Scratching Our Heads at American Ingenuity

When you work on a cruise ship most people think you live a life of leisure.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Nothing could be further from the truth that cruise ships, the ever-expanding cruise ship multi billion dollar industry, largely is not responsible for Hurricane Dorian.  I do not mean to make enemies of my former employers, but it must be said.  When President Donald Trump repeatedly says he never has heard of a category five hurricane, it doesn't take a boatload of logic to understand what is super heating our oceans.  It is why the coral reefs are dying.  Just say it!  Cruise ships largely are responsible for this ocean warming.  The super heated water fuels these newly created super storms.  Super super.  Marsha.  Marsha.  What would a well schooled, prudent, and intelligent Congress do?  They would enact not a carbon tax, but an oxygen tax.  Each diesel prime mover which burns our precious Amazon created oxygen will be monitored and not taxed, but simply according to the rules of Capitalism CHARGED for their use of the earth's oxygen.  Why is this not the case now?  A car engine is a bit different, and possibly we pay this fee when we purchase the vehicle.  Large diesel prime movers which burn tons of oxygen and replace it with carbon, why are they not paying?  It's a loophole.  Simple laws for simple living.  The point of this entry was not to shed light on who is warming out oceans.  Once it was the military.  The huge hole in the ozone of which we hear nothing anymore....  Navy transmitter communicating with submarines.  HAARP.  High altitude whatever...  Figuring out how to build and use a phased array radar but in the microwave or infrared frequencies.  Figuring out how to carry your music collection around while living on a ship.  My first solution was to put CD's in sleeves in a notebook.  I had two large notebooks, and this worked well.  Then iPods came into vogue.  Audio quality became moot but portability made up for it.  I slid every single CD into the multi-drive of my Mac laptop and imported it into iTunes.  It was convenient.  I listened this way for a long time, and it was satisfactory.  Then I became landlocked.  My ship born ways took a long time to correct themselves.  I am not even sure they have become correct, but they have reverted back to a proceeding time.  It is difficult to take a decade of musical growth, accomplishment, and transformation and put it into the closet.  I have done this before.  When I was working on the DMA degree at The OSU, and this was before they decided they wanted to become "The" Ohio State University, I had to shelve my jazz proclivities and focus on 20th century art music.  It was not that difficult, because ironically enough jazz music rose up and bit me in the arse.  So many years of submersion in the jazz aesthetic brainwashed me into believing that jazz was the only music.  Thus its lifestyle, its dynamic, and its rewards were the only musical gifts.  Sadly I was disappointed.  After a successful tenure at the University of South Carolina as a Graduate Teaching Associate and an adjunct faculty member I fell from grace.  I am not really sure what happened, but music was not all of it.  Jazz upchucked as did Columbia, and I was spewed out in an orangy mass back to Fayettenam trying to recreate myself.  It didn't work, and I bailed on the military hot spot.  This was a point I meant to write about earlier, the history of Fayettenam before it became only a military town.  "Once Upon a Time in America" in a small southern town Fayetteville hosted its own plantation elite.  There was big money in 'Nam and it was had by a few families.  They congregated at Highland Country Club.  They lived on Skye Drive with an "e." Before BRAC, Base Realignment and Closure, decided to make Fayetteville the new Baghdad there was a quality of life in Fayetteville that was akin to southern Texas.  We had our coastline, the outer banks, and the Intercoastal Waterway.  We had fresh seafood, Myrtle Beach, and shag music.  There was everything you needed for a high quality of life, at least for yuppies.  You could drink beer out of a keg in a plastic cup, dance with your wife, and listen to beach music in the safe confines of a gated golf club.  No more.  Those families have died out and along with them most of their earned wealth.  Luckily much of it has gone to entitlements for the arts in Cumberland County.  That lifestyle, that 80's epic soap opera existence laced with mall hair and pop fashion died in the fuel tanks of CSX's diesel prime movers.  Thirst quenching, bubbly, intoxicating spirits were replaced with the fumes of diesel fuel.  The mammoth machines rolled into 'Nam and raped and pillaged everything in their paths.  CSX consumed Fayetteville with a well produced belch.  Anyone will be hard pressed to take away their daily diet of carbs.  Their Candida Albicans will find you either through the air, the earth, or water and use your body parts for fuel.  Chemours will continue to genetically modify your existing DNA with cancerous mutations and all the while notifying the EPA of their irresponsibility.  What has this world come to?