No Dance for You

The news on the weekends always is negative.  (I don't feel like ranting, but....)  Writing also serves the purpose of catharsis, and today I need some.  I tried twice to purchase ground chuck today to no avail.  That is two strikes for a menial task.  Maybe it had more substance than I realized.  Covid 19 is rocking the world, and people are hungry.  Kinlaw's meat store was jam packed with patrons.  It felt like a carnival.  I only made it a few feet inside the store, before I realized I would have to stand in line for a long time.  I opted for the alternative plan, and that was another store.  Equally it was as daunting.  A combination of the distracting aggressive background music, many people traveling in different directions, and high tension forced me out of the store with no goods.  Strike two.  How difficult can it be to buy hamburger meat?  I didn't give up.  Carlie C's was my last hope, and they had ground chuck like I wanted, but it was four dollars a pound.  It looked fresh and good, but that was two dollars a burger.  I don't mind paying for good food, but usually ground beef is cheaper.  I just couldn't bring myself to buy it.  Too expensive.  I chose a bargain pack of shoulder steaks, and they were tough but tasty grilled on our natural gas unit.  This was a weekend in 'Nam.  The headlines on the weekends always are negative.  It is like the "A" team has a weekend, and headlines are phoned in.  The most concerning aspect of news is, I am not sure America ever will remember they way it was.  I have lived long enough to remember better times.  I lived through both the 70's and 80's.  Most people have a high holler about the excessive 80's, but I have no beef with this decade.  Film, television, and music were functioning at a very high level.  John Hughes created so many period piece films, they ended up defining the culture of the 1980's.  Again I don't feel like ranting, but I do.  I don't want to begin complaining.  Whining like a ninny.  Sometimes you must.  Our news and politics is a mockery of America.  There is a simple reason.  We have forgotten how honest capitalism must work.  You can't outsource manufacturing to third world countries, and we have.  You can't blame industry owners for wanting to pay a fraction of a living wage if they can get by with it.  The exchange rate inherent in Globalism is a huge boon to industry.  It also fucked America in a major way.  That is a great technical assessment, but it is true.  America's tycoons threw in the towel for the American worker and hence the middle class a long time ago.  That in itself was the end of America.  America cannot be a third world country and survive.  It belies our core principles and an ambulant middle class.  Without the possibility and prospect of improvement, growth, and success, capitalism fails.  It has.  Americans are working for slave wages as the cost of living has continued to rise making the tycoons richer.  It is a  broken record.  Now my ears are going to ring to excess.  As the low flying aircraft draw crisscrossing chemtrails across our once blue sky, life underneath is interrupted.  It is not normal for a city to exist in such a state especially on a Saturday.  The headlines are negative, the population is being strafed by aircraft, and people are manic about a sunny day.  It was crazy, and easily I was defeated.  My recourse was to cook a tasty meal in my own kitchen, despite the bullshit that surrounds me.  I did.  Steak on the grill.  Mixed stir fried veggies, and yams.  It didn't make me feel any better, because depression ensues when no solution is in sight.  I don't see on.  I see no reason to make music.  Napster murdered the commercial music industry and rendered music valueless.  Artists receive alms for the poor in percentages of pennies for royalties.  It is a disgrace, and consequently music has suffered.  Film has suffered.  Television has suffered the most, and what it has become is America as we now know it.  Tabloid America.  That is what Mr. Trump brought to the plate.  He operates at the level of a poor television show, and America can't remember the past.  We make a conscious decision to dumb down our youth by neglecting public education and then take advantage of them.  Burden them with debt.  Brainwash them into submission.  Don't teach them how to think, question, and fend for themselves.  That is because they don't know yet that is happening.  The entire red wave equally is as gullible.  They don't know what is happening to them.  It is frightening.  No one has my back.  When I was resting a few days ago listening to Lester Young and Sweets Edison, images began popping into my mind.  I fantasized about how I would like life to be, and it readily is not possible.  It didn't entail living in a gilded castle.  There was not a mansion or yacht or luxury car involved.  It involved jazz music, dancing, and romance.  At one point in American history these things were synthesized together.  This particular Lester Young recording, which was new to me, had an aura about it that I never had experienced before.  Fifty-eight years old and never experienced The Prez.  That is a good thing, but it made me want what I cannot have even more.  Swing or salsa dancing in a Cuban club with crack musicians and pleasant women.  Such a doldrum fantasy, and yet my life missed it completely.  There was no dance.  There was plenty of music and romance, but dancing.  I was in the wrong geographic region to expect that, the American South, a red state.  However I tried the women I dated could not dance, nor did they want to.  Such a simple thing, a partnered enjoyment of physical rhythm, but in public to music.  I didn't suffer, because sexual activity filled the void.  It replaced it.  Only now after I have studied music for many years to I realized the value and importance of dance.  It is courtship, but it is more than that.  It is politics.  It is opinion.  It is intelligence.  The life I live today is so far from what I want, I see no path of salvation.  Deal with that.