Posts Tagged ‘Perceptions’
Some Songs
Yesterday afternoon, a song popped up on my random shuffled library playback and triggered a visceral response that none of the songs ahead of it did. My reaction wasn’t immediate beyond appreciating that I hadn’t listened to it for quite some time. Then I noticed it was building to an ending that has always been one I adore. The last two minutes of the 4-minute and 52-second song grabbed me.
I spontaneously told Cyndie, “Play this at the closing of my funeral.”
Now, I’m not currently in the thought process of planning for my funeral, so I don’t know where that idea came from. I also don’t know what it was in that moment that triggered my brain and body to react to the end of the song in the way I did.
Some songs just do that for us. Last night we coincidentally watched the 2018 version of “A Star Is Born” with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga in which there is a scene that talks about the 12 notes between octaves…
…music is essentially 12 notes between any octave. Twelve notes and the octave repeats. It’s the same story told over and over forever. All any artist can offer the world is how they see those 12 notes. That’s it.
Sam Elliott’s character, Bobby, talking to Ally (Lady Gaga)
There is an article posted (Dec. 2022) on Psychology Today, “The Amazing Power of Music in Our Lives; Seven great reasons to incorporate music into your daily routine.” Music is good for our health.
I don’t know why some songs stand out more than others for us or why a particular moment I hear a song can have such a distinct impact.
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Yesterday, “Opposites” on Eric Clapton’s 1975 album, “There’s One in Every Crowd,” resonated deeply for me.
Some songs just do that.
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Here Today
In moments of wondering about the ways of the world, my mind seamlessly bounces from comparing to the past and trying to imagine a future. I suppose my current need to select a version of Medicare insurance that suits me is contributing to my pondering how long I might live and what serious illnesses might force me into expensive services from doctors, clinics, medical labs, or hospitals.
It’s a crap shoot and I am not all that concerned about simply rolling some dice and maybe flipping a few coins for guidance.
More immediately, I’m aware that mass consumption of the Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament games on television this weekend has me remembering what high school was like for me and how it compares and contrasts with the experiences of the kids in the stands and on the ice this year.
Plus, long-time play-by-play color commentator, Lou Nanne has announced this is his last tourney because he is retiring after 60 years in the booth, so the broadcasts are filled with flashbacks honoring him. It’s like looking at a scrapbook of how the world looked throughout my life. I remember that!
Campaigns for the 2024 U.S. Presidential election are cranked up and that has me wondering (and a little bit worried) about this country’s future. Top that off with the increasingly treacherous climate warming and my greater concern becomes the future of the entire planet.
I’ve contacted a local landscape company asking for a quote to address the settling of the earth around the foundation of our house. This is one of the recommendations that arose from the inspection visit by the neighbor I called last month. Taking care of that will remove at least one of the variety of possible contributing factors leading to the wet basement we experienced after it rained last December.
Seems like we’ve eliminated all the other causes we initially suspected. Updating the landscape around the house will not only be good for moving water away, but it should also make the place look sharper. If you can improve both function and appearance, it’s a win-win!
Who am I kidding? I know what really has my brain all muddled today. My least favorite weekend of the year is the one when the powers that be force the seasonal changing of our clocks and tonight we adjust one hour forward to Daylight Saving Time. That’s one less hour of sleep for humankind, one giant leap for our natural body clocks.
Cyndie and I have decided on this occasion, we will alter the time we reference for feeding the horses and Asher so that their internal clocks won’t experience any change. We have the luxury of adjusting our times because we are retired and don’t need to align our activities with jobs out of the home.
The times today or tomorrow are no different for animals. I wish I could say the same for me.
Freaky Swing
We are living it. Is there some way to fully comprehend ‘crazy’ when we are smack dab in the middle of it? The weather drama of well-predicted impacts from a warmer climate keeps playing out right before our very eyes.
I recently watched two movies about real events that happened in my lifetime. The first was a documentary about the disastrous last flight of the space shuttle Challenger and the second was an actor-depicted retelling of the GameStop stock adventures that happened during the pandemic.
When I see these kinds of movies, I struggle to recapture my perceptions of the events at the time they were playing out. It all comes up rather blurry in my mind compared to the clear and orderly hindsight offered in such films.
If someone eventually makes a movie in the future depicting all the series of weird weather, fires, flooding, and souped-up storms we have been experiencing, will it come across as more explicitly obvious than how we perceive it now? It should.
I suspect it will make us all look bad for how slow or ultimately ineffective we were in reducing carbon emissions.
On Tuesday, it warmed to 53°F by afternoon, and then clouds rolled in bringing snow, gale-force winds, and a drop in temperature to a mere 4°F by yesterday morning.
The average high for the Twin Cities is 35 for the coming weekend. We are expecting temperatures in the 50s and 60s. What a whiplash.
The horses didn’t seem overly ruffled by the extreme temperature swing overnight Tuesday. By the time Asher and I showed up at the barn in the morning yesterday, the wild winds that made eerie sounds all night long had calmed significantly.
The surface of the driveway had a wicked glaze over it. The truck delivering bags of feed almost didn’t make the corner when turning into our driveway. Luckily, she stopped before sliding all the way off the pavement.
By noon, the bright sunshine had cleared off most of the asphalt surface.
Today is the occasion of Leap Day. February has been so unusual weather-wise, the ‘every-4-years’ addition of one day hardly seems worth mentioning.
Not that I’d notice it happened if you showed me a movie about it three years from now.
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Old Schoolmates
Last night, I traveled back in time with a small gathering of guys I went to high school with. It’s an annual holiday event of simply showing up at a designated establishment at a given hour for beverages and a few hours of catching up and recalling escapades from our youth.
Sort of a tiny fraction of a high school reunion. Certainly much easier to plan and pull off. We met at Fat Pants Brewery in Eden Prairie.
It is a little crazy-making for me because it is usually the only time I see most of them in a year. My connection with them is from when we were teenagers, so that remains my mental reference, while I am looking at us all in our mid-60s. I can’t deny having several conversations about our age, health, ailments, and end-of-life contemplations.
When reaching the point in life where it becomes obvious that one is closer to death than to one’s birth, health conversations flow rather naturally.
These are people who I ran with across old people’s lawns and got yelled at (metaphorically), and now we are the ones telling kids to get off our lawn, so to speak. While hanging out with this bunch, I felt a certain appreciation for our shared experience of growing up without cell phones. These are my people, regardless all our variety of differences.
One thing that I’m struggling to comprehend after our visit is what the heck happened to us all between the 1970s and 2023. I’m afraid it’s mostly all a blur. Somewhere in there we raised kids and worked careers but it almost seems like just incidental anecdotes at this point.
After several hours passed in a blink, holiday greetings were exchanged, and one by one we headed back into our real worlds for another year. Something about that feeds my yearning to be able to participate in this ritual each December.
It’s a little adventure of stepping out of our present lives and spending a few fleeting moments with older versions of our younger selves one night of the year.
It feels very much like what Christmas is all about.
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What Again
It’s back again! A fresh new edition of everyone’s favorite image-guessing game. It’s simple to play. All you need to do is guess what is depicted in the image below.
Do you trust your first impression, or ponder the possibilities? Can you hold off long enough to wait for the answer to come to you, or will you look for the solution right away?
You are in charge, but it is strongly recommended you come up with some kind of guess for yourself before clicking on the image to find out what this could possibly be. Guess your best, and enjoy the mental exercise! What are you looking at?
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Holiday Monday
Today is Labor Day in the U.S., a holiday that alters my life very little at this point. We will drive home after a fabulous weekend on the water on a day when high heat is expected to be baking our part of the planet once again. I’m not getting ready for a new school year or returning to a workplace routine tomorrow, both fall milestones I dealt with for most of my life.
It means a lot to me to not take the benefit of being retired for granted. I feel ecstatic to have the freedom to choose where I will direct my attention every day. It’s unlikely that I will notice that today is a holiday. I expect I will notice that the recent dirt landscaping along our driveway deserves my attention.
Now that I think of it, I may notice a little holiday traffic on the route south. Maybe a line at the Dairy Queen in Cumberland.
Not knowing how I would spend all of my time at the lake over the weekend, I brought my wood sculpting stuff and a guitar. I didn’t bring my bike. I didn’t even open my guitar case and I barely got started on sculpting before being interrupted and putting it away. I guess I spent more time at the pickleball court than expected.
Oh, um…, I got called out yesterday on that claim of “winning” the “tournament” after playing only one game on Saturday. We didn’t show up to play until after the appointed start time and the team with the dinner reservation had won two games by the time we took on the losing team.
Jennifer…, we stand corrected. You and Charlie deserve to claim that (virtual) trophy.
Steve and I played five or six games yesterday and won all of them, except one. That one we lost 11-0. I blame the wind.
The floating inflated water contraptions have been brought in for the season and buoys tied to the anchors. We are ready for summer at the lake to be declared done for another year.
The next visit to the lake place will feel that much more like fall. I wonder how soon the temperature will get the memo.
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Transition Month
August seems like a transition month. It doesn’t really stand alone as a destination month that we look forward to arriving. Other spring and summer months really carry their own weight (my local geographic region-centric take). April showers and May flowers. Everything about June is great. July being smack dab in the middle of summer and including the U.S. Independence Day makes it the jewel of them all.
Then August arrives and the shortening of days becomes more noticeable and the onset of fall sports training camps begin opening. Everything about the month tends to point toward the arrival of September when sports seasons start and schools begin classes.
Sure, locally grown sweet corn becomes available in August, but we’ve been watching fields growing all summer long so it just doesn’t seem like an exclusively August thing.
Cyndie arrived home yesterday and Asher and I were both thrilled to see her again. She gathered produce from her garden and reported that her trumpet vine is going to flower. Her new pond vacuum arrived so she assembled that and gave our landscape pond a serious going-over.
While she was opening the mail and packages that had accumulated, she noticed one was for me. I hadn’t even looked. It was my tent rainfly from The North Face!
I had received no prior communication from them since sending it off to Texas for assessment. They did what I hoped they would, and what I wouldn’t have been able to achieve if I tried to do it myself. They completely resealed all the seams like new.
The North Face has made me very happy once again. Such incredible support to one of their customers!
It’s got me thinking that August is a really great month after all and deserves to be appreciated on its own merits.
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My Reality
Each day when I describe details of my experiences it is a function of a basic tenet of writing: write what you know. One thing I know about is the perceptions I have of the activities of my days. Yesterday, I turned my back on the NCAA Women’s national championship game when it became obvious to me that Iowa would not beat LSU and I went out to tend to the horses.
A glance at the reading from our outdoor thermometer surprised me with the number 51. Looking for a second source, I opened a weather app to see what it offered for a current temperature. The reading from Red Wing, MN –twenty miles to our south– was 57°F! I did not expect this level of warming yesterday. The new snow remaining on the ground from the blizzard Friday night was quickly being transformed into water. Our drainage ditches were flowing like rivers.
I have no idea how this fits into the entanglement of the quantum mechanics of our physical world, but I do know that this quick melt significantly increased the level of mud in the paddocks. At the same time, I cannot describe how I occasionally get a sense of someone in Nepal practicing an endless recitation of the mantra “om mani padme hum” as I breathe our air and take meandering steps half a planet away.
The horses were giving me the impression of being spectacularly patient about the slow melt we’ve been having this spring while they were also slipping into behaviors of being annoyingly impatient about getting served pans of feed after I showed up. The impatience is easily soothed by the arrival of their food and the quartet of munching sounds conveys a new meditative peacefulness that I gladly absorb.
It is April and there is a reason to think we might be gardening soon. Does this image look like our garden is eager to get going?:
I’m trying to absorb some of the horses’ patience about the uneven transition from the snow season to our growing season.
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Unknown Connections
There is so much music that I feel connected to, a lifetime’s worth, really. More to the point, the songwriters and performing artists. They have shared their creative visions and I have absorbed their renditions, on repeating rotations for years and often decades. Some of the people whose work has resonated for me draw me to want to know more about them.
I am an unabashed fan.
Their music is the most listened to in my library. They become connected to me in the unique way of celebrity, in that they have no idea who I am, but to me, it is as if we have become friends.
Upon fantasizing about how things would go if we suddenly found ourselves hanging out together with no agenda or time constraints, I wonder, would the artists of my liking honestly show any sense of connection with me?
My cat seems to like me in a way that hints at a connection. She also will just as quickly demonstrate total disdain. I guess, in reality, that combination of feelings is mutual.
That creative artist who penned lyrics that trip my trigger of perspectives, curiosities, emotions, longings, or visions of the world probably also chews food with their mouth open or has some other odd characteristic that would sour my attraction.
I could get all stalker-like and make my fanaticism known to them to find out for sure, but it makes much more sense to me that I leave the connection unknown, other than my anonymous contribution to their financial success by buying what they are selling and listening to the product of their genius.
The secret to connecting with an artist, in my opinion, is by not knowing anything about them when you meet. If a connection clicks, it isn’t a result of the preconceived perception one would have in mind. I have been curious to know how celebrities feel about meeting people who have no idea about their fame.
I would guess for really famous people, it would be refreshing.
In this scenario, I hope I wouldn’t end up dissing the person like the way my cat disses me.
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Relative Something 