You know you’ve spent too much time in Starbucks when you’ve heard On and On twice in the time you’ve been collecting thoughts in your journal.
    The other morning, in the same coffee shop, there was almost a nostalgic tinge to a song that was so overplayed on popular radio in the late ‘70s, but this morning I reached my saturation limit of the Stephen Bishop hit I can’t recall liking that much anyway.
    Sure, the studio musicianship was flawless and pitch perfect, and there were a few lines of clever lyric, or maybe it was the unexpected meter to the words: “Steals the stars from the sky, puts on Sinatra and starts to cry”. In this morning’s unexpected over-analyzing, I find it’s the purposeful use of the three syllables in the name “Sinatra” that bring about a little bit of songwriting magic that cover up the flaws of the inane Top 40 hit.
    But Bishop’s timid (that’s my chosen synonym for weak) voice ends up grating on my nerves even more than Al Stewart’s Time Passages, next song on the Starbucks playlist and even more forgettable than On and On.
    The song in 1977 into 1978 and 1979 was immensely popular on the AM radio station in my hometown. My mom’s car radio didn’t have an FM dial or the 8-track or cassette tape option, so you were, pretty much, forced to listen to the city’s one station or the that from the city two hours away when the signal made the distance. The song seemed to be as popular on that station as well.
    It was a sappy song in the California soft-rock vein of the day I still refer to it as “air-conditioned pop”; you know, controlled and comfortable. There was a lot of that going around in the late ‘70s: pure pap.
    It shouldn’t matter this much to me now.
    I’ve already spent too much time thinking about a song I didn’t think I cared about anyway.
    Sometimes Mondays are like that (especially a holiday Monday); there’s a little too much thinking and not enough substance to those thoughts.
    Then again, maybe Mondays should be like that; maybe you should get all those insubstantial thoughts out of your head early in the week so you are far better able to deal with the consequential thoughts and important decisions that will arrive later in the week.

07/03/2023                                                                                                                    j.g.l.