Tag: U2

Friday’s Theme Music

Hello feckless fellow philosophers! Welcome to funky foggy Friday, where a moderate portion of fog is being served this AM. It’s the last Friday before…dun dun dun…We Turn Back The Clocks in the United States. People have been trying to turn back the calendar for several years. I wouldn’t mind turning back the calendar on my body. But all we get is an hour back. And we must give it back next spring.

Today is November 5, 2021. It’s 47 degrees F outside and only expected to climb give degrees from here. That fog and cloud cover contributes. It’s a good soup day but I don’t think we have soup planned. The valley experienced an anemic sunrise at 7:49 AM, a grudging lifting of night’s curtain. Night will fall on us again at 6 PM. Meanwhile, we’ll scramble to run errands, clean, work, go to school, eat, have fun, bath, rush to the hospital, fight to breath, battle COVID-19, endure endless stupidity…well, you know the agenda. Your agenda may vary. Especially if you’re below the equator, where it’s getting warmer, sunnier, and brighter. Of course, some areas are probably like our area, worrying about wildfire and smoke as summer comes upon them. It’s our cycle of existence.

I have U2 with “New Year’s Day” (1983) circulating in the morning mental music stream. It’s a dream byproduct. I’ve been dreaming more frequently, or remembering more. Or maybe I’m just imagining that I’m dreaming and/or remembering more. I can’t say.

Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed by the situation, get the vax and booster when you can. We spent hours on the telephone and computers yesterday trying to get a vax. Nothing in my town. Only one place offering them. The earliest appointments are at the end of the month, up the highway. The mobile vax van doesn’t come our way. So, we must get in our cars and ride, fellas. Now I’m gonna ride into the kitchen (actually, I’ll be walking) to the coffee maker. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Monday’s Theme Music

Monday motivation has arrived. Yes, it’s Monday, October 18, 2021, the third Monday in October. Monday is often thought of as a new week and a new start. That works for me, part of the inculcation process begun with school and continuing with my work existence. I now work every day, writing, so there’s no new start to that process. Yet, Monday still starts a new work.

We’re trending toward winter. Winter weather warnings. Snow on the mountains albeit still mostly above four to five thousand feet. Colder and colder at night. Night will come after sunset at 6:24 PM tonight. Sunrise came, sluggish through the gray miasma, at 7:27. Precipitation isn’t forecast for our area today but showers arrived yesterday and hung around through the night. Dampness rules outside. The cats are displeased. Besides the cold and damp, the street cleaner made its regular journey over the roads, much to the cats’ disapproval. It’s like a giant vacuum cleaner to them, I think, circulating the neighborhood with its infernal noise.

The morning mental music stream is featuring U2 with “With Or Without You” from The Joshua Tree. The album was released in 1987 and I was immediately enamored with it. I was stationed in Germany at the time, where weather often seemed a damp, cloudy, and chilly. Neurons connected today’s weather with that German experience and brought the song forth. Yet, “With Or Without You” does fit with a sullen day that seems chilly and ambivalent about rain. The song begins introspective and searching but then expands and explodes.

Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get the vax when you can. Here’s the music. I’m off for a coffee break now. Be back in a few. Cheers

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Thursday’s Theme Music

“Oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh, what a beautiful day. I got a beautiful feeling, everything’s going my way.”

Yes, Gordon MacRae is singing to me this morning. Part of an exercise to, um, exercise a more positive attitude.

In many ways, it is a beautiful morning. Though the sun is a whitish wisp behind a uniform chalky pale gray, the air is calm, windows are open, smoke isn’t actually entering the house, and nothing locally is on fire. See, I can be an optimist. It’s a cool 76 degrees F for now. Sunrise came prowling around my back door on or about 6:15 AM and sunset will get our attention at 8:16 PM here in the Rogue Valley area. The heat dome is still with us, feeding off the air and land temp. We expect a high of 102 plus. We expected that yesterday but didn’t achieve it as the smoke kept us below 96 degrees. Thanks, smoke!

Inside the house is our sanctuary. Not a large space. Nor fancy. But ours. Where we can walk around nude if we want. Laugh and argue. Read and eat. Sleep and bath. All in relative protection. Within it is my space. My desk. Laptop. Printer. Chair. Cats on three sides of me. Guarding or protecting me. I don’t know what they’re doing for sure. But they’re there, sleeping on the job. Snoring, purring, there.

Shifting from Oklahoma!‘s music, I’m now playing U2’s song, “The Fly”, from 1991. Always a little bit of a strange song to me. Not my favorite. But I was going through this one part that goes, “It’s no secret that a conscious can sometimes be a pest, it’s no secret ambition bites the nails of success. Every artist is a cannibal, every poet a thief. All kill their inspiration and sing about the grief.”

What I was thinking about that was drive. Effort. Persistence. Trying and striving. Don’t really see how it ties into those lyric, but that’s what my psyche came up with. Thinking about it more, I believe the song is associated with the album (Achtung Baby) which is part of a chain of time and events in my life in 1991.

All right. Stay positive. Test negative. Wear a mask as needed, and don’t try to bullshit yourself about whether it’s needed. And get the vax. Here’s the music.

Cheers

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

The hump day cometh and the hump day goeth. Daybreak began at 5:34 AM in Ashland, Oregon. Most of the flowers have lived their life of color in my neighborhood, fading to leafy remains. Thanks to cooler temps — highs have dropped from the standard 90 – 100 degrees F days to low 60s — and a splatter of rain, lush greens dominate. Nightbreak (hey, we have daybreak) will come at 8:46 PM. We’re fast approaching that longest day, meaning the longest period of sunshine, in the north. In the southern hemisphere, they’re hurrying toward their shortest day of the year. Then, the northern hemisphere minutes of daylight will start declining while they start adding up to longer days south of the equator. It’s the great circle of seasons, the revolution around the sun.

Out walking yesterday, I encountered a handsome silver tabby. Meowing with urgency, they ran to me. A collared adult, a heart-shaped metal tag informed me the friendly feline was named Rajah. Rajah was very healthy and enjoyed my fingerwork. But a truck backing up sent Rajah racing back up the lawn he came down. I wrote Rajah’s phone number on my hand (always carry a pen — it’s my talisman), then wondered, what’s the name of this street, with an eye toward looking up lost cat reports on our local neighborhood posts. As I went through that process, U2 fired up “Where the Streets Have No Name”, a U2 fave of mine from 1987.

I wasn’t planning on using it for today’s theme music, but the theme of being in a nameless place in a dream where I was searching for a street sign came up in a dream. As I thought about that dream, “Where the Streets Have No Name” was revived in the mental stream.

So here we are. This is the official video of the song, with U2 playing on top of a building. Think the Beatles did that once. Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, and get the vax. Cheers

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Sorry, but I have an ear floof pestering me this morning. It’s on a loop singing U2’s “The Sweetest Thing” (1998) or 1987 – it was a B side originally, and was then released again). Of course, it’s the same verse (with backup vocals and strings) caught in the mental music stream.

Blue-eyed boy meets a brown-eyed girl
Oh oh oh, the sweetest thing
You can sew it up but you still see the tear
Oh oh oh, the sweetest thing
Baby’s got blue skies up ahead
And in this I’m a rain cloud
You know we got a stormy kind of love
Oh oh oh, the sweetest thing
Yeah

So, I foist it upon thee to silence the singing floof in me.

Abject apologies. I’ve used this song before as the theme choice, just over thirteen months ago. It was dream fallout then. I had a multiple, vivid dreams last night, but have no reason to ascribe it to the dreams this year.

Anyway, here we go.

U2 – Sweetest Thing – YouTube

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

It’s a September in Oregon, the first day of September.

Many have made comments on the net that time is dragging. That’s not the case for me. The hours and days have skittered through on spider legs, and you know fast spiders can go, especially if they sense your fear, or you’re trying to get them.

Anyone songs about September bubbled through my morning stream (sounds like I’m pissing them out). Changing the calendar in my office, though, I saw that one, and U2’s song from 1992, “One” vaulted into mind.

Is it getting better?
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you now?
You got someone to blame

h/t to Metrolyrics.com

Yes, with how 2020 has been going, I think “One” works. Cheers

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

The night was lively with energetic, positive dreams. When dreams like these take place, I hope and wish that they’re prophetic. Although I’m an optimist, I believe they’re overflow from my attitude, not the future.

My attitude does fluctuate. I can swing from hopeful to despairing faster than a hummingbird’s heartbeat.

At least one dream featured background music as U2’s “Red Hill Mining Town” was played. A few stanzas were prominent:

We’re wounded by fear
Injured in doubt.
I can lose myself
You I can’t live without.
Yeah, you keep me holdin’ on
In Red Hill Town.
See the lights go down onÖ
Hangin’ on
You’re all that’s left to hold on to.
I’m still waiting
I’m hangin’ on
You’re all that’s left to hold on to
On to.

h/t to Metrolyrics.com

BTW, did anyone else’s WP give you a change — an improvement, they’ll probably tell you — changing your block editor? Gotta fix it again, not difficult, but annoying. Don’t need another cause for teeth gnashing, thanks.

Here’s the music, from 1991. Not fond of this video. Hadn’t seen it before today, but it leaves me cringing with its sense of studied drama.

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Friday’s Theme Music

Yeah, a free association flow today ended up with this song. It started with writing.

Yesterday morning…stalled on writing a scene. Overthinking it, my home-grown inner writing coach screamed. “Do it!”

Despite that exhortation, I resisted and fiddled. Knowing self, though, finally opened doc, went to scene, started reading and fiddling with words. Then, ah…sweet relief as sentences flowed in and out.

Then, pop: revelation. Surprise. Unseen connections and directions illuminated. Go: write like crazy.

Done with the one-handed writing for the day, the writing continued in my gray space — the brain, yeah, but also those nano vacancies visited while watching TV, petting a cat, searching the sky, scrolling the news — and new nuances proliferated. As it happened (continuing in dream material), it came at last as another piece in the characters’ stained- glass personae: desire.

Who they think they are, claim to be, try to be, fail to be, are seen to be, were before, dream to be, and are said to be punched together.

So, today’s theme music is U2’s “Desire” from 1988.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Took a walk into the steep hills of southern Ashland, where you lean forward like you’re walking into a hurricane gale to progress up the incline. Looking back over the browning valley, across to where vineyards sprawled under a blue sky and the Interstate snaked by with semis full of goods, the song, “Bullet the Blue Sky” by Oasis (1987) stole out of memory into consciousness.

And i can see the fighter planes
i can see the fighter planes
Across the mudhuts as the children sleep
Through the alleys of a quiet city street
up the staircase to the first floor
Turn the key and slowly unlock the door
A man breathes into a saxophone
Through the walls we hear the city groan
Outside is America
Outside is America

h/t to Metrolyrics.com

Not surprising. I’d be writing in my head as I walked, picking up where I’d stopped for the day, moving the chains to the next day. As my story companions travel, they stop and watch things and wonder.

Basically, as I was doing today, wondering about the past, the future, the present, politics, you know…the world.

Here’s the music.

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UFloof

UFloof (floofinition) – Irish floof rock (flock) band formed in the late 1970s, who remain active and touring.

In use: “Although demonstrating floof punk (flunk) tendencies in their early years, UFloof evolved into a floofstream band, counting tunes such as “With or Without Floof”, “Mysterious Floofs”, and “Floofday Bloody Floofday” among their many popular songs.”

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