Mood: Pepperyfresh

An endless duvet of clouds challenges the sky. Flat and almost featureless, the clouds vary in tones of blue, white, and gray. Sunshine is out there because it’s daytime but the heat and light are undercover. A cold layer has settled across Ashlandia’s soul and the trees’ colors are fading as they shed leaves. 48 F now, we’ll clock out at 58 F today.

Received my molasses mail for my planned surgery yesterday. Gotta call it molasses mail because snail mail conjures too much speed for how slow local mail is in this age. Been waiting and waiting for that piece from my surgeon’s office, wondering where it was.

My surgeon’s office is about twenty miles up the Interstate from Ashland, in our region’s largest city, Medford. Recent local posts claim that mail between Medford and Ashland now requires seventeen days. That’s because Louis DeJoy reorganized things to make the USPS more like a business. So our mail takes days of traveling, handling, and waiting. It’s picked up in Medford, goes north up I-5, gets processed, and comes back down south via I-5 to travel the final twenty miles. I can’t testify that seventeen days is accurate, but that package did take over ten days.

Hell, twenty miles, they could have walked it over in less time. This is the GOP idea of ‘progress’.

Meantime, not having that letter caused confusion. It informed me that they would be reaching out to me to make a pre-op appointment, and what would happen during it. The document set up milestones and provided instructions. Meanwhile, the electronic side of the system hummed along. I received email notification of the pre-op last week, along with the post-op appointments. I guessed the gist of all of that but it sure would have been nice to have the explanatory documents beforehand. Guess the med system needs to change its methodology now that Louis DeJoy broke the postal system. It’s another reason to give thanks to D.J. Trump, who appointed jackass DeJoy.

Makes you shudder to think of how badly Trump would break the government with Project 2025 as his instruction manual.

With the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame happenings taking place, The Neurons revisited music by the various inductees. Dionne Warwick, Mary J. Blige, Kool & The Gang, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Dave Mathews Band. Cher, Ozzy Osborne, Foreigner, and Peter Frampton. Awesome music and a wide range of superb tunes were put out by these performers.

I ended up with A Tribe Called Quest playing “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” in the morning mental music stream (Trademark famous). It was a confluence of factors guiding the choice. My wife and I went to leave the house, and I said, “Oh, wait, I left my wallet in the office.” As I’d just been reading and remembering songs, Der Neurons instantly pounced with “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo”. The song has a steady, hip moving beat and humorous lyrics about a road trip that goes askew. Who hasn’t had something like that happen? Well, I imagine there are a number of people who haven’t had one askew, but came close enough to identify.

Here we go, time to rock and roll. Coffee and I are bopping along ago, and my pulse has acquired some strength to it. Be strong, stay positive, test negative, and vote blue. Here’s the music. Cheers