Wednesday’s Theme Music
Mood: thwumpy
Thwump thwump thwump thwump
The helicopter — there’s just one, despite the traveling, echoing sound — continues its cleanup action. Good news: it isn’t black. No one rappels down from it.
Other than the chapter, Wednesday, April 24, 2024 in Ashlandia, offers up a mild and attractive spring day. 55 F, hunting for a 68 F high. Scanty clouds are mixing it up with the blue sky and sunshine.
Depressing news on the Mom front. She returned home but is suffering a lot of pain. I’m flummoxed. After days of being mostly upbeat, she’s in pain, angry, snapping at everyone.
Why is she in pain again? What’s the source? It seems to be a culmination of issues. She’s eighty-eight. Systems, muscles, joints fail. Pain ensues.
I try mounting context around her situation. She wasn’t allowed to go to my nephew’s eighteenth birthday party. Arrangements were made so she could join via Facetime to sing happy birthday. She was a no-show. When contacted, she said she saw how she looked on the screen and didn’t want anyone to see her like that.
Meanwhile, there were miscommunications and misunderstandings when she returned home. The facility offered her a wheelchair. Mom said, no, because she has one at home. The sister with her didn’t say anything but the rest of us responding, “What wheelchair? She doesn’t have a wheelchair.” So that opportunity was missed.
Her home stairlift quit functioning. Turns out that it needs a new battery. There are claims that it’s been beeping for weeks. Why didn’t someone notice that and do something about it? That would make sense, wouldn’t it?
Mom’s live-in boyfriend and my two sisters who live near Mom are emotionally exhausted. They’re struggling with their health and life matters. Mom calls for them to come help her but their balance is broken. It’s become harder for them to rise to the moment. They’ve been doing so for about five years.
A third sister leaves near Mom. Her husband has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. No other details are being leaked. They’re a secretive couple.
My fourth sister, the oldest sibling, now 70, lives in Georgia. She works, but her finances are tight. Going to help Mom would be a huge financial challenge for her from what I know.
And I, I sit across the country in my world, frustrated, guilt-ridden because I’m not there to help. I feel selfish. I want to go to help them.
I am selfish. I’m trying to pursue my long-delayed writing dreams. And I have my wife, house, and cats to take care of, along with a bunch of other issues. If I go back to help Mom and the rest, that puts a lot on my wife. She’s dealing with her own matters.
I feel like I know what I must do. Sacrifice and go. But also load it on my wife. And that causes more stress, more guilt, more depression.
Bit of a rant, wasn’t that? I know so many others have gone through like situations. I watched and helped as my wife went through this with her mother for several years. Other friends and relatives have gone through it or are going through it. This is part of modern American life.
On to music, okay? The Neurons have loaded ELO’s 1977 song, “Turn to Stone”, into the morning mental music stream (Trademark overdue). I get that. I feel paralyzed by demands, choices, and the need for decisions. Yeah, I’m turned to stone. Need to suck it up and move.
One other matter on my morning agenda. A toast to Voyager 1. NASA has restored contact with it. Launched back in 1977, a friend of mine was involved with its mission planning with NASA. He passed away from a brain tumor a few years ago. He said that he was only involved in a small degree. His expertise was measuring plasma composition in different regions of space. But even a little involvement is something. So, to Voyager, NASA, and Ed.
Be positive and keep strong. I know it can be a struggle. I’ve already launched some coffee into my body but I’ll probably add another round. Here’s the video. Cheers
The Writing Moment
Still at it with the manuscript in progress. Its working title remains Memories of Why.
As I began rev 6 — I think it’s rev 6 — I saw that I’d gone too meta. The beginning was too abstract. I understood things, sure; whether muses created it, or I did with my imagination, or it’d flown into my being from some other dimension or alternative reality, I was familiar with it.
But it wouldn’t work for other readers. I’m sure the great mass of others would ask, “WTF?” I didn’t want to put that on them. I needed to create a more substantive setting for them.
As I worked on the last revision, another aspect of the situation had emerged. I could weave elements of that arc into this one. I felt it would cement the story, provide a solid introduction to the main character, and create greater empathy for him.
So that’s what I did. Feeling a need to couch it all in the best words and phrases I could, there’s been a lot of stop and go. Lot of deleting to begin again and a great deal of going off page to write myself into understanding. I think, therefore I write, so I know what I think. I perceived how I sometimes overthought myself into paralysis. Made things too difficult for myself. Tried to be too clever or too precious.
Intriguing to me, when I began each time, the world would form, the characters would drop in, sounds would be ladled in, and the place and its story would be. Then I’d wipe it out and commence again. And again, all would fill in, like I was opening doors and walking into other worlds.
The aspect of the process is stunning and mesmerizing. Once I felt sure of the scene and moved on, I felt the weight of that existence as surely as I know impact of the real world that I inhabit.
So, there were detours. There usually are in any effort. But I advance. So does the manuscript. And the pleasure and satisfaction remains.
Cheers
Sunday’s Wandering Thoughts
I was skateboarding the net yesterday, swerving from click to click. An ad bounced up for an Ashlandia coffee shop I used to regularly frequently. It permanenly closed due to the pandemic, Jan 2021.
My backstory is that I enjoy coffee shops as a place to write. I began doing that when I started working from home and began writing short stories in parallel. I use the process of going to the coffee shop as a method to put on my writing hat and throw off the rest of the world. Finding the right place is a challenge. There’s the taste. Location. Prices. Staff. Decent writing surface and a place to plug in. Wifi is a nice convenience to add.
The coffee’s shop closure during the pandemic was the abridged edition. Located in a hotel, a husband and wife team managed it on behalf of her father. He owned the hotel He came in one December day and told them that plans were changing. They protested. The exchange grew angry and loud. The husband and wife were fired.
I’d been loyal to them. The staff walked out with the managers in protest. Long-time customers like me left and didn’t return. They made changes. I visited once a few months later. It wasn’t the same. Management declared after that that only hotel guests were welcome. That was only in the morning.
Replacing it had been difficult. An ad to come patron it surprised me. I checked online: permanently closed, according to its FB page and website.
But businesses are often shoddy about keeping their social presence online up to date. I drove by. Dark. Empty. Closed.
I went on to my new favorite coffee shop. I’ve already lost four Ashlandia coffee shops in the nineteen years I’ve lived here. Hope I don’t lose a fifth. Yes, it’s all about me.
Still, I had to ponder the business intricacies that had an ad for a closed business riding on the net. Sometimes, it’s still garbage in, garbage out.
Thwumpday’s Theme Music
Mood: Melloffee
The choppers continued back and forth, up and down. Thwump thwump thwump thwump. We can hear them in the house, windows closed and all. Outside, they’re much louder. This is day four of their presence.
This is Sunday, April 21, 2024. Or with those choppers going in Sunday’s calm blue silence, Thwumpday.
The helicopters seem to start at 8 AM and go until later afternoon. They’re out there as part of the project to clean up the watershed mountainsides to make the area less attractive to fire. So yes, they are a good thing.
They’re driving my wife a little crazy, she claims. Always there, rising and falling in volume as they thwump about.
I don’t mind them. Reminds me of being on military bases. Makes me a little nostalgic.
Beyond the choppers, blue is the predominate impression with my outward gaze through the glass. Clouds are resting on the horizon but over me is sunshine and blue skies. It’s 48 F at the moment. Some rain is predicted. The high will be about 66 F, a drop from our recent forays into the seventies.
The floof boys don’t seem to mind the choppers. Seem to have adjusted to them. They don’t fly directly overhead. The first days had Papi suspicious. He’d go out there and look and look, as if he worried that they were coming for him. He has a mysterious past, you know. Who knows what mischief he did in his youth.
On to the theme music. As I perused the weather this AM, I mildly complained to myself about the lower high. We’d just been in the seventies. Now —
Want something from the seventies? The Neurons asked.
I was blank and confused. Before I could summon a response, they were playing “Whatch See Is Whatcha Get” by The Dramatics in the morning mental music stream (Trademark trending). The song was released in 1971. I always enjoyed it. It made a comeback in my mind when the personal computer age burst upon is. “What You See Is What You Get” — WYSIWYG — was a big thing with software. The Neurons would play The Dramatics song whenever I saw that on the software box or in a glossy magazine ad.
Stay positive, dress appropriately, be strong, and Vote Blue in 2024. Coffee is being choppered in. I hear it coming. Thwump thwump.
Here’s the music. Cheers
Michael Seidel, writer 