Tag: new month

Saturday’s Theme Music — The End

Ashland, southern Oregon.

Saturday, August 1, 2026. Happy Lammas Day!

It’s 71 F in our valley at the moment. Light, high white clouds. We expect a high in the upper 80s.

A new heat dome is moving into the region. But the jet stream shifted a few years ago. Now we’re often protected from those heat domes. It can change again at any moment, so I’ll take it for now and celebrate the small win.

It’s a new month but much hasn’t changed.

Eight-five fires are burning in Oregon.

They still haven’t closed on Mom’s house. She is aware that it’s being sold, though, asking me for updates every day.

Trump is still lying. Still squirming, trying to distract us from his failures.

The Epstein files haven’t been released. Trump’s war with Iran is still going on. Affordability remains a crisis. Healthcare costs are going up.

Like many people, I’m waiting for other things. Like the old story: waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So, it’s a new month, but the same mode of waiting.

Without much surprise, The Neurons caught onto my thinking. My Neurons can be slow and flaky, easily distracted by games and cats, but like a car, they can get fired up and pointed in the right direction once in a while.

Today’s song in the morning mental music stream is “Waiting for the End”. This is a Linkin Park song. Came out in 2010. I caught it on SNL and went looking for it to hear it again.

Sample Lyrics:

Waiting for the end to come
Wishing I had strength to stand
This is not what I had planned
It’s out of my control

Yeah, yeah
What was left when that fire was gone?
I thought it felt right, but that right was wrong
All caught up in the eye of the storm
And trying to figure out what it’s like moving on
And I don’t even know what kind of things I’ve said
My mouth kept moving, and my mind went dead
So, I’m picking up the pieces now, where to begin?
The hardest part of ending is starting again

The song is about hope, paralysis, and frustration, IMO. Feels right for today. Here we are, waiting for the end, trying to figure out how we define the end.

I hope you have a strong day, whatever one it is, whatever your season, a day that comes with lasting peace and grace.

Cheers

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Hello, August

Hey, all you hep writers out there in writing land. Hope this post finds you in the writing groove on this first day of the eighth month of the eighteenth year of this new century.

When does this stop being the new century? It’s still a young century as the age of centuries go, just in its teens, which could be why it’s rebelling against everything and challenging every word. Just old enough to vote in some places, old enough to marry, depending upon where you live, and not old enough to drink in some areas, the century brings to mind Alice Cooper’s song, “I’m Eighteen.”

I got a Baby’s brain and an old man’s heart
Took eighteen years to get this far
Don’t always know what I’m talkin’ about
Feels like I’m livin in the middle of doubt
Cause I’m Eighteen
I get confused every day
Eighteen
I just don’t know what to say
Eighteen
I gotta get away

h/t to Genius.com

Sure sounds like this year and century, doesn’t it?

I sometimes feel that I’m eighteen as I go through my writing processes. Each writing session offers its own challenges and rewards. When I measure it all, I hope the results are worth it, but there are times, man, there are times when confused, disparaging whispers echo in the chasms of my mind.

I prevail, in the same fashion as most writers, by venting, raging, sulking, drinking, reading, shrugging, and writing, and then writing more. I often wonder what I’d be like had I not heard the writing call, but then, I wonder about that with every area of my life. What if I’d not married the woman that I did, or what if I hadn’t joined the military, and so on, as billions upon billions of people have done.

In the end, August of 2018 feels a lot like January of 2018, a hopeful period that also looks daunting.

Time to write like it’s 1999.

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Monthly Changeover

A new month has arrived. Hello? February, already? No way. Time continues to accelerate in an unseemly manner with months passing like weeks and hours flashing by like minutes.

I hypothesize that we each have time particles at a sub-atomic level in ourselves. Their interaction with others’ time particles and those embedded in other matter form how we perceive and use time, and how time treats us. We adhere to agreed standards for simplicity’s sake, but time is more personalized than realized. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it, at least for today. Someday, someone a lot smarter than me will figure all this out, and our thinking about time will undergo a monumental shift. For now, it’s one of those, we can’t make out the forest for the trees sort of perspective.

With the new month comes chores that rotate around the month’s arrival. Besides flipping over calendar pages, reviewing business plans, goals, and dreams, I also back up my writing work on something external that’s placed somewhere safe. While floppies of the five and a quarter and three and a half-inch varieties were used in the past, I moved on to zip drives, CDs, and now, flash drives.

Reviewing the month, I’m pleased with my writing progress, but I’m astonished that it’s taking so long to finish this quadrilogy, Incomplete States. I seem to be adding a new volume every few months; this week I was contemplating a fifth book in the series. Reining myself in, I sought ways to incorporate these new ideas into the fourth book being written. We’ll see how it goes. It’s not like the series is a raised garden bed, where everything must be contained. My motto is generally, write like crazy, and let the words go where they flow. I’m a trifled concerned; if I keep adding volumes like this, I’ll end up with something that rivals the Wheel of Time for the series’ length.

Now it’s time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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