What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
I’m an ordinary man who lives an ordinary, mundane life. So my morning “rituals” are pretty routine. I am going to use the 7 to 8 am hour for my answer, since my usual wake up time is around 7 am.
The first thing I do after I get out of bed is go into the bathroom, pee, wash my face, and brush my teeth. Then I get dressed in my early morning attire, which is usually a sweatshirt and sweatpants.
Once dressed, I head toward the kitchen, where my wife, who is almost always up before me and has let the dog out into the backyard to do her business, is sitting at the kitchen table, drinking her coffee, and working on her crossword puzzles. I pour myself a cup of coffee, turn on my iPhone, and start reading comments that came in overnight and the posts that showed up in my Reader.
I fix myself a bowl of cold cereal, continue reading posts from other bloggers until I finish my cereal. By then, it’s around 8 am, so I go back to my room, change into my flight gear, and take off on my routine morning flight around the neighborhood.
See, I warned you. I live an ordinary life. Nothing special.
Do you have any regrets regarding your blog and blogging? What would you like to have done differently when you launched your blog?
I started my first blog in 2005 on Blogger. In 2007 I moved to a different blog hosting site, TypePad. It wasn’t until July 2013 that I started to blog at WordPress. In April 2015, to deal with some pressing personal issues, I shut down my WordPress blog. But in May 2017, once those personal matters were addressed, I returned to WordPress with This, That, and the Other.
My biggest blogging regret is that I didn’t start my first blog in 2005 with WordPress. Maybe it was me, but I had almost no interactions with other bloggers on either Blogger or TypePad. Neither (at the time) had the functionality of “likes.” Neither had a simple way to follow bloggers you enjoyed or a Reader functionality. And I hardly received any comments on my posts at either site. As a result, for me, anyway, blogging at Blogger and at TypePad made me feel like that proverbial tree in the forest that fell, but nobody was around to hear it. Only in these cases, I was posting and posting and got little to no feedback.
It wasn’t until blogging at WordPress that I discovered a robust and supportive community of other bloggers. I wish, back in 2005, I would have started at WordPress. But I suppose I got good practice blogging on Blogger and TypePad.
It’s time for this year’s A to Z Blogging Challenge to get underway. My theme is classic rock songs. Each day during the month (except for the first four Sundays, I will post a classic rock song: a video from YouTube, along with a brief bit of background about the song and the recording artist(s).
My C song is “Crazy on You,” from the American rock band Heart from their 1975 debut studio album, Dreamboat Annie. It was released in March 1976 as the album’s third single in Canada and the album’s debut single in the United States. It reached the top 25 in Canada and the top 35 in the U.S. It is considered one of Heart’s signature songs as it is one of the most played tracks on classic rock radio stations in the U.S.
Heart’s lead singer Ann Wilson wrote the “Crazy On You” lyrics about finding solace from the stressful state of the world in the arms of her boyfriend, Heart guitarist Mike Fisher. She was in her mid-20s and didn’t see a bright future for her generation. At the time, the Vietnam War was still going on, crime was rising, and there were gas shortages.
But she was in love, so she made the song about Mike as a way of saying “thank God I have you.” The song turns sensual, with Wilson coming to the conclusion that all she can do in these seemingly apocalyptic times is go crazy on the man of her dreams.
The song opens with the acoustic guitar stylings of Nancy Wilson, Ann’s sister and bandmate. On the album track she plays for 45 seconds before Roger Fisher’s electric guitar blasts in. But she goes on quite a bit longer in their live performances. Nancy said how the instrumentation was inspired by a classic Moody Blues tune. “We were listening to a lot of Moody Blues back then. There was a song called Question that had this fast, fiery guitar rhythm. That was our idea for the groove. Then Roger Fisher came up with the really cool riff that gave it some more beautiful momentum.”
Here are the lyrics to “Crazy on You.”
If we still have time, we might still get by Every time I think about it, I wanna cry With bombs and the Devil, and the kids keep comin' No way to breathe easy, no time to be young
But I tell myself that I was doin' all right There's nothin' left to do at night But go crazy on you Crazy on you Let me go crazy, crazy on you, oh
My love is the evenin' breeze touchin' your skin The gentle, sweet singin' of leaves in the wind The whisper that calls after you in the night And kisses your ear in the early moonlight And you don't need to wonder, you're doing fine My love, the pleasure's mine
Let me go crazy on you Crazy on you Let me go crazy, crazy on you, oh
Wild man's world is cryin' in pain What you gonna do when everybody's insane? So afraid of one who's so afraid of you What you gonna do?
(Ah, ah, ah, ah)
Ooh, crazy on you Crazy on you Let me go crazy, crazy on you
I was a willow last night in a dream I bent down over a clear running stream Sang you the song that I heard up above And you kept me alive with your sweet flowing love
Crazy Yeah, crazy on you Let me go crazy, crazy on you, oh Crazy on you Crazy on you Let me go crazy, crazy on you, yeah
(Ah, ah, ah, ah)
Crazy on you Crazy on you Let me go crazy, crazy on you, oh
It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you a “teaser” sentence or sentence fragment and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that sentence/fragment. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.
This week’s Story Starter teaser is:
She could always tell when he was lying because…
If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and to tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.
This, That, and the Other 