. That’s guided by the Writing Neurons. Sometimes, they fuse a solid grip on my focus, and I notice nothing outside of the scenes in my head and the words on the screen. When they let go, I generally look up to breathe, blink, take in some water and coffee.
Lo, I hear words then. “Bro’, are you going to blah blah blah?” This is one young female talking to another. I suspect they’re high schoolers. We’re two blocks from the high school and youth is oozing out of them.
“No, bro, I can’t, got to blah blah blah.”
I’m taken by how “bro'” has evolved in use. I’ve used bro’ for decades with males of all colors, ages, positions, and relationships. Never, though, never, with a woman. Took a while for me to accept hearing and calling females ‘guys’. Guys was always…um, a guy thing…to me.
“Bro’,” a young female says to her young male companion. Appearing to be about fifteen, sixteen, they speak and move with BF/GF intimacy. She goes on to talk to him about tonight’s dinner. Later, I hear him say, “Bro’, I gotta fly.”
They rise together and hold hands, two bros moving into the world, progressing in life, changing languages, changing expectations.
Another sun filled blue sky day cups Ashlandia. It’s a quiet one out there. Like it’s a holiday and everyone else has gone away. They don’t know about the 70 degrees F and sun-kissed wind toying with our hair in Ashlandia. Clouds are gathering and we’ll top off our temperatures at 75 plus F today.
Papi is loving this weather, prancing in and out of the house with his tail up. Whenever we go out back, he emerges from his sun nap to visit with us.
This, for the record, is May 25, 2025, part of the Memorial Day holiday weekend in the United States. As always, my wife and I compare our childhood Memorial Days. For her, it was Decoration Day. Her family would make the pilgrimage by car to the family’s graveyards. They had two, one for Mom’s family, and the other for Dad’s line. Both were born and raised in southern West Virginia and had a family line that went back several hundred years. The graveyard was cleaned up, if needed, and fresh flowers were put on the graves.
My family, in contrast, were relatively new, in some ways. Mom’s side came over on the Mayflower and kept moving west. She was born in Turin, Iowa in the 1930s. Her grandfather helped establish the town, and her mother was born in Turin in 1910. Dad’s father’s family came over in 1899, went to Pittsburgh, PA, and stayed. His mother’s family arrived in Pittsburgh a little bit later and also stayed.
Memorial Day for me, then, wasn’t and isn’t about graves, but about sports, family, and food. As I aged, it did become more about military service and sacrifice. Now it’s just my wife and I out here in Oregon. Her mobility and diet are limited, and Memorial Day has been relegated to just another spot on the calendar.
My theme music today relates to a conversation with my wife this morning. A friend highlighted a post for me on Facebook. I don’t go much on Facebook. My wife doesn’t have a FB account but uses mine to lurk, so she saw the post and told me about it. The post is about misunderstood song lyrics — mondegreens. One song was “Panama” by Van Halen. A popular mondegreen, unfamiliar to me, is that they’re singing “padded bra!” instead of “Panama!” Reading this to me, my wife sang the “padded bra!” part, cracking herself up. The Neurons immediately shipped the song into the morning mental music stream, where it shares time with my thoughts.
My wife and I were in the office this morning, each pursuing our computer agendas. Suddenly she bursts, “There’s a FEMA carveout for Trump’s residences in the bill that was just passed.” She was livid. “Trump doesn’t send FEMA to help anyone any more but if one of his places are hit, he’s taken care of. This is ridiculous! This is disgusting! He’s supposed to be the servant of the people, not the other way around. When will those idiots wake up?”
A few minutes later and she launched into Trump’s latest crypto scam, piling on about how he’s using the presidency to enrich herself. I commiserate but don’t otherwise respond. I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of how Trump and the Greedy Ol’ Trump Party is enshittifying the United States. I’m taking the day off from it.
Hope you have the best day you can. I’m gonna try to do the same. Coffee is at hand. And away we go.
Jessica Brösche was walking from Tijuana to San Diego with her friend, Nikita Lofving, an American citizen living in Los Angeles, when she was stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and accused of working in the country last time she was in the United States on a visa, KGTV reported.
Evidence? Judiciary process? Are you kidding, with PINO Trusk in charge?
He and his friends met for beers and conversation. As they raised glasses and clinked them against one another, he said, “I just learned that the reason people originally clinked glasses like that was because the sound was supposed to drive evil spirits away.”
“Really?” Another asked.
“Yes, apparently the Gods didn’t like people to have fun outside of celebrations of Gods, and would send evil spirits and demons or minions or something after them to stop them from having fun.”
“Huh,” several said.
“Yes,” he continued, “and I just learned that when I made it up.”
Where does everyone stand on blessing people when they sneeze? I mean, I say, “Excuse me,” when I sneeze. I notice many people don’t. I tell others, “Bless you,” when I’m near someone who sneezes, even though I’m agnostic, with tendencies that slide toward being an atheist. It’s something mom taught me to do. It was considered polite. That training, though, was almost sixty years ago. She could have been conning me, for all that I know. I was young and just learning the language.
Also, if someone is wearing headphones and can’t hear you, should you still say, “Bless you?”
Should I just drop the whole thing because it’s an outdated custom?
Michael Seidel, writer 