Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
The cats inspired today’s theme music. I’d gotten out of bed and came into the office. From the other room came the sounds of a clumsy cat in the kitty litter box. A few moments later, a stink cyclone struck me.
As I hastened to attend the natural disaster, I told the cat (who wanted out, and I understand why), “I love you but sometimes love stinks.”
J. Geils Band, “Love Stinks”, 1980.
Today’s song is one I sing briefly for myself almost every morning because I’ve tortured the lyrics to address my morning coffee ritual.
“Pour some coffee for me.
“Make it black, hot and strong,
“I can drink it all day long.”
Here’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, Def Leppard, 1987.
Songs often connect me to another place and time. In today’s case, I was connected to another person’s connection to elsewhere.
She was on my team at a San Mateo start-up. I’d moved to Oregon by now but went down to meet with my team once a month. We’d become good friends by then. First, she’d worked for my wife at an advertising agency. When a resource action moved them to the unemployment rosters, I hired her for a temp position and then ended up asking her to join my team. We carpooled for a while, too, and appreciated one another’s humor.
I had a radio in my office, the same boom box that was bought for office use in Germany a decade before, the same one I use now when I’m doing yard work. Back visiting my team in 2006, she was sitting in my office when they played The Killers, “When You Were Young”.
She said, “Oh, can you turn that up?”
Sure. I did.
Her expression acquired that almost reverential introspective gaze that people sometimes gain when they’re privately reminiscing. We started talking about the song. She told me that it reminded her of a friend. This is had happened about ten years before. She’d met this great guy, they got married, and then he cheated on her. Her friend became severely depressed and was going to kill herself but he found her and stopped it. They ended up going to counseling. Unlike the song, though, he cheated again. That was it for her. She didn’t kill herself, but she did divorced his ass.
So I remember her remembering this song as she remembers her friend.
I watched the video later to get a better understanding of what the song was about. It’s a long video, and they take their time getting into the music.
Memories come like tides, in private cycles. In today, I cycled back to Feb, 1991. I’d just come back from an assignment with the USAF in Germany. Enroute to California, I passed through WV and Pennsylvania on leave, visiting family, and then arrived at SF, CA.
Rain was pouring in the Bay Area that day. Ted, my sponsor, picked me up at the airport. California had been in a drought, he said, hard to believe since the great deluge was making Highway 101’s traffic a slow-moving shit show.
A little later, I was in the military hotel at Moffett just outside of Mountain View. Up the road was my new assignment, a place called Sunnyvale Air Station, a.k.a., the Blue Cube. The name was changed to Onizuka Air Base to honor Ellison Onizuka, an astronaut killed in the Challenger disaster.
Onizuka turned out to be a good assignment and my last. I retired there four and a half years later. The base closed down in 2010 and the Blue Cube was demolished in 2014. I blamed myself because the base probably wasn’t the same after my tenure (ha, ha).
It was a complete unknown to me when I arrived, though. Bored and tired, I flipped through channels in my hotel room, rediscovering American pop culture after four years in Germany, and saw a video by R.E.M. called “Losing My Religion”.
Somehow, it fit the moment.
I’d not thought of this song – or heard it – in a while, but Kalliope mentioned it on another post, and naturally the song was sucked into the stream.
Here’s Vanessa Carlton with “A Thousand Miles” (2002), a good song to begin a week, and an excellent song to stream as you walk-about and wonder.
Weirdly, it always bothers me that she doesn’t cover the piano up when she’d done with the song and has gone back home in the video. I think it’s a statement, things are not finished, but my inner tidy guy thinks, it was covered when you started, you should cover it when you’re done.
Today’s music choice began with a Billy Collins poem.
I don’t know what neuron decisions forced the stream of a Billy Collins poem to intersect with a 1989 song, but after a bit of that music, the Billy Collins poem moved aside, like a little Fiat 500 moves aside for a semi-tractor bearing down at seventy-five, its horn blowing like a child with a toy.
Wondering about the switch, I wondered if it was about faith and expectations running up against experience and reality. Maybe that was far-fetched.
For the record, the Billy Collins poem is “Nostalgia”. I can’t say that it’s my favorite B.C. poem because I like so many of them so much. I think that if I had to recommend just one B.C. poem, it would be “Forgetfulness”. It begins,
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
h/t to PoetrySoup.com
Love that poem. Anyway, here’s the song, “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode.
You get a twofer today.
This photo on Facebook reminded a friend and I of a conversation we once had about the songs, “Our House”. One version is by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Madness did the other. We just chatted about how different these songs were as we went about something else.
I haven’t seen him since around 2003 but I remember him fondly. FB connects us, so sometimes FB works as designed.
Sunshine lit the valley from the west, splashing through lazy swatches of stretched grey clouds outside our windows. Could’ve been early summer by its deceptive appearance, but it was March 3.
Ill with a sore throat and dribbling nose, I alternated between reading (Fear: Trump in the White House, Woodward) and napping whereupon a song found the stream and played in my brain.
You see, she was gonna be an actress
And I was gonna learn to fly
She took off to find the footlights
And I took off to find the sky
I couldn’t fathom why Harry Chapin’s “Taxi” (1972) was streaming in these circumstances. I often don’t understand how my mind words but I decided that “Taxi”, about the dreams that age into nostalgic memories, would be today’s theme music.
Cheers
Nathaniel Taylor, an actor who I knew from his role as Rollo on “Sanford and Son”, passed away a few days ago. He was eighty.
Many actors, politicians, writers, and sports and rock stars have passed away throughout my lifetime, along with cats, friends, family members, and people that I didn’t know. Some of them were killed in ways that we don’t like to think about.
Nathaniel Taylor’s death was another death. We all understand that death is gonna get us. Now, what happens beyond the door that death opens, well, we don’t know. We have a lot of theories, and we think that we have intangible proof that once we die, that’s it, game over. Then again, many ancient people believed that the sun revolved around the Earth, until we learned how to prove otherwise.
The death of someone who acted on a show when I was young triggered a stream of thought about how time seems to pass and prompted me to think, wow, 1969 was fifty years ago. Ain’t that somethin’?
Not really, right? It’s as arbitrary as weather in March, 2019, predictable but still surprising. Thinking ’bout all that nonsense kindled reflections on the music from then. Pop goes the song and out came the Rolling Stones with “Honky Tonk Women”.
Seems ’bout right.
You ever have one of those days when you think, today will be a good day to skip work? Mostly happens to me on a Friday.
Hey, look, it’s Friday. At least, you know, in this quanta of existence.
I can’t stop being me which brings me to the conundrum of wanting to laze around and wanting to go get ’em! I thought, a little soothing music, and I’ll be good to go.
Here’s Beastie Boys with “Sure Shot” (1994).
It’s fun time.
Michael Seidel, writer 