A perfect Friday: sunny skies, warmer than 30 degrees Fahrenheit. (This is one word that I say more than spell, so that first H tricked me. I then spent a few minutes on the Wikipedia entry for the measurement and the man who defined it. Of course there’s only one question any sane person would then have: has an ancestor or distant relative had their surname used in a similar way? Alas, I am a brand. But it’s a British brand, and who pays attention to those?)

I’m looking out the window at downtown Lowell and it’s a bluish gray sky over us. It’s been like that all day. It’s the kind of weather that lends itself to melancholy. As the unseen sun sets this afternoon, I’m impatiently waiting for it to become night. If I can only see clouds, it might as well just be dark.

It’s the habitual instinct to give up that has haunted me for years. If things aren’t currently good, they might as well be bad. Why bother trying to improve anything? It’s all just gonna be dark eventually. But that’s the foolish hobgoblin of little minds, one that forgets the central tenet of existence: this is what the moment currently is. Comparisons to prior moments and desires for a different future are troublesome when they’re made as a sort of time travel. Better for us to be here now.

Oh no – wait. That’s the third album from Britpop legends Oasis. Then again, I bet you can’t name a single song off that record. Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? are the ones with the hits.

Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that?

-Paul