Trumpean Dynasty

I must take a moment to write, because I cannot continue work on my current project.  Although my eyes are dry and burning, and my contacts are foggy I muster the energy to force my eyes into focus.  Usually it is only at two o'clock in the wee small hours of the morning that my contacts inexplicably dry out and fog up.  Like a light switch that flips my left ear rings and my eyes dry up.  These are familiar occurrences. I am used to them, but I am not used not being able to work on a musical project.  I stand corrected.  I have all but stopped recording music in my upstairs studio.  It has been too frustrating to mix.  If you can't monitor accurately then you cannot produce music.  Recording studios go to great lengths to normalize their mixing rooms.  They have a noise generator and a spectrum analyzer.  They play white noise (or is it pink?) through their studio monitor speakers and then analyze the  peaks and valleys of frequency response.  They then use a graphic EQ to level out the response of the room so that when they mix recorded music what they hear is an accurate portrayal of the content.  Content.  What is this millennial word.  Content.  Content is crap found in a web page.  Graphics.  Images.  Sound bytes.  Music.  Content.  (So my left ear begins to ring, the air in my bedroom begins to undulate, and my FM radio reception falters.  Par for the course.  This is what we have.  It is either diesel electric locomotives from many sources, helicopters from many sources, aircraft, or activity from a Fort Bragg range.  The frustrating thing now is I am trying to restore a vintage keyboard instrument using my garage as a workshop.  Good luck.  I can't complete the work, because this particular phenomenon is invasive to this kind of work.  Perhaps it is not to ordinary life.  Perhaps it does not effect or bother others, but it interrupts my work.  I discovered yesterday that the Aberdeen and Rockfish Railroad has a "yard" behind Berean Baptist Church.  What?  How could this be possible?  Berean Baptist Church is on Glensford at the corner of Cliffdale Road.  Always Fayetteville has know that the A&R tracks connect downtown Fayetteville with Southern Pines.  It is a historic business this short line railroad who sneaked over to Fayetteville in the middle of the night and built a crossover across the mainline railroad tracks so they could access the downtown yard.  No one stopped them.  Normally they assemble their trains in the Norfolk Southern yard off Russell Street which is shared with CSX.  They are there most days assembling trains which go back to Aberdeen.  Yesterday I spotted A&R engines 300 and 400 assembling a long train behind Berean Baptist Church off Glensford.  What the f?  Who knew there was a siding here that allows them to shunt cars from downtown and assemble trains?  Evidently it has been happening for a while, because it used to be one train a day.  10:45 a.m. and 1:45 p.m.  I would hear the train horn and that would be it.  A few hours a day.  Now their trains are manic beginning at six a.m. and not leaving until five in the afternoon.  What is all of this hub bub?  My left ear is still ringing and my eyes are burning with pumped pollen.  I wanted to know what they were carrying.  What was this long line of cars in the Aberdeen and Rockfish train.  It didn't take much to pinpoint the source.  It is DAK Americas.  CSX shuttles out the raw materials for this plant on Cedar Creek Road every day after four, and evidently now the final product is tendered by the A&R.  Pellets I think.  PET resin is their product.  Perhaps the pellets which are processed and make plastic bottles are being transported by the Aberdeen and Rockfish.  I reckon it was a good idea that they laid those tracks so many decades ago creeping out of the Raeford pine forests and making their way to Fayettenam.  It was good for them, wasn't it?  Commerce.  Business.  Money, for them.  My question always has been whence does this arrangement come, this right of way to shunt freight all hours of the day and night on tracks which inundate our neighborhoods?  Especially how does a business which is headquartered in another city have access to contracts elsewhere?  They make their money in another city, and yet exist in Aberdeen?   Fayetteville evidently is their whore, except she doesn't get paid.  She is exploited on a massive scale.  My FM radio reception, WCPE specifically whose transmitter is on Bragg Blvd, is shit.  May I reiterate?  WCPE has a transmitter a few miles from our house, and yet the reception constantly and continually is interupted.  There is static, noise, or a complete drop out of their FM signal which is plenty strong.  Likewise the same source which causes this interuption is what is halting my work on this vintage electric piano.  I have been struggling with it for weeks.  It is both aural and electrical, meaning it is both acoustical and radio frequency.  That is a double whammy.  Not only do you have low frequency air pressure assaulting your tactile sensory responses and affecting your things, you have electromagnetic energy that is causing electrical interference.  The static electricity in my bedroom is tangible.  Static electricity is something that seems from a different era, and yet it still is just as relavent today as it was then.  I cannot "voice" this Rhodes piano, because its mechanism for producing sound is a vibrating tine and tone bar.  This vibration is captured by an electromagnetic pick up consisting of a copper wire wrapped magnet, a makeshift magneto.  The efficienty of this apparatus is great, and the "harp" of the Rhodes piano, a series of 73 or 88 pick ups, produces up to a volt of electricity.  Not millivolts, but an entire volt.  This mechanism is prone to bouth acoustical and electrical interference.  Never have I had problems until now.  While the instrument upon which I am working is fifty years old, it should not matter.  The vibration of the metal tines and tone bars is being quashed, and when a hammer strikes them instead of vibrating freely they are muted.  You can hear the interference in the production of the tone.  The lower frequency harmonic fades in after the upper tone, and there often is a disturbing modulation that sound like it could be caused by a magnetic field.  It is angry and undulating.  I am suspending my work, because it is too frustrating.  It makes me feel incompetant.  It is like trusting a president who cares not about your well being.