Failed Rail

I am tired of loss.  When we played for the ceremonial Lighting of Trees in Lumberton the other night, the keynote speaker said we spend half of our lives navigating loss.  That was a cheerful bit of narrative.  His wife had died recently after finishing her book "Mr. Owita's Guide to Gardening:  How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and Open Heart."  I have not read it.  He never really said the name of the book clearly.  He did make it clear she had recurring cancer and recently died from it.  He remarried and was publicizing her book from which the profits were to go to Southeastern Hospice.  That was a heavy message for a Christmas tree lighting.  I have been surrounded by death for the last few years.  People die at an unusual rate in Cumberland Country.  It must be true if there is a FB page named "Remembering Our Lost Friends."  The list keeps getting longer, and these are young people, former students at Terry Sanford High School.  That means that life in "Da Ville" is difficult.  I always have known that.  I was a product of school segregation.  It began slowly, and a few black children appeared in our classrooms at Belvedere Elementary School, later to be renamed Margaret Willis.  Then when it came time for fourth grade and to move on to another school, I was bused across town to Ramsey Street School.  Busing if you don't know means you got on a bus in your own neighborhood and were trekked down The Murch, past Fayetteville State University, and up the hill to the school.  I did not have a bad time at Ramsey Street School.  Mrs. Fairly was my fourth grade teacher, and I was elected President of my class.  My secretary was Janet Beard, now Janet Thoren, an attorney with two grown children.  Her daughter is in the military, and her son plays hockey.  I did well academically for the most part, but during fifth grade my permanent teeth began to come in, crooked.  My mouth was so small the first time I visited a dentist he pulled one of my teeth.  I screamed like bloody hell, and he slapped my hand.  My teeth were so screwed up, Dr. Roberson just kept pulling permanent teeth as soon as they came in.  I got used to the excruciating pain, him wrenching on my teeth with those pliers.  There was no gingerly prying with a probe.  He just went in, clamped down on the tooth, and wrenched it out.  Pain, but I was used to it.  The few fillings I had were worse, the ones that developed underneath my braces.  Matt and Beth, his kids, were our friends.  It was that family who allowed me to experience the bliss of motorcycling.  There weren't many families who were close knit enough to indulge in motorsports responsibly.  The Robersons grandparents lived in Buie's Creek.  One set owned a trailer park and lived on the property.  It was a motorcycle riding oasis, and there is nothing ever I have done that was as enjoyable.  It was the ultimate freedom.  I still ride today, but on a limited basis.  The woods behind our house still have the trails I cleared forty years ago.  They also now have every kind of poison you can imagine.  I guess it is those damn bird who eat the berries and poop out the seeds.  The sumac grows in large trees, and it took a long time to get rid of those.  Then there is the ivy and the oak.  One you catch that itchy rash, you are reluctant to return to the spot whence you caught it.  Motorcyling is an enjoyable activity.  The other activity I rediscovered while living on cruise ships was skateboarding.  Fayetteville is an anti-skateboard city.  There is a city ordinance which says you cannot ride a bicycle in historic downtown, and yet Raleigh and other cities have allowed scooters to be driven on sidewalks.  They want allow physical exercise, but they will allow an upstart millennial company to rent deadly scooters to unsuspecting adolescents.  America is a mismanaged nation.  One hand does not know that the other one is doing, including collecting absentee ballots in Elizabethtown.  None of this is what about what I intended to write.  What I want to write about is my lack of opportunity to create music.  Much to my mother's dismay, when I came home to tend to my dying father my musical equipment came with me.  Two of my motorcycles have been in our garage for a long time.  When he shared Thanksgiving dinner with my sister's family, I listened to my mother complain about my "stuff."  It is true that the master bedroom has become somewhat of a music studio.  I have been happy with it thus far, except recently when I realized that playing music "live" meant playing at a particular volume in a club or church like space.  She has goaded me about many things, and usually I accomplish whatever task is at hand.  this particular rant was untimely.  She would like for me to be playing again, but a cruise ship job is not convenient at the moment.  Not only do the cruise lines want to hire beginner musicians so they can pay them less, they require a very stringent medical exam which costs over $500.00.  You must pay for this yourself as a token of your sincerity to the company.  I did this a few years ago like I have for the past fifteen years at the same facility.  Except this time they refused to accept it.  Not only did the desk attendant overcharge me for the lab work, he also verbally harassed me because of my race.  What fun!  No job and racism.  Welcome to Fayetteville.  In my quest to play live, promptly I went down to our garage and devised a new "rig" upon which to play keyboards.  I restored my third Rhodes piano and built a shelf system to stack my other keyboards on top of it.  In about a weeks time, I had a new/old rig that sounded better than anything I have every played through.  My old rig was peach, and I was using basically the same equipment but through new amplification with the added Rhodes.  It emerged out of the oak dust in our garage, and midnight until six a.m. became my new work time.  In this extremely short period of time, say one week, I was able to create a recording environment in which I could sequence backing tracks with which to play.  It is no easy task to create a hip jazz feeling in the middle of a war-torn city.  The fifty caliber machine guns are as clear as day, their sound, and the cannons.  The ground shakes.  After midnight the local rail activity of both Norfolk Southern, who must be providing the limestone for Fayetteville Block Materials, and the Aberdeen and Rockfish who do most of their business at River Terminal in Cumberland County, subsides.  Unlike CSX-T who often switch trains 24/7, at least the majority of the local rail activity ceases.  At least it did for this one particular week.  Then two things happened.  One was it got cold overnight.  With the onset of global warming, we have lost our seasons.  Fayetteville always has been the hottest city in North Carolina.  It partly could be because we are situated in the Cape Fear River Basin.  Heat and humidity from the Atlantic Ocean travels directly up this trench.  It does not help that the military's deep water munitions port is at the mouth of the Cape Fear River.  This industrial activity, a rail head and three large container ship docks, creates heat.  These vehicles burn oxygen and release carbon into the atmosphere.  Fayetteville is hot for several reasons.  One is the Cargill plant also on the Cape Fear River.  They manufacture oils which are produced by heating either vegetable or soybeans.  Then there is Valley Proteins which also renders animal fat by heating carcasses.  Hexion produced ammonia products.  Both of these plants are located at River Terminal, which the Aberdeen and Rockfish service.  They house their locomotives in Aberdeen, and they travel several times a week to "Da Ville" to make their money.  We citizens of Fayetteville are so fortunate to reap the benefit of their industrial activity.  The city of Fayetteville is the Rail Head of the Carolinas.  Not only are we a part of STRACNET, the Pentagon's strategic rail corridor servicing Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, but we are a connection for two Class A railroads, CSX-T and Norfolk Southern.  Add in the activity of the Aberdeen and Rockfish and you have a train horn problem.  The City Council has entertained the idea of a "No Blow" zone, and it is a bad idea.  It is a bad idea, because downtown Fayetteville is a safety disgrace.  When the rail survey was done over a decade ago, specific recommendations were made to improve grade crossings downtown.  One was the building of a connector track which would connect the Fort Bragg/Norfolk Southern track directly to the CSX-T mainline.  This new track would stop military trains from backing down Russell Street and blocking traffic for long periods of time.  Now that a new bridge has built and the land underneath has been cleared, there is no better time for CSX-T to add this track.  They won't, because they operate on splinters and shrapnel to keep their property taxes low.  The Vander line which services these military trains is a disgrace.  It is a miracle that it functions at all with its poor upkeep.  A quiet zone is a bad idea, because the citizens of Fayetteville need to know when a rapidly moving freight train is approaching.  They are covert about their whistles now.  There is a strict set of guidelines for railroad horns at grade crossings.  It is of no matter that affluent families have purchased overpriced real estate in downtown Fayetteville.  That was their choice, and they should have known in what they were investing.  People all ready have been killed by erroneously pulling on to the CSX-T mainline, and the city has covered it up.  There are no crossing gates on Hay Street, and with a new minor league baseball stadium being built, death is imminent.  The train horns for me are a relief, because when I hear them I know why my musical activity suffers.  There is a reason why my keyboard sounds move in a repeating circle distorting their true stereo image.  There is a reason why monophonic MP3 files seem to sound better emanating from an Amazon Tap, Echo, Dot, or Show.  Locomotive-produced infrasound, which has become constant in Fayetteville because of the increased activity of Ground Forces Command at Fort Bragg, skews sound.  When it is present human beings never will experience the full effect of music as it once was.  Instead the music is modulated by an invisible force, an invisible moderator, a locomotive engineer, or a military gunner, who while they are operating ultimately have control over your music production.  When we recorded in Nashville with the Matt Kiernan band, the engineers at our studio were perplexed why in the wee hours of the morning an "arc" would emerge dead shorting some of their audio busses.  I had to explain to them that this was from an AC traction locomotive that was passing through, and we had to wait for it to pass.  It took me several years to figure this out.  Not only are there low frequency sounds waves in great amounts, there is electricity.  My musical output suffers from both.  My reverb comes and goes, my stereo signal moves in a circle, and I get dead shorts on occasion.  Somehow during this one wonderful week, nighttime train activity was at a low.  My studio emerged, the temperature was moderate, and for once I could actualize my former repertoire of jazz-oriented music.  I am talking about feel.  I am talking about groove.  I am talking about being able to play time in music, which is generated from a feeling or emotion created by a human beings mind and body.  This is the magic of music, and this is what is lacking in today's popular music.  The massive expansion of rail activity, its trade on the stock market, and its weighty investors have capitalized on the invisibility of their pollution.  The death of the music industry is a direct ramification of their profit.  Novice television competitors are not capable of creating a professional musical product, much less trying to overcome the effects of an invisible hindrance to the creation of time, feeling, and groove.  Pop is their substitute, an elfin groove that uses the square pulse created by today's computer as its base.  There is no need to learn how to play time based upon certain feels such as the Bossa Nova, the Samba, the Merengue, or Salsa.  These forms are the lost art of music, and they are worth preserving.  It was my quest to use my newly formed studio to program some of these feels with which to play.  Two things happened.  It got cold, and my thirty year old Yamaha DX-7llFD began to stiffen up.  Its plastic buttons became cold and brittle and would not function.  I realized in the blink of an eye I would have to sacrifice my new studio for the longevity of my old equipment.  Although my kerosene heater was efficient  heating the garage for short amounts of time, I could not keep the temperature moderated enough for it to function as a full time music studio.  I packed up my gear and hauled it upstairs to try and recreate my sound.  It was impossible.  After a few days of futile fury, I reassembled an abbreviated system in the same space which sat idle.  The second thing that happened was a continual low frequency standing appeared in an instant, and it has not stopped since.  Its origin either is at the Honeycutt Marshalling Yard at Fort Bragg, at DAK Americas, or in the CSX-T Milan yard as they service the Cargill plant.  It is no help that all of the railroads have succumbed to the snake oil pitch of GE.  Norfolk Southern, who resisted the conversion to AC traction in its inception, now has consented to have their C40-9 locomotives rebuilt.  Even the smaller GP-38's and SD-40-2's have been offered this conversion sealing the fate of America's music industry.  There is no way mainstream music ever will possess its former power to transform humanity.  That is because this invisible force is emasculating music the way it is emasculating people.  It robs us of the very things we need to survive and feel healthy.  This is why we are a nation on drugs.  I am suffering from the loss of this fleeting week, a week of nirvana where I once again was enabled to do what I do well, create music freely and without the influence of anyone I do not choose.  For me this is happiness.  This is freedom, and America has been robbed of this right by the rail industry.