He wasn’t surprised. Not eating brains. Yet. No. Just a matter of time. Someone will probably tell them that eating brains will save them from the coronavirus or something. He wouldn’t put it past them.
He’d been expecting the zombies for a while. They’d quit thinking several years ago. Clearly were unthinking and undead, not caring about anything except themselves and the undermining of their so-called freedoms.
What else could they be but zombies? Living in such an alternative world, believing ridiculous conspiracy theories for which proof wasn’t offered. Well, okay, sometimes they tried to put up some ‘proof’ – or their idea of it – but then it was shot down. You know, like masks don’t work. Vaccines will magnetize you. The coronavirus is a hoax. No worse than the flu. There’s a secret child sex ring on Mars. Trump is still secretly POTUS. And take ivermectin for the virus that doesn’t exist, that’s no worse than the flu. Now they were trying to blame Biden for Afghanistan. Biden, who has been in office for seven months, who took office twenty years after the war in that poor country began.
Today is Friday, August 27, 2021. Had some issues figuring out the day yesterday. Thought it was Wednesday. Had a Wednesday vibe. My wife’s comments abetted the Wednesday vibe. But it cleared up. I’m flying right now. Because, you know, it’s important what day of the week it is…isn’t it? Well, that’s how I was raised. Chores, school, vacations, holidays, work, it’s all built on the calendar.
Sunrise was at 6:31 AM. Sunset will come at 7:53 PM. Temperatures will range into the low 80s F today. They claim that our air quality is good today – first time it’s hit that mark in weeks – but the looks and smell don’t align with a good reading. I kept the kitties in and the doors and windows closed.
I’ve been thinking about the 1900s today. Started with wars. Progressed to a pandemic. Then the dust bowl struck. Obliterated millions of acres and displaced families. Thinking of all of that due to comparisons with now. The 2000s. Started with war. Then COVID-19 struck. Half of the western U.S. is suffering drought and fire. (Might be a little hyperbole there.) Thousands are being displaced.
Also been thinking about the Rolling Stones. Of course. Watts, their drummer, passed away. Long life. I think he would say he had a good one. Better than many, for sure. His passing has prompted me to listen to Stones music. A universe of Stone songs are out there. I’ve used many favorites as theme music already. What to do? How ’bout “Living in A Ghost Town” from last year. Fits the general mood. Smoke casts a ghostly pall over my world. COVID-19 lockdowns and smoke slash unhealthy air forces cancellations. Businesses are closed or hours are reduced. Activity slumbers. Why not, right?
Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, get the vax, celebrate life, remember that it’s Friday. Time for coffee. Enjoy the music. Cheers
On the Oregon coastfor today, Tuesday, August 17, 2021. Sunrise was at 6:20 AM. Sunset is at 8:09 PM.
Cool, here. Rained this morning. Ahhh. Rain and coffee. Is there a song for that? We expect a high of 64 degrees F. Brilliant, walking along in the cool, fresh air, going to a coffee shop in the early hours while the sun is still clearing its eyes behind a bank of clouds. Going into a funky coffee shop. Fantastic art by local artists on the walls. Fresh coffee. Fresh pastries. Fortunate to enjoy such things.
Back home, the woman staying in our house and taking care of the three amigos told us the smoke blew away after we left town. Yes, we’re taking it personally. The heat dome wandered on. Temperatures dropped by twenty degrees. Yes, we’re taking it personally.
Talking with friends about their lives, medicines, treatments, and ailments. Friend visited Pompei back in the mid seventies. I’m listening to the Bangles’ cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter” in my head. You know, “Time, time, time, see what you’ve done to me. While I looked around for my possibilities. I was so hard to please. Look around. Leaves are brown. And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.” It’s another terrific Simon & Garfunkel composition. Paul and Art released the original in 1966. The Bangles did their bang up in 1987. Here I am, thirty plus years later, listening via technology’s assistance. Do you have a preference between these two versions, or another?
Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask, get the vax. Here’s the music. Cheers
Today is Tuesday, know what that means? Means it’s May 18, 2021. Your reality may vary.
Sol pulled out over the hills and sluggishly beamed into the valley where Ashland is nestled at about 5:47 AM. His visit is expected to last until about 8:28 PM, when we’ll wave farewell and watch him set off for the rest of his daily visits. It’s never ending for that guy. He just keeps going and going…
Sol’s arrival was sluggish because surly clouds, puffed up and thick as steroid-infused weightlifters, wouldn’t make room. Some rain could be in our day, fingers crossed. ‘Too dry’ is how I’d label this spring. Temperatures will tug onto the lower seventies, maybe just the high sixties, depending.
Historically, Mount St. Helens blew on this day back in 1980. I just read it, otherwise it would’ve blown right past me. The old volcano had been threatening for a few months. When it finally blew, it made major headline news. We just don’t experience many volcanos erupting in the continental United States.
I was in the Randolph AFB Command Post at the time (in the Taj Mahal, under the water tower — yes, it’s true), and called the commander with the information when the volcano finally erupted. My wife and I lived in base housing with two cats, P.K. and Roary, watching cable TV on a big Magnavox console. We were getting ready to leave and head to Okinawa on assignment. Our car was a metallic copper Pontiac Firebird, the first new car we ever bought.
Dredging up music, I came up with Pink Floyd The Wall and Billy Joel. “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” was a big song at that point. Billy Joel was on a roll, pumping out albums and hits, and in the news because of his successful roll. I’m going with it because of its sentimental connections with who I was when. “Hot funk, cool punk, even it it’s old junk, it’s still rock and roll to me.” We can add a few more genres now, can’t we? It’s still rock and roll.
Stay positive, test negative, adjust your mask wearing as appropriate, and get the vax. Also encourage your friends and relatives to get the vax. Here’s the music. I’m gonna get coffee. Be right back. Ta
I spent over twenty years in the military, 1974 to 1995. The Cold War was underway. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. and the allies of each were constantly ready to fight a war. Stationed in Germany for several years, we used to practice wearing our hazmat suits and gas masks, taking shelter as we were attacked. I did the same during war games in Korea and Egypt.
Wearing the suits and masks wasn’t fun. That experience rendered it much easier to wear masks during the pandemic. These masks over our mouths, attached to our ears, are much easier to wear.
I’ve just finished reading The Splendid and the Vile.This book by Erik Larson covers Winston Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister. World War II had begun six months before. The London Blitz began that first year, 1940. The tales of deprivation are stunning. Larson uses multiple sources to weave a narrative not just about Churchill, England, and the Blitz, but about Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Hess, FDR, and the many people around Churchill coping with him, helping Churchill, and hunting for the way forward.
Imagine those times in the United Kingdom as bombers flew overhead through the night skies, dropping incendiary devices, and then bombs, feeling the ground shake with violence as buildings were shredded and people were killed. Imagine being one of those people in London and other cities, enduring as food and tea was rationed, gas, electric, and water services were interrupted, fighting fires, worrying about unexploded bombs if you survived the raid, then going to work. Imagine sleeping in air raid shelters in squalid conditions. Imagine the black-out demands where lights were left off, forcing all to stumble through darkness.
And so many here, in 2021, complain about social distancing. They won’t wear a mask, because fake news. Freedom.
They know nothing. They should have been in London or any of the other cities around the world that experienced these conditions. Then maybe they’d realize what sacrifice means. A mask? Six feet apart?
Really. It is nothing.
Wear the mask. Stay positive. Test negative. Get the vax.
Today is January 22, 2021. Sunrise is 7:33 AM and sunset is 5:13 PM in Ashland, Oregon, moving us closer to ten hours of sunlit. Our temperature is 37 F. Choppy layers of clouds, like pieces of clothing being sorted and stretched, are moving as the weather finds itself. A storm is shyly crowding in. We might have snow next week. We’ll definitely have colder weather.
Hammerin’ Hank Aaron passed away. Hammerin’ Hank broke Babe Ruth’s MLB home run record in 1974. I graduated high school and joined the military that year, so that’s childhood’s end for me.
When I think of my childhood, Hank Aaron and baseball were a large part of it, almost as big as music and politics. Music was defined by its growing presence on television and the increasing number of festivals and stadium shows. Other things from that era include the Doomsday Clock and the chance of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. using nukes, the Vietnam War and the peace talks, Watergate, student protests and riots in the 1960s, the oil embargo and gas shortages, and the explosive spread of cable television. Reasoner, Smith, Rather, Brinkley, and Hunt gave us the news at night. We were sending rockets with men in them to the moon and talking about the future of computers where everyone would have one in their home. The EPA had been created and the ERA was still a possibility, acronyms which were regularly discussed in school and on talk show panels.
It’s nice having President Biden in the White House. Nice not waking up to see what madness Biden’s predecessor was saying. Been a while since I read about a Karen employing privilege to insult and attack others. Coincidence? No.
Today’s song comes after another busy dream night. In one dream, I and others sometimes say, “There she goes,” in response to someone we’re looking for. In the course of thinking about that dream and phrase, the LA’s 1991 song, “There She Goes”, jumped into the thoughts. I guess my mind thought that would be helpful. It wasn’t.
Anyway, “There She Goes” is a strange song to me. It feels and sounds like something that should have been a hit in the early seventies or late sixties due its simple structure and sound. It’s also a brief song, under three minutes. Growing up with pop/rock, songs on the radio were typically three to four minutes long, so this song is ending just when you expect it to explode with something more. It doesn’t, leaving me asking, “Was that it?”
Here we go. Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask, and get vaccinated. Cheers
Politics and books took over my bandwidth last week.
Books are such time thieves. Writing them takes time, energy, and attention. With energy, I’m referring to intellectual, emotional, and physical energy. The effort absorbs everything. Don’t know if that’s true for other writers, but this is how it is for me.
Reading books also sucks away time and energy. I read a C.J. Sanson novel last week, Tombland. Tombland isn’t a small novel, registering at eight hundred packed pages. The latest in the Matthew Shardlake series, like the other novels, I was compelled to read, almost as if I’d been cursed. The mystery is relatively thin but that is incidental to the history, period, and characters. His voice is authentic, and the characters are alive and shifting. You feel it all.
But reading that book meant I was doing almost nothing else. It was that consuming. I was also trying to read it to return it to the library. It was due 10/22, but I had other books on hold. My wife also had library books to return (The Plover, and The House in the Cerulean Sea). (She’d read Tombland before me.) So I was pushing to finish to turn the books in, limiting our library visits and its potential COVID-19 exposure. They do a good job at the library, but exposure is exposure, right? Right. After returning Tombland, I returned home and had an email from the library system: they’d extended Tombland for me. Nice of them but unnecessary.
I recommend Tombland.This particular novel swirled around murders in Norfolk in 1549. Somerset was the Lord Protector for the young king. It being England and that era, politics around rights for the common people the Kett Rebellion, differences in the church (Protestants vs. Catholics), power struggles among lords and ladies (including Edward’s sisters), and enclosures – fencing off common land that set aside for animal crazy. All the sinister and cynical conniving among the wealthy to increase their power and wealth, and their attitude toward the lower classes, and the subservience expected from the upper classes strikes amazing similarities to what’s happening in the United States in this century.
Tombland was a fresh reminder of what England endured and how they prevailed and developed as a democracy. Turmoil and bloodshed are occurring in the U.S., but not at the levels seen in England at that time. I want to add, yet. It may come to that.
The monstrous poverty and homelessness of the era also brought out sharp comparisons to here and now in America. It provided rich fodder for heavy thinking.
Of course, reading a book that I enjoy helps inform the novel that I’m writing. Nothing I read made me want to tear up my manuscript (or delete it) or start anew. It did inspire nuances and new flavors to fold into the blend, and of course, fuel up the need to sit down and write.
The skunk and I (and my wife) continue our non-violent confrontation. I don’t want the skunk to go under the house to live; the skunk wants to. I’m not a violent person, and love animals. Watching the skunk (and studying it through the window as it emerges at night) gives more appreciation to who it is. Yet, I know it’s damaging our foundation, insulation, and weather barrier. I empathize with the little critter, though. It’s a tough life out there, and it’s only trying to exist as I’m trying to exist. It certainly has the same rights as me.
I blame some of my sympathy to the skunk to the Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher.A wonderful love story, it revealed standard details the octopus and its tough existence. Naturally, after watching it, I transferred the octopus’ struggles to ‘my’ skunk. There is a difference between the octopus and skunk: the octopus isn’t invading ‘my’ territory. Anyone can argue, the skunks were there first, and that I’m the trespasser. I know; that doesn’t make my job dealing with the skunk any easier.
I was rallying myself to get out of bed when the quote was remembered.
It’s a good quote Churchill, the second World War. (Has war stopped since then?) Queen put it into their 1984 song, “Radio Ga Ga”. After I applied it to myself (and wondering if it’s true), I applied it to humanity.
We — humanity — have been changing the world and our societies. Now the world is biting back, or so it feels. It feels like that because it’s us, and our moment. Review some history, and you’ll see that nature bites back pretty damn regularly.
So here we go with the theme music. Enjoy yourself, if you can, wherever you are, and wear your mask, please.
John Muir and Margaret Sanger. These two are the latest to be addressed for their racism. In Sanger’s case, it’s more nuanced, regards eugenics, and is too much for my sprawled one-handed pecking for much detail here. I do recommend research. Muir, though, was an outright racist. We learn that people can be visionary and flawed. His damage to our society is deep. It’s sad and disheartening to learn these things. But they must be learned, and we need to be cognizant of the damage inflicted, and, yeah, make changes.
Making changes like acknowledging past racism and its impact and then trying to fix it is just like the stages of grief, isn’t it? It’ll take a while to work through it. I can hear replies, how much longer must it take?
Lovely to feel my arm healing. Strength is returning, range of movement is expanding, and the circle of pain is shrinking. Go back next week. The plan (if all is well) is to replace the splint with a short cast.
Realizing that next week is August. July passed through with a sonic boom.
I love the John Cheever quote I found this morning (posted elsewhere on the blog). It speaks strongly to my own writing drive. I always think, there’s more to our lives and reality than what we know. I’m agnostic about gods, and indeed enjoy tucking them into my tales, but I pursue the impression that we’ve only skimmed the surface of being. Writing helps me explore that essence.
Drank a fantastic cup of coffee this morning. Right temp, flavor, and richness. A wow cup. Which made me immediately want to experience it again. Comparing it to drinking wine and beer, and eating food, and achieving things, I appreciated again the blend needed to brew something memorable that’s greater than its parts. Once, I’ve had it, I want more of the same. Not an epiphany, but a lesson learned one more time.
Speaking of one more time, got a refresher cuppa coffee (yeah, it’s not the same, but it’ll do). Time to write like crazy…at least one. More. Time.
After reading headline bullshit about more Trump lies (and other pols, but mostly the mano one) and general bullshit that’s out there, a 1984 Queen song entered the mental music stream.
“I Want to Break Free” wasn’t a big hit in the U.S., but I was travelling through Europe on mil biz that year, and heard it on their media. I thought the thingy ’bout the lies worked for this pandemic year.
Michael Seidel, writer 