PopWars

I have friends and family members who are affected by the quantity of sunshine in a day. I recognize that SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is real. A good friend of ours is moving back here from the Bay Area. As much as I am looking forward to seeing him in person I was encouraging him not to move here. He gets bummed out when it’s cloudy and he complains about it to anyone who will listen. I don’t want to hear it. I like cloudy days and I love living here.

There was a mist in the air this morning but it had temporarily stopped raining. We saw one other person. The cherry, crab apple and magnolia blossoms along Zoo Road looked magnificent against the grey. We took along Durand Lake, through Katsura Glen where the new leaves were just coming out.

Is today as nice nice as yesterday? Maybe but yesterday was my birthday so it was different.

Peggi made blueberry pancakes for breakfast and we took our time with the paper. We went down a YouTube hole for a bit and made a few phone calls. My sister has Covid so we talked on what would have normally been a workday for her. We never left the house until 2 but it was plenty of time for a six mile walk.

We started at my parents’ grave site, seventy-two years after they celebrated their first born’s arrival. I don’t think they knew how lovely this spot is when they picked it out. The green burial section on a hill overlooking Riverside, the non-denominational cemetery next door and the Genesee River was a brand new concept for Holy Sepulcher. There’s daffodils there now and a bench.

We left the car sitting near the graves and walked into the woods along the river. We found a patch of mature skunk cabbage looking just like cabbage does near the end of the summer. My father loved getting out in the very earliest days of Spring to find skunk cabbage popping through the snow in its flowering state. We found a few homeless guys camping out and this mysterious mound of sticks and eventually hooked up with the paved path that takes you down the river bank to Turning Point Park where the McKeil Spirit was unloading cement from Hamilton, Ontario. It looked as big as an apartment building or cruise ship and made the mighty Genesee look small..

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The type face, Glyphic Neue Neue Wide, could read as “Brian Ride.” That would work just as well. This song is from our gig last Wednesday and the train footage was in my home movie collection.

I used a still too, the shot above. I took this in 2011 on a high speed train to Sevilla. I considered using this still for the whole movie. I love it that much. The Spanish colors on the upholstery, the dark hair on the gentleman, his thin mustache, the stripes on his shirt, the olive green tie, the mustard pants! If there was some blood red in this photo we would have the entire Spanish pallette.

This is how to travel. This is how to live. This is civilization.

Margaret Explosion plays one more Wednesday, tomorrow, at the Little Theatre Café.

The imaginary keyboard on my iPad slipped from numbers to letters just as I was typing 2022. I caught a glimpse of the screen just before typing the last “2” and saw that I had typed “wow.” Try it.

The Lindas Lindas are keeping the flame going.

I love watching these birds. Woodsier than pigeons they spend more time on the ground than in the air. They waddle around and are always in pairs. I thought they were Morning Doves until I looked it up. They are probably called Mourning Doves because their coo sounds like a lament.

A pair of them are building a nest in the cherry tree out front and we have a closeup view of the action. The male, the more colorful and bigger one, shown on the left in my photo, dutifully collects small sticks and leaves and brings them back to the nest, putting each piece in the mouth of his mate. She packs it under her body while she sitting on the nest and he flys off for another piece. They can live to be thirty years old.

There was a note attached to our morning papers informing us that the carrier has decided to retire ” after thirty plus years of getting up at 4AM.” He threw in “the rising gas prices and the dwindling subscriptions” as factors that convinced him “it doesn’t make any sense for me to continue.”

Spring has come again but a sense of mortality hangs in the air. Friends and neighbors, all close to my age, are dealing with serious health issues. The last of my parents’ siblings is gone and one of my cousins. We have sat in on a few Zoom memorials. And there’s the book I’m reading. Here are two passages from Etel Adnan’s “Shifting the Silence.”

“Almost all of my beliefs have deserted me. I take it as a kind of liberation, and anyway, they were never too many. Our houses are cluttered, our minds too, so a fire as devastating as it can be, can well clear the air, enlarge the space, make room for some silence. Year after year all we do is gather dust.”

“I need to simplify my thinking: to come to the roots of the olive trees I have planted on my island, sit close to them, look at every leaf. Start early in the morning. Then close my eyes and let the morning sun touch my face. Go to the Mediterranean at the street corner, go into its water, its salt, its acid colors, its heat. Oh Lord, let’s stop thinking. Let’s just be, and for many hours in a row, merge with this vegetal and metallic kind of consciousness which is so overpowering.”