Now's the Time, but It's a Major Drag

 I keep learning.  Recently I read a religious post or "lesson" on Facebook.  It was simple.  Growth does not begin until we submit completely.  We must give up everything with which we are familiar and improvise day to day.  What is it about this process that promotes learning?  Are we unable to learn while secure in our own knowledge and experiences of life?  That can't be true.  True growth it said, spiritual growth, involves the soul, not just the mind.  It is education.  It is making mistakes and learning from them.  Schooling on the other hand is a more careful teaching and learning of rules to avoid failure.  I will not abandon what I know, because what I have learned allows me to navigate a both challenging and now life threatening existence.  It has or always had been survival of the fittest.  I must use what I know to survive.  On the other hand what I have done is give up my own personal goals, temporarily.  It is like opening and closing cabinet doors.  Today I must open this cabinet and deal with its contents.  Most of the compartments are disparate.  My life in retrospect has been disparate.  I had a short lived chapter of basketball proficiency augmented with swimming.  Needless to say a chapter like this is predicated by your environment.  I had the Athletic Center available to me at Ohio State, because I had been enrolled in the DMA program in music composition.  Although I was not enrolled in classes over this particular summer, I was granted an athletic pass to use this facility.  I swam.  I started slow in the "adult's section" and worked my way up to swimming laps in the Olympic sized pool.  Always I hated the "American Crawl," or whatever that stroke is.  I used the side stroke on both sides and a modified backstroke.  It was enough, and I lost weight immediately.  Treading water in the deep end for five to ten minutes will trim inches off your waistline immediately.  While I was swimming and inadvertently getting in better physical shape, I played basketball in my apartment complex parking lot.  It was one of the boons of this particular dwelling in contrast to its extreme hazards.  This apartment complex was a rife feeding ground for thieves.  They drove from miles away to break into cars in this lot, because most of the inhabitants were graduate students.  They were not poor, and therefore their vehicles reflected this higher status of college enrollment.  Larceny is not my topic of discussion.  Instead the basketball goals provided by the complex contained in this parking lot were of great use.  They were steel posts professionally installed in the asphalt with steel backboards and heavy duty metal rims.  I purchased my own nets and installed them while standing on the roof of my Toyota Tercel wagon.  These goals, because of their quality construction, provided a needed and necessary aural reinforcement to my shooting endeavors.  The sound of the ball rebounding off the metal backboard and the subsequent "swoosh" as the ball fell through the rim were positive conditioning in my learning to shoot effectively.  Like music the rhythm and sound of the basketball aesthetic were therapeutic during this chapter of my life.  I took the General Exams for the DMA in composition, and on my first attempt did not pass everything.  I did well in the theory/composition and aural skills portions of these exams.  I knew my music, because I had studied for almost a year.  What I did not do well in was music history, because I failed to find the appropriate article upon which I was supposed to write.  I found another article by Donald Tovey and mistakenly wrote about its subject.  While I did an adequate job discussing its content, I missed the mark.  The second shortcoming I had was in discussing jazz history and its contributing artists.  I wrote about instrumentalists but failed to credit the major vocalists.  Twenty-five years later I still am working on this issue.  I knew the major jazz singers, as most people do.  What I didn't know, like Dr. Ted McDaniel did, was the history of the Blues and more specifically the roots of African-American music.  He was in fact co-chair of the African American and Jazz Studies disciplines at OSU.  What he didn't realize was my DMA degree was in orchestra and chamber music of the twentieth century.  Went I went to OSU I stayed involved in the jazz program, because those were my roots.  After three years it became necessary for me to put jazz on the shelf and embrace the curriculum offered by the composition department at OSU.  It was with a bit of reserve I made this decision, but I was serious about completing the degree.  Ted expected from me on this exam the same amount of knowledge of jazz as I had prepared for the orchestral part.  I couldn't do both.  They equally are as demanding, and I was not adequately prepared to discuss the lineage of jazz history.  There was no DMA program in jazz studies, and he felt like he may have been an inappropriate choice for my doctoral committee.  Actually I had no clue or finesse in picking a committee.  I did not think much about it, and certainly I did little to include them in my preparation.  This is the art of politics.  Subsequently I became a very good basketball player and trimmed my waist to 30 inches.  Unfortunately I never was able to enroll again to complete the degree.  I needed to make money, not spend it for tuition.  This small chapter, a summer spent dribbling, shooting, and swimming in the blazing sun is a faint memory for me, but still I want a goal.  There are several other chapters of recent years, where I explored alternative aesthetics.  I became a landscaper, and also I became a competent cook.  When engaging in these activities you must commit completely, and evidently I had enough spare time to do so.  No longer is that space available in my brain.  Instead my desire to think about and perform has returned.  I am cooking and gardening enough to be ahead of the curve, but my knack for these aesthetics is scant compared to what it was at one time.  Why?  The answer is because I refuse to embrace the creative aspect of either.  Somehow subliminally I feel I am being scrutinized, and the private trappings of my soul, my creativity, and my emotional expression are for me only.  I don't feel compelled to exert my mojo at this time, because there is little support, reinforcement, or appreciation of my talent.  We are in a very volatile, violent, and superficial American time.  The dregs of society are duking it out on a daily basis, and I want nothing to do with it.  This is the dog eat dog real world, but it is a drag.