Upon Having Traveled This Road Before

Life is full of challenges.  I am beginning to remember that life is not your destiny or your dream.  It seems like a lot of other people have achieved their dreams.  I have not.  I am not sure what they are anymore.  In any case often it is cited that life is the journey.  Life is the process.  Still occasionally it is nice to experience the spoils.  I believe I have tasted these spoils quite often in my life.  Also I have suffered the toils and tribulations of life.  It could be because personally I suffered quite early, I made the best of the later years.  Then of course you get old.  I stopped trying to taste the spoils not that long ago.  It felt too selfish.  I began to value experiences other than myself.  For example I came to understand what it was like to love your children.  I have none, but still at my station in life it made sense.  It didn't make sense to chase women.  Why expend your valuable energy chasing tail?  Well, now I am single.  Of course I miss having the heterosexual relationship, but I can blame no one.  I do not seek it.  It is not worth it to me.  Nothing seems much worth it to me these days.  I have disciplined myself to maintain a degree of interest in my chosen career, music. Because the pursuit of music is intertwined with romance, neither are at a peak with me.  I have arrived at a station where before I have traveled.  The first time it was tumultuous.  I experienced clinical depression.  That was a combination of many very real things.  I lost my job.  I lost my love.  I lost my life.  I myself was lost in the abyss.  Everything for which I had worked disappeared almost instantly.  No longer was I affiliated with academic teaching.  No longer was I playing music professionally.  No longer did I have the circle of friends who supported my pursuits.  They were taken away, and I fell completely and directly to the bottom.  Rock bottom.  It took quite a few years to put the pieces together again.  The station through which I traveled was here.  It is equally difficult the second time around, but at least I can benefit from my own previous enlightenment and healing.  I learned what caused my bereavement, and I worked on changing my life's circumstances to circumvent it in the future.  I was successful.  I had to move to a state five hundred miles away.  Over the course of ten years I entered, acclimated, and became accustomed to life in Columbus, Ohio.  In fact I was successful.  I was successful musically.  Just now I can remember that on a few isolated occasions I found a small degree of success in North Carolina as an adult.  One year in particular, the year my father had a small stroke, I substituted for him in his band.  For the period of about one year I played music in Fayetteville and had moderate success.  The gigs were good, and I was making a small amount of money.  Then he got well.  Again my opportunities were thwarted.  I changed and began to do musical theater.  I played in the pit orchestra for a number of musicals.  After "Footloose" opened immediately I received a phone call from Carnival offering me a job playing piano on their cruise ships.  I took it and never looked back until how.  Because my parents are aging and my father needed nursing care, I moved back into my childhood home with my mother.  I all but stopped doing ship work in lieu of being a homeowner.  I have spent my time tending to the yard, the house, and the cooking.  I have not spent much time trying to earn money playing music.  That is because there is very little opportunity to do so here in North Carolina.  I have found myself back at that station previously I have traversed.  It almost is as difficult the second time.  Not much is different.  The challenges are the same, except that the friends and contacts I once had are gone.  The few opportunities to play music all are gone too.  My mother would love for me to reinvent my musical career here.  It is not possible.  At the ripe age of fifty-two it is not possible to reinvent one's musical career, especially in one's home.  "You can't go home."  I am stuck.  I am stuck facing many of the same obstacles I traversed before.  In addition the road is more rocky.  It almost is an impossibility without moving again.  Uncannily the unforgiving environment of the "Old South" is the same as it was thirty years ago.  Nothing has changed.  It has  worsened.  Local society seems to have become more racist, more selfish, and more ignorant, or are they the same?  The narrow mindedness that plagues the South still is as strong as ever.  Truly the Confederacy hangs a flag over the State House in Columbia, South Carolina.  When one has traveled to escape oppression, it is difficult to face that oppression again.  After you have lived a life of freedom, enlightenment, and artisty, it is difficult to face oppression again.  It feels like Jesus.  What mortal can assume that responsibility?   I understand Jesus's struggles, and I understand that we as human beings are subject to similar struggles.  What I tire of is being persecuted for good.  I have figured out how to remain musically active.  I do it for my own well being.  I do it for my own interest.  I do it, because it is what I am meant to do.  God has told me this.  What I will not do is the thing you must do to be successful today.  You must succor your enemies.  You must recognize, succumb to, and then manipulate your enemies.  This is how it is done in the "Old South."  It is of no consequence the quality of your music.  It is of no consequence the quality of your art.  It is of no consequence one day you will become a great person.  What matters is that you are willing to kiss the asses of those around you.  They are the incumbents.  They are the nobility.  They are the locals.  They are the controlling populace who will determine your monetary success or failure.  Who has time to back pedal and play the fool for monetary gain?  Can we not be allowed to flourish and prosper without resistance?  Is not this the "American Dream?"  The South has risen again.  Never did they lose the America's Civil War.  They have been fighting it ever since. 

What is "Bad" Music?

After harping on the true definition of jazz music, I feel compelled to spell out exactly what is bad music or non music.  If I had to estimate a ratio of "real" music to "pop" music on television, I would have to put the percentages at about 95% to 5%.  Pop is heard 95% of the time, while real music is heard 5% of the time.  5% of the time the network must pay a realistic royalty to a composer and publisher.  A few television commercials or shows admit they have actually purchased the 'rights' of a particular song. With Steve Jobs' brain child, the iTunes Store, the royalty scale for ASCAP or BMI must be altered.  I can't imagined writer/publisher members are earning the same royalties they did a decade ago.  I would like to know.  If there is no real music on television than it doesn't have to be paid for.  Simple.  Conan O'Brien evidently lost his theme song when he changed networks, something in my opinion that degrades the show.  A theme song is crucial to establishing a relationship with an audience.  If there is no recognizable theme song, then what transpires is exactly what we have now.  Television programming is a huge wash.  You turn on the TV, find a network show, and it just flows.  There is no rhythm, such as comedic timing.  Once when television writing was at its pinnacle musical timing and comedic timing equally were essential.  This timing is what America has lost and for what has settled.  A wash.  We are being flooded in a huge wash.  There is not real distinction between the background music and the dialog.  Nebulously the inane dialog competes with the music with no real understanding of its content.  For their to be this relationship there must be a concept, an understanding of an idea.  It is far from a wash.  How music contributes to this wash is by defying the use of rhythm.  Instead they use an arrhythmic reciprocating of eighth notes in a 1/4  time signature.  Unlike African music this device has no musical significance.  Instead of carefully planning, choosing, and implementing specific musical lines, it is a wash.  A washout.  Sounds are nondescript, unrefined and blur together.  There is no independence between the voices.  What truly is amazing to me is that the television sounds I hear today are undefined in terms of envelope.  The sounds chosen are washes with no concrete attack and release.  Therefore when I watch the show, my brain fails to solve the riddle.  There is no riddle.  There is nothing to decipher.  There is no connection between the music and the dialog.  There is no reinforcement of the drama with the music.  Instead the music just smears all of art's traditional boundaries into a wash.  Who would want to watch or listen to such a thing?  The answer only is the mindless, because it truly is that.  We do not use our brains at all.  We vegetate.  Instead our brains are reinforced NOT to think.  The words, the sentences, the punctuation, and the paragraphs are reduced to mindless one liners.  One only would watch a few episodes of Seinfeld to see the difference.  It is a cruel, powerful, and evil ruse, the maiming of music. 

Is Jazz Pornography?

To the ignorant who question the idea that "jazz is anything," please question how and why Miles Davis was a musical genius who changed America.  Did he do so by "just doing anything?"  It is an interesting notion, because many people do not understand American jazz music.  Sonny Rollins, one of America's most iconic tenor saxophonists, sums it up admirably.  Jazz might be the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with. The band starts a song, but then everything falls apart and the musicians just play whatever they want for as long they can stand it. People take turns noodling around, and once they run out of ideas and have to stop, the audience claps. I’m getting angry just thinking about it.

Sometimes we would run through the same song over and over again to see if anybody noticed. If someone did, I don’t care.

There was this one time, in 1953 or 1954, when a few guys and I had just finished our last set at Club Carousel, and we were about to pack it in when in walked Bud Powell and Charlie Parker. We must have jammed together for five more hours, right through sunrise. That was the worst day of my life.  As it turns out Mr. Rollins did not actually write this.  When I read this interview in its entirely it had been posted on Facebook.  That of itself should throw up caution flags.  Facebook these days only causes me grief.  I believed the missive that Sonny Rollins felt he had wasted his life playing jazz.  It was credible.  It was credible because I feel the same way.  Fully I understood how someone that does not understand jazz music could make such assumptions.  The reality of jazz music is a polar opposite.  There is a reason whey often it is cited as America's only true art form.  Jazz music at its worst is all of the things stated in the New Yorker's satire.  I know this, because in my tenure working as a pianist on cruise ships I have encountered it time and time again.  We are required to play jazz on the final night of the cruise, and musicians hired to READ music otherwise must "get through" the jazz set.  Often it is heinous.  It is heinous, because without the required education one unequivocally cannot play jazz music.  The ignorant would disagree as do these unskilled jazz players.  They rely upon schmaltz, grandstanding, and masquerading.  I think I have experienced no worse feeling in the world than being demanded to accompany one of these players on a jazz set.  They feel that by being able to make a decent sound on an instrument and by the sheer enjoyment of listening to their own bullshit, they should be considered a credible jazz player.  Ask Miles Davis.  While it did not begin this way the resolution of the musical eighth note shrank.  It shrank into the mindless strum of a guitar.  Without consciously knowing it the guitar created the pop musical genre.  Without realizing that strumming down and then up in rapid succession creates an unrealistic musical spacing, the ignorant grasped the concept as validation for their ignorance at playing jazz.  The new concept, which is the concept of the pop musical genre, is instead of playing strongly and with a discernible rhythm pulse, you "lay down."  Like a dead fish you lay on your back, spread your legs, and get violated.  I watched an entire Mickey Dolenz Monkey's musical show, and it did just this.  Never during the entire show was their a discernible groove.  There never was a pattern or a clave of rhythm that you could understand, subdivide, or feel.  Instead rhythm became a wash of sound.  The melodies and harmonies were being played but devoid of any discernible rhythm.  When I first had the band AC DC I hated them.  It was because they are a pop/rock band.  They masquerade as fury, but when they play their instruments they are tepid.  Pop music has capitalized on this loophole, and it destroyed American popular music.  No longer were you required to have physical skill articulating musical passages.  Simply you turned your amps up, made the synonymous physical gestures, and played as weakly as humanly possible.  This was the goal, because removing musical intent was the only way to glorify the ego of the listener.  I have trouble with this concept.  There is valid pop/rock music.  There are band who use the technique of playing between the kick drum and the snare drum in a lazy, loping, reciprocating feel.  The rest are marauders.  American music has become a congregation of marauders.  Other than this lack of rhythmic integrity or "swing" feeling, jazz marauders actually do not know the songs they are playing.  If they do happen to know the song (or rather its melodic and harmonic progression), they do not know the appropriate scales with which to improvise new melodies.  Melodies and their accompanying chords are finite.  They are tangible.  They are mathematic.  The last thing they are are "jazz is anything I think it is."  "Tunes" or songs comprise the musical vehicles for jazz performance.  These tunes comes in varying styles, most commonly the ballad, the medium-tempo-swing tune, the bossa, the samba, shuffle-funk, and African 12/8.  Only in this area of style or feel could the phrase "jazz is anything" be entertained.  Unluckily purveyors of "Smooth Jazz" have exploited this back door.  They emerged as jazz wanna-be's and decided if you could play with a decent sound on your instrument but actually knew the song and its progression, you could be a musical star.  American jazz never has recovered.  As a former jazz music educator at two major universities, I like to define jazz this way.  "Jazz is swing-oriented improvisation music based upon the American popular song and the twelve bar blues."  The American popular song often uses the form A-A-B-A with the B section being called the song's "bridge."  The Great American Songbook truly is the source for jazz's evolution.  Iconic musical figures such as Miles Davis developed and expanded the content of jazz music.  Three significant contributions made to jazz music by Miles Davis were the invention of "Cool Jazz," "Modal Jazz," and "Jazz Fusion"  Unlike what widely is believed Miles created fusion with two seminal recordings, "In a Silent Way," and "Bitches Brew."  It was not long after Miles 'went electric' that other bands followed.  Most notably is Joe Zawinul's birth child, "Weather Report."  Modal jazz substituted a musical mode for a harmonic chord progression.  Most often it was the Dorian, a musical scale that has its roots in antiquity.  Cool jazz created a contemplative, unhurried, more quiet rendition of songs than Bebop. The essence of jazz is the essence of all real music.  It has definable parameters.  It has a tangible structure consisting of a foundation, its content, and its marketing.  Only a musician mesmerized by the idea that they could masquerade as a great musician could believe that any of these things could be sacrificed.  Contrarily the knowledge and skill it demands to play jazz is significant.  First one must be an accomplished instrumentalist.  Second one must know the repertoire of songs.  Third one must have studied the craft and art of improvisation.  It is a life long process akin to religion.  Spirituality also is involved something we have moved away from in shallow America.  The music that has raped and pillaged America's valid music easily is defined.  It is all of the things real music is not.  It seeks to have no impact on society.  It seeks to be tepid and weak.  It seeks to make no statement.  It seeks NOT to define a principle, opinion, or boundary.  It seeks only to masturbate at the basest human level.  It is pornography.  

The Extinction of American Popular Music

When I was a college teacher I never got much resistance from my students about what I taught.  They believed me, because I was talented as a musician.  Later in life when I was not teaching young people began to question and disagree with things I felt strongly about.  One was the definition of jazz.  As American music has regressed the traditional postulates of a quality music education have been cast aside.  America is fond these days of qualifying her own bullshit.  Just as historical periodicals threw in the towel for better sales, the rest of America has followed.  When Time magazine questions the validity of God on their front cover, we should know something is amiss.  I try to remember that the Holocaust was not really that long ago.  The murderous atrocities of Adolph Hitler still are lukewarm, and they are surrounding us each and every day.  Fascism is ensconced in American society and is being promulgated by the powers at be.  The powers at be in my realization are a younger generation of Americans that missed the school bus.  It seems they were exempt from developing a sound moral conscience, because the ethical standards by which America has stood and thrived have been compromised.  If you abolish Christianity then those ignorant are free to behave as they wish with no regard for their common man.  While I do believe there are such movements in play in our country, ignorance has become a metaphor for these compromised ideals.  Ignorance only can be the cause of the fall of music and television.  As I have begun watching and listening more critically, instead of getting angry I am getting disillusioned.  Music education always has been a liberal art, a collection of disciplines chosen by the ancient Greeks that were deemed crucial to a fulfilling human existence.  We have grown so far away from these liberal arts, that America bears little resemblance to her once glory.  We lead in very little these days.  I can't really think of anything in particular that can be attributed to American ingenuity.  What I have found is my cultural proclivities are matched only by other nationalities.  I find great comfort in the musical works of the Russians.  They, unlike music I hear in America, resonate with me as being vibrant, wise, and visionary.  The Russian Five while rebelling against Tchakovsky's nationalism sought to forge their own musical futures not by adhering to anachronistic dogma but by pushing the limits of music.  Similarly the Second Vienesse School, something of which I never hear about in America, pioneered a new kind of musical expression.  This expression represents an evolution of the human mind and spirit, something of which we know not in America.  We still are stuck in the doldrums of worthless pop fodder with no thought for a rebirth of a once former nation.  It is because we do not care.  I am not sure why everyone seems to have laid down their arms and surrendered. Unquestionably during the tenure of George W. Bush there was an avid campaign of fear and intimidation.  With a lack of emphasis and thus funding of public education, Americans have grown more and more ignorant.  With this ignorance has come a selfishness that belies rational understanding.  How can society expect to provide empathy to those desiring to be ignorant?  Luckily I have been shielded from this movement most of my life.  Only moving back to Fayetteville, North Carolina have I witnessed such an unsettling ignorance.  Just as many Republican pundits have campaigned upon, there is a large active faction of worthless Americans looking for handouts.  How does the city of Fayetteville respond?  It refuses to allow a new manufacturing plant to build here providing hundreds of sorely needed jobs.  Likewise many of the homeless shelters have been closed demanding these citizens live under bridges in the bitter cold.  I take pride in transporting my refuse to the city landfill.  It is like a little adventure having my pick up truck weighed and paying a few dollars to make the city cleaner.  Today the city requires personal vehicles pay a flat twenty dollar fee no matter what the content or quantity of their load.  Twenty dollars to pay to get rid of your garbage?  I refuse, and while I realize it is an attempt to truncate the line of cars at the dump, I do not agree.  That is fascist to charge citizens to unload their garbage.  We should be rewarded with a tax break for being conscientious.  Whether it is possible that the faction of gratuity seekers still is playing the slavery card I am not sure.  Racism like many ills of America have returned to blossom in this new ignorance.  It doesn't matter.  What seems to matter is the more intelligent and thus affluent intend to keep taking advantage of us.  Those with no intelligence are shit out of luck.  Music and television are not helping like they should be.  At their great height in American history both mediums transcended petty selfishness and sought to educate America.  It was demanded.  It was demanded by a generation of purveyors who now rapidly have died.  Journalists, sports commentators, television writers, directors, and musicians have disappeared at a startling rate, and there is no one left to take the reins.  It is frustrating to me because my entire life I have been prepared to take these reins, but there was not opportunity.  Today I feel still there is no opportunity, because opportunity is controlled by politics.  Not only have my mentors moved on to a better place, what is left is ignorance.  It is an ignorance so deep that it is in denial.  Most easily it can be personified by one questioning the definition of jazz music.  Most easily that severe ignorance is expecting there to be no vocation.  "Why must we study music or television to be good at it?  Let just change the rules and pitch it out there, and no one will notice the difference."  One only has to pay attention to a television program to see that there is no concept.  Again the ignorant would say anything goes.  "Why would we need a 'concept' to give our shit meaning?"  Consequently we have shit.  It is due time that the shit is flushed by those knowing the difference.  That is not a panel of celebrities feeling they are qualified to adjudicate musical juries.  That is not untrained actors feeling they are qualified to act.  That is not pretty faces and curvaceous bodies twerking on stage.  There are disciplines, disciplines of television and music production.  Just because the tools of production have been shrunk into a laptop computer does not product create.  One must study the lineage of production that  is your predecessor.  A thorough study of those that came before your own damn self is the first step to enlightenment.  This principle often is cited in criticism of contemporary classical music.  "Does the music refer to anything other than itself, or is it just self indulgent masturbation?"  The personal computer and the internet once groundbreaking  now have succumbed to the shallow capitalism of America.  Once a connected data base of academic institutions, the internet now nurtures prostitution, pornography, and sex trafficking.  Story telling is a lost American art form,  because we do not have time in our days to listen to the toils of others.  We struggle to survive and our existence reflects it.  We are at a low point in American history.  This new ignorance is the simple declaration that American jazz is anything.  If anything seems to work, then it is jazz.  If anything is jazz, than anything is Rock 'n' Roll.  Anything is R&B.  Anything is country music.  Anything is soul music.  Anything is Gospel music.  This anything, the epitome of ignorance, is "pop" music and reality television.  Just as I labored watching an American Sniper live his meager life, I labor watching ignorant faux celebrities trying to entertain.  It is a disgrace, but humiliation has become the new American entertainment.  I first hand was involved in the transformation.  While working professionally as a musician on cruise ships, I watched Karioke usurp live music.  It seems this newer generation of ignorant rather would humiliate themselves for fun rather that watch an artistic band.  Slowly the observation of this humiliation overtook musical quality in cruise shows.  The people no longer were interested in the music.  They just wanted to watch the performers struggle at their jobs, because it was tangible.  It was more tangible than television, because we musicians were paid professionals attempting to do our jobs.  Never have I seen television cameras placed inside a courtroom to observe as a skilled attorney litigates a case.  Never have I seen cameras placed in an operating room to observe a skilled surgeon.  We have been sold out, musicians.  Once an energetic driving force of humanity has been reduced to a few nondescript digital samples of analog waveforms and jungle drums.  They are not even good drums.  

Being a Musician

I can't help it that I am a musician.  I can't help it that I am from the old school.  I don't feel old.  I wish I did.  They say you never really become an adult until your parents are gone.  My reality is at age fifty-two, I have been around long enough to have become extinct.  I'm sure in other places my profession carries on.  I am sure of it, because I have Facebook friends who are musicians.  I moved from Fayetteville, North Carolina to Columbus, Ohio to work on my doctorate of musical arts in composition.  I nearly finished had it not been for the eye disease kerataconus.  I needed cornea transplants in each eye, and I am grateful to be able to see.  My eyes are not what they used to be.  It seems in a college town music always is more active.  I was able to make a living in Columbus playing keyboards for several years.  I was an accomplished jazz pianist, but it is difficult to remember.  Now I am extremely isolated from music.  What I hear on television is most insulting.  I go on about this from time to time.  I'm not sure if I grew up in the golden age of television, but I must have.  I am lucky as the child of baby boomers that my cultural proclivities far are superior compared to the youth of today.  America drastically has changed during the last decade, and it has been for the worst.  I use television as an example, because in its golden age it was artistic.  It set an example for healthy behavior.  Today it is intended to dumb down the population.  Not only have we neglected our system of public education, we are bombarding our viewing citizens with trash.  As a musician I can't help to make value judgements about the quality of music around me.  Television music in particular has suffered the most.  Once it was the pinnacle for aspiring commercial composers.  Today it is an afterthought.  Like America's pop music it does nothing.  It does not inspire, it does not create art, and ironically is does not qualify as being music.  It, like the rest of reality television, fills space. It passes time.  It accomplishes nothing except for making Americans more ignorant.  We are bombarded with trash ruthlessly and without conscience.  Whether it is a conscious decision or the result of a suffering economy, television music is extinct.  What is taking its place is something that is not music.  It is noise.  It is constant droning noise that fills time and space.  Noise creates insensitivity.  We tune it out.  I have found since being back in Fayetteville, North Carlina all of my musical skills have faded because they are not being used.  Also they are not being reinforced.  Rarely if ever do I hear any music on television that qualifies as music.  Music is time organized in rhythm.  Rhythm is what is conspicuously absent from both television and pop music today.  Instead what is used is the lazy and usually drunken motion of a strumming guitarist.  It takes no musical knowledge to strum a guitar, and that motion of ignorance in a clever coup has defeated real music and taken its place.  This ignorance in music I have come to realize is the partner in crime to ignorant reality television.  Music had to be dumbed down or it would upstage the non actors.  When I am blessed to be able to watch and listen to a music video from its golden years, I am shocked by the quality of its sound.  Even when bands are performing live in large arenas surrounded by noisy fans, the pure audio quality  coming from the stage is amazing.  Often I have to do a double take to see if I really am hearing a live performance.  If these vintage videos or any of the Top 100 from history's Billboard charts were to be heard today, it would cement that reality that today's pop music is indeed not real music.  Systematically this is why quality television programming, quality radio music, and music television are buried.  The music industry that is in power today in America wants it that way, because they would not be in power if that comparison ever emerged.  After watching Superbowl number forty-nine this evening, I found all of the terrible shortcomings of cheap film music have made their way onto television.  They really are the same, and that was an infuriating realization.  I have wanted to write film music almost my entire life, and this is what I have to listen to?  I understand I do not have to listen to it, but why must I at age fifty-two give up the entertaining things I have had my entire life?  Is it a right of passage?  Is God trying to tell me something?  I think this is possible.  I have tried feverishly to maintain my professional keyboard rig for the last two years.  It has been difficult.  Only last night after I have programmed its patches three separate times all of this work was lost in what must have been one blast of static electricity.  All of the programs that call up my quality chosen sounds mysteriously vanished.  Instead I got a ROM chip validation that the system was good, and each and every patch that had been named were now INIT.  INIT.  The memory had been initialized.  After scanning the manual for this unit I could find no such parameter in its menus.  Synthesizers of course have this function.  It was unnerving.  Because I know I can re-program the controlling patches, I didn't get angry.  I was dismayed.  Three separate times all ready I have done this trying to keep this rig operational.  The first time the patches were lost by a technician changing its battery.  The second time, lightening struck.  This is the third time.  Because the music industry today is so different than before, the piece of gear I am using to control my rig no longer is manufactured.  They would rather sell you expensive computer gear that does not sound as good.  I am from the old school, and old school is better.  I do not want to carry a laptop computer with me to a gig.  It is expensive, it is a theft temptation, and it is not musical.  I had to take this piece of gear apart and try to find some anomaly.  It seems the battery holder was a little loose, so I bent it with some long-nosed pliers.  I have no way of knowing if this will happen again.  It takes many long hours choosing sounds, setting up MIDI routings, programming patch changes, and naming settings.  I should be good at it by now.  Because I am so disillusioned with music today, I am beginning to think that it is time to draw the chapter of electronic music in my life to a close.  I have over  four hours of contemporary classical piano music that needs publishing.  Why am I wasting my time on this keyboard gear?  The answer is it gives me immense pleasure.  The sounds I create exponentially are better than any sounds you hear today.  The sounds (sound) you hear today completely is hackneyed.  It is a hack.  I'm not sure today if our ignorant youth would even understand what a hack is.  A fake.  They are too worried about being homosexual and mediocre, and it has become the entertainment industry's job to stroke their egos with dribble.  I have little pleasure in my life today.  One major thing that has kept me happy for several years is seen as an enemy today.  Republican businessmen can't make money on skateboarding.  It like art is an uplifting and enlightening sport.  We can't have that, seeing as the sole responsibility of adolescent TV is to be ignorant.  Skateboarding.  Skateboarding creates physical pleasure by allowing the rider to defy gravity.  In Fayetteville, North Carolina our gravity no longer is a virgin.  Our gravity while strong enough to keep our feet on the ground does not seems as strong as the infrasonic waves that beat us everyday.  They are so strong here from air and rail traffic that they can move objects.  This barometric air pressure makes it nearly impossible to surf a wave the traditional way.  It creates its own never-ending wave that like bad television and pop music seizes power over what was good.  America has become overrun with this movement and we are dying as a result of it.  Terrorism in America does not have to be violent.  Slowly and without recognition it is killing our citizens with ease in our own homes.  How can I qualify the ignorance of this non-music?  It is simple.  The motion it uses as a substitute for rhythm is that of a mindless drunken stooge.  It requires no thought.  How is it possible to have music with no thought?  It is because it is not music.  It is noise.