Soonday Morning

Mood: Soontobe

It’s Soonday, December 9, 2024. We’re enjoying a clear sky loaded with sunshine and an outdoor tempy of 28 F. Frost has shadowy places airbushed with white influences. A dense fog warning is percolating while 49 F is being dangled in front of us as a high. Should say that it’s my local system calling out 28; in other parts of Ashlandia, sunshine has cleared the forests and mountains and 42 is already being experienced. A friend’s weather setup, available via Wunderground, has his temperature at 31 F. Dress appropriately.

Moving slow this morning. That’s why I’m calling this soon day. Soon, I’ll get up and do things. Soon I’ll leave and get my hair cut. Soon. Night fraught with dreams and restlessness are keeping the go pedal from getting engaged, even though coffee and I have said our hellos. One dream featured me as a young man with young friends and relatives, traveling to another place. Along the way, I stopped to visit with others. There, I rested in sunshine and told people of other people’s businesses failing, along with places such as airports not being built. It ended with me trying to pull a nuisance weed, which then bloomed, leaped out of the ground and ran away, freaking us out. Then we laughed.

This cold weather and clear sky put me into a whirlpool of childhood memories. Once, while going outside to play football with friends when I was almost a teenager, I was accosted by mom. “Put a heavier coat on, for God’s sake,” she said. “It’s winter outside.”

Wise me replied, “It’s not winter yet, Mom, until the solstice, December 22.”

She answered, “It’s winter when it’s cold and the snow starts falling to me.”

We were living in Penn Hills, a Pittsburgh, PA, suburb. Snow had been falling since before Thanksgiving. Therefore, it was winter.

I used to talk to her about her winters in Iowa. She loved those days, she said, because they would stay in the house, where it was cozy and warm, and play games, listen to the radio, talk, cook, and clean. Winter remains her favorite season for those reasons.

Those memories crystallized into two songs for me last night. Both are called “Our House”. They’re very different. The first was dropped into the morning mental music stream (Trademark frozen) when a television show featured it ysterday evening. This is the “Our House” by Crosy, Stills, Nash, and Young. My wife sang along with it; that stirred The Neurons up, and triggered that memory whirlpool. But a rebel group of Neurons countered with “Our House” by Madness. Two very different songs. The CSNY offering says, “Our house is a very very fine house. With two cats in the yard. Life used to be so hard. Now everything is easy cause of you.” Madness sings, “Father wears his Sunday best, Mother’s tired, she needs a rest, the kids are playing up downstairs. Sister’s sighing in her sleep. Brother’s got a date to keep, he can’t hang around.” The CSNY version is about a young couple’s domestic tranquility. Madness offers a portrait of hustle, growth, and noise.

Let’s get positive (sung to Olivia Newton-John’s “Let’s Get Physical) and move forward. 2025 is almost here. Here’s the music to help you along. Cheers

Wednesday’s Theme Music

I didn’t recall when today’s theme music came out. I guessed about 1966, ’67. I was wrong. It was 1969. I remembered it the other day, when I was reading about Oregon’s marijuana glut a few days ago. Oregon has grown about one million pounds of surplus weed.

“Little Green Bag” by the George Baker Selection sounds weirdly like it’s from several different eras of pop-rock. Its beginning is often used to define cool in a movie or television show. A group moves in slow music, typically turning toward the camera as the music plays. This was done in Reservoir Dogs and the BBC television show, Red Dwarf. That song’s beginning, with its  bass line and isolated percussion, is cool.

I always remembered the next lines, though, thinking, hey, he’s looking for a bag of grass, as in marijuana. It sounded like he dropped it and has gone back for it, except he wasn’t singing bag, he was singing back, like, greenback. Which, I realized in one history leson in school, was dollars. So he was looking for dollars, not grass. That amused me, but perplexed my friends, who didn’t know what the hell song I was singing.

I’d never seen the video before today. They look very uncomfortable to me, like they’re self-consciously cringing inside.

Here it is, though. This is how we used to roll.

Weed Man

They encountered each other every day, and every day, the ginger-bearded young man said, “Hey, man, do you have any weed?”

Every day, Mitchell said, “No, sorry.”

After the first three days of this, Mitchell wondered, why is this man asking him for weed? Mitchell wondered, does he look like a man who might have weed? What makes a person look like he might have weed? He had his own conceptions of this. To his mind, he didn’t look like one who might be carrying weed.

The other thought Mitchell had was, perhaps the man greeted everyone like this. Mitchell laughed at the idea of this man saying to everyone met in town, “Hey, man, do you have any weed?”

After five days of this, Mitchell encountered the man while crossing the street, and said, by way of greeting, “Sorry, I don’t have any weed.”

The weed man looked at him like he was crazy.

Which made Mitchell laugh.

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