A.B.D or All But Dead?

Somehow I have been involved with academia most of my life.  Partly it is because both of my parents were teachers.  I'm not sure if I ever really wanted to become a teacher, but I pursued a music education degree because it was prudent.  Evidently back in the day it was clear that trying to
nurture an economically rewarding music career was dubious.  Completely I ignored this dogma eventually finding my way into a D.M.A. program in music composition.  Previous were the B.M.E. and a Masters in Jazz and Commercial Music, one of the first degrees of its kind in the late l980's.  Today I choose not to remember any of it, because along the way the truthfulness of the heartache and sorrow attached to pursuing a music career came to fruition.  I personally do not have any regrets for pursuing music.  It was my chosen path most probably by the Creator.  As a composer all I have had to do was open my heart, my ears, and eventually my mind to receive the breath of God as Beethoven said, or at least Beethoven as played by Ed Harris in the film "Copying Beethoven."  I believe him.  Music is the breath of God, or at least most of it.  Today it is the breath of evil as many conventional cultural aesthetics have become.  Specifically in America the intrinsic but not inherent building blocks of our artistic, intellectual, philosophical and spiritual beliefs have become corrupt.  How can I make the determination, me a lowly classical and jazz composer and performer?  Simply because I have the academic credentials to be able to assess such an opinion which correlates directly to nine years of collegiate music study.  At one time a degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill meant something. It did during my tenure.  Unfortunately with the appointment of former Chancellor Holden Thorp that academic standard collapsed along with the reputation of that once fine institution.  For me graduation from Chapel Hill was the most difficult thing I ever accomplished next to playing the piano in the orchestra on cruise ships.  My Masters degree was fun but not difficult.  I was hired as a G.T.A. or Graduate Teaching Associate, therefore I got a stipend and free tuition to teach a few courses.  One responsibility was directing the second jazz ensemble, which I did for two years.  When the Coordinator of Jazz Studies died from a brain tumor I was re-hired as an adjunct faculty member temporarily to cover for his absence.  In this capacity I taught private jazz piano lessons and a course in jazz improvisation.  Also I performed with the Left Bank Big Band, the University of South Carolina's top swing band both on piano and trumpet.  Because I do not have the opportunities to do such anymore, I choose not to remember this period of time.  Also losing that adjust faculty position to an Eastman graduate the next year turned my life upside down.  It did more than that.  After a rewarding seven years being involved in music at the academic level, I found myself playing in a wedding band in Columbia, South Carolina.  That was it.  The band I founded and led to win the semi-finals of the Hennessy Cognac jazz search featuring saxophonist Chris Potter no longer existed.  My connection to a university level music education program was severed.  My personal life came crashing down for a plethora of reasons, not all of which were my fault.  Never did I want to be a music star.   Always simply I have wanted to be able to use my music talents to their best ability satisfying my own soul at the same time.  Somehow today that has been curtailed.  I feel the aberration of the American's traditional value system is responsible.  Somehow the gifts I have been given by God feel wrong to me now.  When I indulge in music protocols that make me feel good and satisfy my spiritual longing, my environment makes me feel the opposite.  Now what used to satisfy me at these deep levels creates heartache and even depression.  It is about this process I am writing to try and discover its cause and nature.  I acutely have been aware of this cause for several years, but I am beginning to forget.  Thus I have begun to try and function that way I have traditionally my entire life until my father suffered a stroke and no longer could remember me as a musical ally.  Instead he began to view me as a severe threat to his own musical existence.  I became the enemy, and I am not sure to this day if that still is not the case.  My father turned 85 years old this week, and although he is unable to do anything for himself other than see and listen still his selfishness for his own happiness is pervasive.  He quietly, almost silently, intensely is bereaved at the loss of his musical expression.  So am I.  It would seem logical if what I am feeling really is what he is feeling.  I discovered this a few years ago and made a conscious decision NOT to pursue music when in close proximity to my parents.          It shielded me from the almost incapacitating grief I would feel at the loss of my own opportunities in the field of music.  As a wise man I deducted my personal opportunities would return at the appropriate time and the appropriate place.  Lately I have failed at following my own rule.  I have begun to think it is possible and okay for me to pursue my music interests without hindrance, resistance, or competition.  What it has caused me is acute disappointment.  I look around and see the rest of the world engaged in their processes, and I am not.  I am not composing.  I am not performing.  What I am doing is organizing the many parts of my life that have become scattered after working on cruise ships for over a decade.  Luckily or rather unluckily I almost have completed that process.  Now for the first time I am bored.  While I have access to most of my tools of music, I do not have a studio integrating them all.  They are spread around with no one work space.  While I am capable of being pragmatic about that, I have yet to come to terms with the realization my joy at making music is my father's grief at losing his.  This must be the reason why now I feel pain and anguish at the things once that provided me so much joy and fulfillment.  It is difficult.  It is difficult being 51 years old and single, not for loneliness but for the complete and utter lack of a personal support system for myself other than me.  I am and always have been a strong person, but not having a single person in this world that is willing to understand me is difficult.  With the inclusion of this "father" issue and its effects upon my musical vocation, my opportunities to be musically viable have shrunk to almost nothing.  Still I peck away at it knowing in the future these things will come back to me, but America is not making that easy.  It makes me angry the my vocation for music has become extinct.  Now I now exactly how the jazz musicians felt when their field of music was overtaken by Rock 'n' Roll.  What you have done and have been respected for for years suddenly now was not valued anymore by mainstream society.  Slowly this has happened to music in America.  Understandably it has happened before now, and I guess as it is supposed to.  Crooning music from the l940's no longer is fashionable today.  Neither is big band swing dance music.  Upon examination most of the more viable forms of American music have become extinct or at least dormant.  How is it that today in the year 2014 America has changed so much from her roots?  How is it we have gone from Dorothy Dandridge to Miley Cyrus being dry humped by Santa Claus?  This tendency only can be correlated to the lack of an effective educational system in America.  Our schools have failed by their misadministration by the government.  I think this misadministration has been purposeful simply to dumb down the American people.  Consequently we have not trained workforce even if we did possess the jobs to hire it.  We are a shite state of affairs.  Our entire nation continually has devolved during my lifetime robbing me of the opportunities my parents had.  America has fallen from grace as the pinnacle of freedom to the world.  We instead are a debacle of confusion, evil, and selfishness which contends Satan's return to earth all ready has occurred.  It is unnerving confronting that obstacle everyday.  How did I get this?