Here it comes again, six months of grey, cold, wet, shovels, ice, accidents, commercialism, religious competition and general buffoonery. No sunlight, no break in the cloud cover, just grey gray grae until May.
Can’t get anywhere in a reasonable time, can’t commute safely, can’t stand the insincere “Happy Holidays!” from the happy happy sales clerks.
Can’t purchase anything without muscling your way through noisy, smelly crowds of humanity, and fighting for those precious few parking spaces miles from the store (in a snow drift).
Can’t get the damn car to even start, because it plunged deep into sub-zero last night. Can’t get your packages delivered on time (because the Delivery Vans also can’t get anywhere). Doesn’t matter, you’re plowed in anyway.
The Television Professional Plastic People glee at every parade and event, with their pristine polished enthusiasm. Let’s start the advertising blitz a month earlier this year, everybody loves ads! Shill it, shill it, media hoes! Ho ho hoes.
The glass is half full or half empty. My friend Bob likes winter. My friend Bob needs psychiatric examination.
I mean, come on, the guy is a cat-warmer!
I’ll be over here Grinch-ing and Humbug-ing. Let me know when it’s a civilized month again. July, maybe.
The challenge today is picking a lyric that you know “by heart”, one that resonates particularly well (any why).
I find this sort of thing immensely difficult, because I have a trick memory (tricky in a good way, I suppose) for lyrics. I can dredge up One-Hit Wonders with ease, and recite literally hundreds of songs entirely and thousands of lyric fragments. It appears to be one of the only things my memory is really, really good at retaining forever.
And unlike my wife (hi beautiful!), I generally have the right artists attached to the right songs!
Sucks pretty bad when Celine bleeds “My heart will go on” or Whitney craps out “I will always love you“, or one of the many other “Pop tunes I have always hated” gets stuck circling in my head and refuses to be shaken out.
So as you might expect, this sort of thing makes me say “hurmh, huh, well, umm” for quite a while, trying to eliminate song that’s wandered through my head, to narrow it down to only one.
I began to think through the second part, the “why”, while flipping through my 500-favorites. I decided to go with:
Time (Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973)
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I’d something more to say.
Home, home again
I like to be here
When I can
When I come home
Cold and tired
It’s good to warm my bones
Beside the fire
Far away
Across the field
Tolling on the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell
Songwriters: DAVID GILMOUR, NICHOLAS MASON, ROGER WATERS, RICK WRIGHT
One of the more obvious choices, the best song from one of the highest grossing albums of all time, right? That’s not why I picked it .
I chose this piece for the instrumental, one of David Gilmour’s finest (to this day) moments, which is what makes it stand out in an album full of standout pieces.
(Groove to Mason’s Intro, too)
Watch the video and pay attention around 3:00, peaks with the long wail around 4:20. Brilliant, it still catches my breath to this day, and I always reach for the volume knob. Gilmour deserves to be played loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear.
My thanks to the boys in the band, and to Alan Parsons. There’s a fair chance my choice will be duplicated by other authors as a choice one (or many) times. I don’t care. I was a child of the 70s, this piece (and Hotel California) embodied the 70s, to me.
Hmm, Hotel California also has a long (and excellent) lead guitar break–do we sense a pattern?
If “failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor”, then an important question that needs to be asked before we choose up sides for the softball team: Who decides? Politicians in particular have a stunningly bad track record for picking winners and failures.
Should the MGM execs kill off Mickey Mouse in 1927, or allow Walt a chance to fail?
The Michelson-Morley experiment was a failure that changed the scientific world (and for which Michelson won a Nobel—for a null result!). Scientists as a whole view failure a bit differently from the rest of us; it’s often the failed experiments that lead to the next big steps ahead, that teach us the most.
There’s some inspiration to be drawn from historical failures, and sometimes even the close calls—so they can make a good backdrop thesis for those stirring inspirational speeches. Or a solid chapter for any book, I suppose.
*Yes, I know it’s not entirely as black and white in Galileo’s case as my 8th grade science teacher led us to believe. But now both the rationalists and the Church have plenty of apologists busily re-writing BlogHistory… Will history have any clear-cut bad guys left in another hundred years?
“Grand Moff Tarkin? Aw, he wasn’t so bad, he just had a mean old Darth breathing down his neck.”
Just going to liven up the posts a bit, it’s a daily challenge (not sure if I can keep up a daily pace, but nothing stopping me from just doing one here and there for fun).
The first one was a way rushed, trying to race the clock (late start). Annie may get in on the fun from the photography side, we’ll see.
The year is 2214, and your computer’s dusty hard drive has just resurfaced at an antique store. Write a note to the curious buyer explaining what he or she will find there.
“It’s too bad their pornography was only two-dimensional, isn’t it? Not even collectors want this stuff. Yours free, if you really want it.”
Today’s Assignment: publish a post for your dream reader, and include a new-to-you element in it.
My dream reader has (I hope) a sense of whimsy, and not too much art critic…
You might find a pathetic old codger
Who lacks even the skills of a bodger
His verse is quite trite
And his wisdom is slight
And he just ain’t that much of a blogger
(incidentally, I haven’t written any poetry since “Ex-Husband Stew”, which I wrote for a Witch singing at a Bardfest…long story…which was, I hope, a tiny bit more serious that a limping limerick. I’ll see if I can find a text of Ex-Husband Stew through the magic of the internet)
Today’s assignment: write the post that was on your mind when you decided to start a blog.
Ew. Okay well: I had just finished reading a couple of books that got my brain working along alternate-income-sorta lines. Those “Passions” posts…25 questions to help live a passionate life….The hundred dollar start-up, a couple more. Anyway, I’m not really still pursuing those vague maybes. Nor am I spending much time on Python right now, too distracted by the wonderful combined worlds of those high-intensity time wasters, Facebook and WordPress!
Maybe there’s a way to turn spare-time writing into cash, but…no, not really likely to happen, is it? I’m digging this ’cause it’s fun, lemme dig that for a while!
Sometimes I feel like the chasing latest bright-and-shiny idea IS my passion, “short attention spans R us”.
ParkInkSpot 