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.