Personal Note: It's 2025, and I'm Back!

Hello! It's been quite a few months since I posted anything on here. I just wanted to let you all know that I'm still here, and getting ready to become more active writing for The Memory Cache again.

You may recall that last spring (2024), I mentioned I was working on a sort of memoir, using a web site called Storyworth as a tool to write a year's worth of answers to weekly questions from the site about my life story. The end product of all these questions and answers will be a book.

 

It turned out to be a non-trivial project, which took most of my available time and energy for creative projects in 2024. On top of that, we lost several dear members of our family this past year, and had some of the other types of personal disruptions and distractions typical of normal life in this post-pandemic era.

 

Fortunately, my wife and I also had frequent grandparenting opportunities throughout the year, and a lovely trip to Europe and the UK in the fall, our first trip abroad in a long time. So the year was by no means a total waste. It just wasn't that productive for me in terms of making new music, and my blog writing.

 

Now it's a new year, and I'm hoping to refocus again on resuming songwriting and recording, and doing more writing for public consumption. Happily, my Storyworth memoir project is nearly finished. The rough draft is complete, and I just need to edit it, add some photos, and have it produced as a book, which I expect to complete by mid-year 2025.

 

As I'd said back in the spring, this book won't be for public consumption, but there will be a few copies available for close friends and family. In any event, I'm really proud to have completed writing it, and to have had the opportunity to share my life story with those who are nearest and dearest to me. It was also very rewarding to have a chance to time-travel back into my own past, and remember and reflect on so many of the things I've done, and different people I've known.

 

In any case, with 2024 behind me, my hopes for The Memory Cache are to resume writing occasional reviews and summaries of good books, movies and TV, and maybe also doing some commentary on other topics. Obviously there will be plenty of important topics out in the world for the next few years to think and write about. I won't commit to a fixed production schedule, but I do hope to share my thoughts and information regularly, at least a couple of times a month, beginning next week.

 

One other thing I'm hoping to do soon is to start using Substack as another way to distribute my writing for The Memory Cache. I will be establishing a presence there, and moving my mailing list there as well, so subscribers can have each article I post on this site emailed to them via Substack if they want. I don't currently have any plans to charge money for that, although perhaps in the future I might - who knows? Never say never, I suppose! But for now, it's just another way to share my writing efficiently, and distribute it to a wider audience.

 

One other detail to share. I haven't yet made a decision about leaving Meta social media apps, which a lot of people seem to be doing lately, but I have added an account on Bluesky. As with my Facebook and Instagram accounts, you can follow me on Bluesky at @wayneparkernotes. I won't post often, but when I do, you'll find me there for sure, even if I'm gone from Facebook and Instagram by then.

 

So, happy new year to you all! And I hope to have something new for you to read here very soon.

Personal Note: Recent news and Storyworth

It’s been a number of months since I posted anything to The Memory Cache, as you may have noticed. “What happened to Wayne, anyway? He hasn’t posted anything recently!”

 

I’m still here, and I’m fine – it’s just been a very busy time this winter and spring, and a time of some transition and reflection in my life too.

 

In mid-March, we lost my father, Richard “Dick” Parker, who passed away peacefully at his home in Maryland at the age of 99 ½. My family and I were away from home off and on during his last couple of months this winter, helping him as best we could, and then going through the aftermath of celebrating his life, mourning him and helping put his affairs to rest.

 

Needless to say, these moments in the life of a person and a family require much of our time, attention and emotional resources while they’re happening, and for a while afterward too. I haven’t had much energy or focus left over for this blog so far this year, or for my music, while we were going through all this. But I believe most of that period is now behind me, and I’m looking forward to getting back to some of my creative interests.

 

There is also an unexpected new writing project on my plate, as the result of a “gift” (ha!) I received last Christmas from my son and daughter-in-law. The present was a one-year subscription to an unusual online organization you may have heard about called “Storyworth”. 

 

Storyworth is a service that provides a way for a person (like myself) to be asked a series of questions, roughly one per week for a year, as a catalyst for writing stories about one’s life, thoughts and personal history. The questions can come from whoever gave you the gift (such as your children), or can be picked off a huge list that the service provides, or even selected or made up by the writer.   

 

The idea is to spend a year answering 50 questions or so, and at the end, Storyworth will then produce a book out of it, for circulation to those among your family and friends who are interested. It’s sort of an “autobiography in a box” concept, where the structure is more or less provided for you, and it's conversational, rather than the usual chronological narrative we would expect in an autobiography. There are other nice options too, like the ability to add photographs to supplement the articles you’ve written.

 

I thought this would be relatively easy, but it turns out to be more time-consuming and challenging than I would have thought. For one thing, it’s easy to fall behind, and for another, giving good, well-structured and interesting written answers, even three or four pages per question, is surprisingly hard work!  But on the other hand, I’m finding it very enjoyable, and it has triggered a fascinating process of introspection, one that provides a reason for me to go back and revisit the details of many memories and different phases of my life. 

 

I don’t expect to be publishing or sharing this Storyworth body of work with the public – it’s really intended for a small audience of my close family and friends. But I take it seriously just the same, and hope to do it well. So that’s one writing project already taking time away from the blog, and from my music, at least for the next year or so.

 

By the way, if that sounds interesting, and you think you or someone in your family or life might enjoy trying to write a Storyworth book too, you can find out more about it at https://www.storyworth.com . I heard an ad for it on NPR last week, and I’ve been seeing ads for it on Instagram too, so apparently it’s becoming a thing. Check it out!  It’s fun, and it could be a treasure for your family that might be valued by later generations, as well as a paper-based contribution to the archives and history of our  times. 

 

Despite the demands of my Storyworth project, I do want to resume my writing for this blog. I have been saving a list of a number of things I’ve read and watched during the past half year that I’m very excited to share with you, so there will be new posts coming soon, as quickly as I can get my thoughts together and start putting them in readable form. I am also hoping to resume my musical and video projects at some point in the near future.

 

One of the things I’ve learned over the past four  years, since I started this “life of the artist” after I retired, is that art and creativity don’t always need to happen on a predictable or consistent schedule, and indeed, probably often can’t. They happen instead more in sync with the rhythms and seasons of the artist’s life and moods.

 

It’s taken me a while, after a long professional career where everything was always planned and on a tight production schedule, to realize I have the freedom now (as a retired person) to do as much or as little as I can, and to do it only when I desire or find the inspiration. But I’m getting more comfortable with that idea. 

 

I will have my next review post up soon. Thanks for sticking with me, and with The Memory Cache.

Personal Note: Some News, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Hello, friends!

Most of you by now probably already know this, but for those readers who haven't been closely following my musical adventures, I did (as promised) release my debut music album Strangers back on September 29th. It has 12 of my original songs on it, including my first seven singles from 2021 and 2022, and five new songs which were previously unreleased, all from 2023.  

I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and it has been so much fun sharing it with the world, and hearing peoples' reactions to the songs and the album. I also released new lyric videos for the five new songs, so you can listen to the entire album on YouTube, with videos, if you prefer that to just listening on your favorite music streaming service.

If you're curious about it, please click either the link to my music website, and/or the link to my music YouTube channel, on the lower right side of the page. 

And if you want to stay in touch with what I'm doing creatively by receiving occasional emails (about either this blog, and/or my music), please go straight to my music web site's Contact page, and add your name and email to my email list!  I haven't actually sent any emails out yet, but I plan to shortly, and then only every so often (and you can quit any time). So please join!

 

By the way -- I expect to begin writing more about the topic of artificial intelligence (AI), as you'll see by my next post later today. But the arrival of ChatGPT last year actually poses immediate questions that relate to this blog, and what I'm doing in continuing to write it (or why). 

If I wanted to, I could now ask ChatGPT to write my blog posts for me, once I've found a book, or a show, or any topic I want to share with you, so why should I even bother to do it myself?  And it's a very reasonable question, one that every writer and creative person is now having to ask. But that won't be happening here any time soon.

ChatGPT can accurately describe and summarize any work of art or source of information we ask it about, at whatever intellectual level and in whatever writing style we might choose. That is an amazingly powerful tool, which like millions of other people, I look forward to exploring and using more in the years ahead.

But my blog is written to tell you what I think about something, to use my own words, and to describe it based on what I found interesting and important, not on a condensation of what a lot of other anonymous writers said. So at least until I say otherwise, please be assured that the content on this blog is 100% human-generated.

 

One more very gratifying bit of news I wanted to share is that when I logged on this morning, I noticed that my "page views" count for The Memory Cache blog has just passed 10,000 (since I started this blog in February 2022). 

It's not a huge number, but it's very pleasing to me, since it means that there are still readers out there who are interested in what I have to say, even after my 6-month absence this year while I was working on the album. So I will keep writing and posting more reviews, and my own thoughts about the very best of what I read, watch and notice. Thank you so much for visiting!

In fact, in that vein, it's Thanksgiving tomorrow, my favorite holiday of the year. So I'm wishing you, your family and friends a very happy Thanksgiving, and giving thanks myself for my own family, friends, readers, music followers and community in this always-interesting time and place we share. Stay well, and have a wonderful holiday season!      

Personal Note: Surprise! The Memory Cache is Returning!

Hello again, dear readers,

 

In February, I made a decision to step away from this blog (at the time, I assumed permanently), based on what I perceived of as my own self-inflicted pressure to produce regular and frequent posts. I wanted more leisure and lack of obligation to the blog to enjoy time spent with family and friends, to work more on my music, song-writing and recording, and to be able to enjoy the books I read and shows I watch for the sheer pleasure of it, rather than as fodder for commentary and analysis.

 

These were good and important insights about myself, and the process and demands of the kind of writing I’d done for the blog over the course of a year. And as hoped, I have definitely enjoyed the time away from it since February, and have made good use of the time. 

 

On that note, there’s so much news to share!  For one thing, I just went online with my music website – I've put a link to it on the Favorite Links list. There you can find information about my music and music videos, and a little about me and the musical side of my artistic and creative life.  It’s also a hub for linking to my artist profiles on music streaming sites, my social media accounts, my YouTube channel and the like.  I’ll also have a blog there, about what I’m doing with my music, and other specifically music-related topics of interest.  

 

Most importantly, check out the site's Contact page – from there, you can join my email list, and if you like, send me a short message. I’ll use this email list to send out occasional news about my music, and also my future writing projects.  I promise the emails won’t be a burden – I’ll only use it occasionally, and every email will have an “Unsubscribe” link so you can quit whenever you want if you’re tired of it.

 

But wait, there’s more! After releasing seven singles to digital streaming in 2021 and 2022, with videos, I’ve been working hard all this year writing and recording five new songs to combine with the others on my first album, Strangers. The album will be released on Friday, September 29th, and will be available on all music streaming services, plus in a limited run CD release.

 

Despite all this other music-related activity and focus this year, though, it occurred to me recently that perhaps it might be possible (and rewarding) to resume The Memory Cache blog, but on different terms (for myself, as well as the readers). 

 

It’s unfortunate that the nature of the attention economy and its imperatives make anyone with a web site assume that they have to produce constantly, or their site will “go stale”, and no one will bother to look at it anymore. That was certainly a major factor for me in deciding to give it up in February – it just felt like way too much pressure to produce, to keep people interested and checking the site for frequent new posts.

 

But with time to reflect, I’ve realized how unnecessary that approach is. The remedy, I realized, is simple – I just need to approach this blog as a place to continue posting and sharing whatever information and musings I think are useful, fun or particularly significant to other people too, but only when the mood strikes me. In other words, the blog site and my writing for it could be much more about quality than quantity, passion than productivity. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition.    

 

With that in mind, I’m happy to announce I have decided to begin posting new entries here again starting in the fall of 2023. However, this time, I will only post when I think there’s something especially important or exceptional about the content or issues I’m covering. That means I may only write an article every month or tw0 – I’ll see as I go along how often I’m inspired. But when I am, you’ll be able to read it here on the site again.

 

Of course, I understand that it’s hard to follow a blog that only changes infrequently, but that’s probably okay. You’ll only need to check it occasionally to see what’s new, especially since (like a monthly magazine) I’m not trying to provide up-to-the-minute news flashes, but rather less time-sensitive interpretation and opinion. 

 

And with my emailing list up and running (don’t forget to sign up on my new web site on the Contact page), I can and will send a bulletin out whenever there’s a new post, so you won’t have to check the site at all in between posts if you're on the email list. You’ll know when there’s something new.

 

Looking forward to writing to you (and for you) again soon.

Personal Note: Phasing Out Rock and Roll Friday

From early on here at The Memory Cache, I’ve used the fourth Friday of each month as my day for posting reviews and writing about pop music, musicians, music films, music books and even a music podcast. I called this regular feature "Rock and Roll Friday". 

However, as part of the ongoing evolution of the blog, I’ve decided to discontinue this tradition effective today, and simply move to writing about music whenever something good turns up, as I do with all other topics covered here.

I currently have U2’s lead singer Bono’s recent autobiography Surrender high on my reading list for the near future, so no worries – there will be more music-related posts to come, whenever I discover anything of the kind that I really enjoy and find noteworthy. It just won’t necessarily show up in the blog on any particular day of the month.

In the meantime, happy fourth Friday!

Personal Note: Taking an End of the Year Breather . . .

Hello, dear readers. You probably noticed that there’s been a longer-than-usual break since the most recent new review was posted here at The Memory Cache (on December 1st). 

As I’ve mentioned before, my general goal is to publish at least two or three short reviews each week, but as I approach the first anniversary of this blog (in February), after writing and publishing 250 posts in the first ten months, I've realized that it’s not always possible for me to maintain that pace on my own without a break, while also preserving the quality of life I want.

Family activities and responsibilities, frequent travel, the gradual resumption of our social life after three years of pandemic, and my musical projects are all taking more of my time and attention away from reading new books, and watching new shows, then sitting down to write about the ones I enjoyed. 

I’m beginning to realize that as we (and I) come out of the total isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic years (a period which contained very few distractions, or other demands on my time), I sometimes will need short vacations to relax and recharge, and to take time for reflection and other priorities, away from my now much-fuller daily schedule.

At this time of year, fortunately, most of you presumably also have plenty of other things on your mind, and hopefully plans to spend time with families and friends over the holidays. With that in mind, I wanted to let you know that I will only be posting a few more reviews between now and the end of this year.

I expect to come back up to speed again in January. Until then, please continue to check in periodically to see what’s new. I’ll be looking forward to the next year of writing and publishing The Memory Cache blog for your continuing enjoyment and information in 2023.

Wishing you and your families happy holidays, and a very happy New Year. 

Personal Note: Another New Song and Video Released Today!

I'm very pleased to announce that I released my seventh original music single this morning, with an accompanying lyric video, on all the music streaming services and on YouTube. It's called I'm Watching You, and (despite that ambiguously ominous sounding title), it's actually a happy love story about a young family living their dreams together, with an island sound that's quite different from any of my previous songs.

This song release follows closely on the heels of my two preceding song and video releases, Science Fiction World (released November 9th) and Canadian Girl (released October 6th). If you haven't heard them yet, I'd encourage you to check them out! 

If you'd like to see the videos of any of these songs, please just click the link to my YouTube music video channel on the right column of this page.

In related news, I'm in the process of setting up an email list service for my music audience, as well as for The Memory Cache blog. I am hoping to find new ways to widen the audience for my music and my writing, while also ensuring that I don't continue to send unsolicited announcements to personal friends and family (or anyone else) who may not want to receive them. 

I'm also hoping to find a more efficient and direct way of sharing news of my activities with an intentional audience, without having to rely so heavily on social media platforms.

The new email list service (using the Mailchimp platform) will include pop-up forms on my web sites that allow readers and listeners to join my email list to receive announcements and news from me, and also to easily unsubscribe from the list at any time.  

I promise that emails from me to my list will be brief and only occasional. I don't want to fill up anyone's inbox with spam, so I will always strive to be respectful of your time and attention with any emails I send. With that said, don't be surprised if you see a pop-up invitation to join my email list on this site, and/or an email from me via the new email service, in the near future.

In the meantime, I wish you and your families a very happy Thanksgiving!

Personal Note: My new song, Science Fiction World, is released!

In a moment of marvelous distraction from what's going on in the outer world, I scheduled the release of my newest song, Science Fiction World, for today -- the day after a momentous election, upon which almost everyone's attention has been hyper-focused (including mine). 

I just overlooked the significance of November 8th on the calendar, and didn't consider whether people would want to listen to a new song, and see a new video, the day after the election! Fortunately, though, it's a relatively calm morning after, so we'll continue on with life as usual, and hope for the best.

Anyway, I'm very excited about this new song and video release. The song has a particular retro sound from the psychedelic rock era of the late 1960s I haven't tried to create before, and I'm thrilled with how it turned out. If you haven't seen it (and would like to), just click on the link on the right column of this blog (at the bottom) for my YouTube Channel. The video is a lyric video, and it's a little more abstract than most of my other music videos, but it is very colorful. 

I wrote the lyrics and music, and I played all of the guitar parts, except one short but tasteful guitar part Matt Taylor added during the bridge. I sang the nominal lead vocal too, but for the first time I have other strong voices joining mine: my multi-talented recording engineer and friend Matt Taylor (who also produced the song, as well as mixing and mastering it), plus Karyn Michaelson, a very talented local Seattle singer-songwriter and musician with her own solo recordings.

In his role as producer, Matt also recruited two friends to add instrumental parts, Tim Delaney (electric bass) and Rich Rowlinson (piano).  I'm very grateful to all four of these fine musicians for their contributions to this song. It was just so much fun to work for the first time with other musicians (in addition to Matt, who's contributed drum parts on all my songs), and all together, I think it makes for an exciting and rich sound. 

By the way, in addition to the music video on YouTube, the Science Fiction World song is also available now on all the music streaming services, along with all my other songs.

One other musical note for the near future: even though I've released two singles already this fall, I have yet another song finished which is scheduled for release on November 22nd. It's called I'm Watching You. It too has a totally different style from any of my previous songs, with an island lilt and a story of love and family which will arrive just in time for Thanksgiving. I haven't announced this release anywhere else, so you heard it here first.

Enjoy, and I'll be back soon with more reviews!

Personal Note: A New Song, and New Video!

Oh my -- it's Thursday already, and I haven't done a single post to The Memory Cache all week. It's okay, though, I hope -- I haven't gone anywhere, and I do have several new books and shows I'm ready to review, which I will get back to within the next couple of days.

But as I mentioned recently, I've been heavily focused this late summer and early fall on recording and preparing a number of new songs for release, a process which I've now chosen to make more labor intensive, but also even more artistically rewarding, by taking on the challenge of making my own music videos to go with my songs.

I learned enough about video editing and production by making the lyric video for Brand New Driver last summer to be able to at least provide a pleasing background for displaying the words of the song in a music video, but this time I wanted to see if I could actually create a visual presentation of the song's story, in music video format.

Today you can actually check out the results of my experiments. This morning, I released my latest rock single, Canadian Girl, on all music streaming services, along with not one but two Canadian Girl music videos on YouTube. They are essentially the same video, but the official lyric version includes the lyrics on screen for those who want to read along with the song.

If you follow the link on the bottom right side of this page to my YouTube music video channel, you can see both new videos, along with the others I've released since I started this mad post-retirement rock musical adventure. I hope you like the new song and video, a musical tale of young summer romance with a glockenspiel in it!  And I'll be back with new reviews here shortly.

Personal Notes: Progress and Changes at The Memory Cache blog.

Today’s post is a personal note about the state of the blog after nearly six months of daily reviews and articles.

I’m very pleased with the quantity of hopefully interesting information and opinion that I’ve shared with readers in this first half year, and am looking forward to continuing onward into the indefinite future! However, a half year into this project, it seemed like a good time to take stock of what I’ve done so far, and what I want to do with The Memory Cache blog going forward.

Several friends who read the blog have expressed surprise at the amount of writing I’ve done, and the sheer number of cultural items (books, movies, TV shows) I had to consume in order to have something to write about, day after day. And it’s true – I’ve just passed my 200th post, or more than one per day, for every day since I started the blog in February.  That's a lot of reading and TV watching, not to even mention the writing part!

However, as I think I mentioned at the beginning, I actually consumed much of this content, and compiled my notes and reviews over a seven year period, going back through the pandemic years, and all the way back to 2015. Over this first five+ months of the blog, I curated that back content, rewrote and added to many of those existing reviews, and also added plenty of new reviews of things I was enjoying this year. But it was a mix, with many of the written reviews almost ready to post, straight out of my back files, rather than needing to be written now.

Happily, most of that back information and content has now appeared, and is tagged and available by category for anyone to search and check out. The downside, though, is that I’m now (as I say whenever I catch up with a live broadcast while watching something on the DVR) “marooned in real time”.

In the blog context, that means for me to report on anything – book, movie or TV show – I now have to actually consume the content (read the book, or watch the show), then write a new review.  I can't just pull it out of the back files on a slow day.

This is exactly where I wanted to be, and planned to be when I started, after about this much time had passed. But what this means is that from this point on, almost all reviews and articles posted will be “just written”, or “hot off the press” so to speak, and they are much more likely to be about content that was recently released, and issues or topics which are currently being widely discussed and reviewed.

This doesn’t mean I won’t continue to discover new content from earlier years that I think is interesting, fun or important, and write about it. I certainly will. But it does mean that my posts are probably going to be at least somewhat more consistently relevant and timely than some of the ones thus far.

The other important consequence of finishing with the prior reviews, though, is that I can, and indeed must slow the pace down from this point on. I can’t dependably find and enjoy enough new content, and have the time to think and write about it on a daily basis (particularly while I'm also writing, recording and producing new music and video). Therefore, starting today, I’ll be aiming to post only 2 to 3 times per week, without a fixed schedule. This should allow me the time to find, enjoy and review items of wide interest, and of high quality and importance, to share with you.

I am also thinking of adding a couple of new features. One type of post I want to try occasionally will be called “Honorable Mentions”. These posts will include a short list of good books or shows of a particular type, where I will simply provide a brief description for each one, rather than a full review. This way I can note items I’ve read or seen that seemed worthwhile or interesting, but perhaps not exceptional (to me, anyway). Readers can then take note of the reference information, and check them out if they’re interested. Everyone has different tastes, so this seems a helpful way to offer suggestions without going into depth in reviewing every item.

Another area I want to explore is reviewing some other types of media. Like many of you, I read a number of major periodicals, and listen to some podcasts too. I could name the publications and podcast show names, but that wouldn’t be that useful – most busy people don’t have the time or the interest to keep up with the constant torrent of information out there. My thought instead was that occasionally, when I come upon a specific article or podcast episode that provides information that is new and startling, or perhaps puts an interesting or unusual spin on a current topic or event, I would love to share short reviews of these types of items too when I come upon them, and pass along the references.

One other option I am exploring is starting a mailing list for the blog. The idea would be to allow interested readers to subscribe, to receive periodic notices with news about recent posts, and a reminder and link to go check out the blog if you haven’t been there recently. If I do this, I promise you would never be receiving more than 1 or 2 emails per month. No one needs a ton more emails in their inbox, but it can be useful as an occasional reminder of something you want to follow regularly. I'll have more news on this idea soon.

So there we are. To sum up, the blog is in good shape, I’ve finished the “phase one” populating of the site’s reviews collection from my back files, and I'm moving to a 2-3 posts per week schedule, rather than posting 7 days per week. I’m also planning to add some new types of content, and perhaps an occasional informational mailing for subscribers.

If you can think of any other things you’d like to see, or have any other comments you’d like to share with me about the blog, please feel to write to me at info@wayneparkernotes.com.  I'd love to hear from you.  And if you have books or shows you think are fantastic, particularly ones that aren't on the bestseller or blockbuster lists, send me a note -- I'll take a look, and see if they might be a good subject for a review.

I hope you continue to enjoy the blog, and if you like it, please let your friends know about it too! And have a great week.

From Wayne: Blog News and Brand New Driver Song Release.

As most readers know, The Memory Cache blog is my personal platform for sharing my writing, ideas, useful information and reviews with a reading audience.

Since I launched it back in February, I've been very pleased to see that there does appear to be a small but regular group of people who are coming back regularly to see what's new, and what books, movies and TV shows I've reviewed recently.

I noticed the other day that the site's page view count has gone over 2,500 since I launched it. It's not millions, but it's still gratifying!

Thank you so much for your interest, and please let your friends and family know about the site too, if you think they might enjoy reading it, and using its categorized lists of different types of content to find good books to read, good shows to see, and interesting topics to discover and learn about.

Meanwhile, some readers may not know that the other creative project I started early in the pandemic, as a new hobby, was writing and recording my own original rock, country and folk-influenced songs.

I released my first three singles last year, with music videos, which you can hear on all major music streaming services, and also see on my YouTube channel, which you can find by clicking on the link to my music under the Favorite Links heading on the right side of the page. You can also find my artist social media accounts on both Facebook and Instagram at @wayneparkernotes. Please feel free to follow me there if interested.

In that vein, I'm delighted to announce the release today of my latest song, Brand New Driver, which is now available or arriving soon at all major music streaming services, as well as on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Check it out! And I do hope you enjoy it.

Have a great day, and rock on!

Editorial: On Current Events, and Today's Abortion Rights Decision.

Hello, dear readers. Here on The Memory Cache blog, it’s once again Rock and Roll Friday, the fourth Friday of each month, where I try to post several reviews of books I’ve read and shows I’ve seen that relate to popular music and the music industry. In keeping with this tradition, I have posted a book review of Dave Grohl’s book The Storyteller, and the fascinating documentary interviews of Paul McCartney called McCartney 3,2,1. After all, the show must go on, and we need to keep trying to find joy in our lives, and things to celebrate and enjoy.

But it’s hard to feel celebratory in the wake of this morning’s expected but disastrous Supreme Court decision reversing Roe vs. Wade, and striking down abortion rights for women across much of this country. There is particularly ominous language in Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, which states clearly that today’s decision, and its underlying legal theory, are laying the basis to roll back many other personal rights of privacy, and human rights, that we have enjoyed and come to depend upon for the past half century. Same sex marriage? Contraception? Interracial marriage? All of these rights and others we take for granted now hang by a thread.

At the same time, we have so many other deeply concerning issues confronting us. Of course, there is the lingering trauma and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic which has caused such havoc to our lives and the world for the past two+ years. There is the ongoing struggle over reasonable gun control measures, and the shock of the constant string of mass casualty shootings, and daily gun fatalities in neighborhoods across the country. There are the hearings in Congress that are revealing the full extent of the attempts to overthrow our democratic system of government in 2020 that led to the January 6th uprisings. There is the danger that these subversive strategies are ongoing, and are now aimed at completing successfully this fall, and in the 2024 election, the insurrection that failed the last time. There is the dangerous and destructive war in Ukraine. And then there is the inflationary moment in the economy, which hits many of us so deeply in our personal finances, and our everyday standard of living.

Behind all of these unending issues and worries sits the most catastrophic looming crisis of all: the climate change which is rapidly destabilizing the planetary environment upon which we all depend for our survival and prosperity. I fear the urgency of trying to solve this confoundingly difficult global problem is increasingly being lost in the noise about all the other more immediate and localized crises that hit the headlines every day.

I believe most of us are trying in some way to figure out what we can do to help. I wonder that too. I know voting for responsible people, and doing what we can to support good people in public service who are trying to fix things and make them better, can go some ways. Standing up to authoritarians who would undermine our democratic system is going to become increasingly necessary and urgent in the days ahead. We will all need to get more involved to save ourselves and the world we want to live in.

For myself, I intend to keep using this blog to bring useful information to your attention. Of course, some of it will be just for fun, and to help keep us sane, but as much as possible, I will be highlighting books and shows that call out problems, identify solutions, explain what’s going on, and fight injustice. I hope you’ll continue to come by the site, and see what’s new, and perhaps it can help you be informed and provide tools for understanding your own situation as it develops, and doing what you can to respond constructively to events as they unfold.

Best wishes to you and yours, and try to stay positive. It looks like a bumpy road up ahead.

Personal Notes: About Mysteries of Life

In this blog's Topics list, you will now see a new item called "Mysteries of Life". 

 

The sorts of topics to be included and discussed in my Mysteries of Life section are those that deal with aspects of the "paranormal".   Some will disparage and dismiss these topics as new age, mystical, pseudo-scientific, hocus-pocus, fantasy, or otherwise just absurd within the modern scientific and rationalist worldview.  I understand that reaction and that skepticism, and am quite sympathetic to it.  Skepticism is a necessary part of any rational thought.

 

I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, organized religions, cults, magical thinking, or other non-rational and unscientific belief systems.  I am a strong believer in reason, logic, and the scientific method, which over the past five hundred years have given us a powerful set of tools for evaluating, testing, proving and disproving ideas about the reality we inhabit, through a process of repeatable and peer-reviewed experimentation. 

 

With that said, though, I have occasionally stumbled onto well-documented facts and events, and even had a few personal experiences, that challenged aspects of the scientific and materialist consensus as well as my own beliefs, and raised disturbing questions that are not easily explained by our current understanding of "objective" reality.

 

Two such evolving stories that have particularly caught my attention in recent years are the strange reports of many young children around the world who appear to have detailed and often-verifiable memories of recent past lives; and the newly-rehabilitated status of the UFO phenomenon, which had been denied and ridiculed by the U.S. government for three generations, only to be suddenly acknowledged and confirmed a few years ago by that same government, after the New York Times reported on a series of encounters between UFOs and a U.S. Navy carrier task force that were witnessed and recorded by many of the pilots, officers and sailors who were there when it happened.

 

After starting down this road, I also noticed that once I had begun to delve into the history and scientific study of these two particular areas of investigation, I soon discovered other types of curious phenomena and widely reported psychological and paranormal experiences that seemed to be similar, or at least somehow related. 

 

One possibility to explain this proliferation of weirdness is that once you head down the rabbit hole of giving any credence to the paranormal, you'll inevitably be drawn deeper into it, much like other forms of irrational belief and madness.  But it is also conceivable that there are real common threads or unknown forces involved in many of these unexplained mysteries.  These perceived similarities between different paranormal phenomena often seem to suggest the same need to probe our limited understanding of the true nature of our human minds (as distinct from our brains), and our consciousness and perceptions.

 

For example, I recently discovered that the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience (NDEs), when studied in a scientific manner across a large data set of patient reports, raises many of the same sorts of age-old questions of mind, body and soul, and of space and time, as are found in attempts to understand the meaning of accounts of apparent reincarnation, or of UFOs and reported alien encounters. 

 

Meanwhile, some of our contemporary physicists, still looking for a grand unified theory of existence, suggest with increasing frequency that quantum physics, and its postulation of an endless multiverse determined by consciousness, choice and observation, may offer explanations for some of the paranormal phenomena that have been reported recently, and throughout most of recorded history for that matter.  What are we to make of that?

 

It may be that none of these questions can ever be convincingly answered, explained or proven.  I'm very open to that possibility.  But the process of documenting and cataloguing strange facts and events, the study of puzzling and often traumatic or transformative experiences many people have reported that don't seem to be "normal", and the search for greater knowledge and understanding of these odd phenomena, is still intriguing to me. 

 

Therefore, I will occasionally report on good books, movies and TV shows by and about people who are exploring "mysteries of life" from a scientific and academic perspective.  The more we can know about what's really going on in these lives, minds and world of ours, the better, don't you think?  And besides, it's fun!  Who doesn't love a good eerie mystery?

We're Live! Welcome to The Memory Cache.

Hi, this is Wayne. This is my first post on my new personal blog site, The Memory Cache. I'm calling it that, because for the past seven years, I've written and kept summaries and mini-reviews of most of the good books I've read, the movies I've watched, and the TV shows I've seen, partly for the fun of writing them, but mostly as a way to remember more about all the interesting content flowing by me, so I don't forget it all the day after I see it.  

    

Two years ago (when the pandemic was new), I decided to share annual lists of my short reviews with a few friends and family members. They were well-received, so recently I thought perhaps I could make a blog out of these notes to myself, and in the process make my reviews available much faster (than once a year), and to a wider audience. So here we go!

 

I spent the past three days working my way through all the tech challenges of creating a blog site. It really took me back to my IT database administrator days, when I worked closely with systems administrators: figuring out about Domain Name Servers, making and changing DNS records and propagating them, installing SSL site security certificates, and a lot of other web-hosting esoterica which probably won't mean anything to you if you're not already deep in the IT systems weeds.

 

But it was a fun challenge for me, and a new opportunity to learn some tech processes I didn't already know: namely, how to set up my own web site, and put it on the public internet. Very exciting!  And now it's here.  Who knows where this could lead?

 

Next up: a steady flow of new book, movie and TV reviews from 2022, plus I'll gradually be adding reviews from my previous annual lists (back to 2015).  You'll notice I have a variety of interests, so hopefully you'll find some content that looks interesting to you too along the way. 

 

For now, comments are allowed if you want to respond to posts. That will continue as long as comments are friendly, positive and constructive. I'd be happy to hear ideas and suggestions for how to make this blog a more helpful and entertaining site. Enjoy, and come back often!