1. I hope to figure out in the next few days whether the shortness of breath I experienced tonight when I walked to the Gondolier (to buy some milk -- they didn't carry any!) is from walking too soon after I ate, points to me needing to walk more and build up my wind, or is another problem. I see Dr. Bieber in a week. Every visit, he asks me if I'm experiencing shortness of breath and I've always been able to tell him that I haven't been. I'll keep walking, see if it's a stamina problem, hope for the best, and discuss this with the doc next week.
2. Well, if I did walk too soon after eating dinner, the meal Debbie fixed was awesome. She fixed a garlic-y pot of rice, cooked a chunk of salmon just the right size for the two of us to split, and served the bean salad she made a couple of days ago.
It cooled off nicely as the sun set. It made sitting outside comfortable -- and it made my evening walk pleasant, too, despite my concerns about being a little short of wind.
3. I've been having fun, while working puzzles inside to stay out of the sun, to listen to albums from 40-50 or more year ago. My senior year at Whitworth, I developed a deep affinity for Emerson, Lake & Palmer's album, Brain Salad Surgery ("Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends") and, lo and behold, all these years later, it once again gave me a jolt and it did what I enjoyed when I was young: it transported me to imaginary worlds, gave me a welcome sense of romance and uplift.
Today, I returned to Joe Jackson's superb album, Night and Day, and listening to it brought back enthusiasms I felt not only for this lp, but for the early days of MTV and the fun times I had with students at Whitworth getting together to watch videos come on. I thought a lot about how well, from my point of view, Joe Jackson's song, "Real Men", has aged. It's not just the questions Joe Jackson raises in this song that are always current, but so is his passion, his feelings for the complexity of what it means to be a man ("What's a man now? What's a man mean?/Is he rough or is he rugged?/Is he cultural and clean?").
The last album I listened to, both in the Vizio room and on my walk, was Steely Dan's masterpiece, Aja. Several songs on this album give me the pleasure of a tightly written short story as Donald Fagan and Walter Becker bring characters to life in my favorite cuts, "Deacon Blues", "Josie", "Black Cow", and "Meg". I listened to a lot of contemporary jazz during the years surrounding the time Aja was released (1977). Aja's jazzy flavor seems to me rooted in that music (several prominent jazz artists from that time play on Aja) and so the album serves me up deeply satisfying nostalgic pleasures, both musical and literary, and I loved how it worked on me yet again today.
I hadn't listened to Brain Salad Surgery or Night and Day for quite a while -- but Aja? Well, that's a different story. I never let Aja get too far away and my enjoyment of this album continues to grow.
No comments:
Post a Comment