Taking a Hit!

The American people have taken a hit, and it wasn't marijuana.  When people say to me, "We should be happy to be walking around alive."  WTF?  So many people have died.  What happened to America?  People are fat, because they rely upon fast food.  Fast food has become poison.  Groceries we buy at the store seem not much better.  It is hit and miss.  Is this supply chain problems?  My gut tells me it is labor.  We took such a hit from Covid, sheltering in place, not attending school, and ordering meals online, we have lost track of the traditional work regime.  For America's labor force to return, things must change.  Labor cannot be the enemy.  It is.  Companies are downsizing, retooling to AI, and eliminating jobs.  People no longer are valued.  War is upon the people.  This is not America.  No longer are we America.  We are stunted step children of the super rich, and they forsook us.  The people were America.  Like Trump we no longer favor the people of America.  Too many foreigners.  Too many uneducated peasants.  The unfair white soul of America is no longer.  There are Mexicans.  There are Asians.  There are Arabs.  This disparity cannot create a mainstream or Main Street.  The exploitation of the internet, of television, and of radio, and their control by a few has stunted America.  Corporate monopolies seek to control everything.  Hedge Funds are buying homes.  I am watching a Pearl Jam video, and it is a glimpse into the extinct.  Hundreds of thousands of healthy, active, energetic American youth are engaged in fellowship.  Is it rebellion?  Whatever it is, it no longer exists, because America took a hit!  Too bad it was not the right kind.  

The Arduous Task of the Family Home

 The transition of a family home is not easy.  Perhaps the easiest method is the most common.  Children have moved on and established lives of their own often with a family.  They have no interest in the childhood home.  It was painful for me to watch the Thorp residence transition.  Because the home often is a metaphor for the family, the entire family, it may cause more grief than just the passing of one family member.  You abstractly are burying a family history, and this is difficult.  There is no way around it except to hide.  You can ignore the family bereavement, or you can acknowledge it.  The easiest way is to let others handle the transition of the estate no matter how large or how small.  Estate companies exist for this reason, because it is exceedingly difficult to sort through decades of personal belongings and attempt to give them adequate closure.  Family money is beneficial in most cases, and wealth is accrued through families.  There are a handful of families in the world that hold most of the wealth.  They know the benefits of estate planning and inheritance and how to avoid excessive taxation.  The GOP is an expert, and bounden duty of Republicans use every loophole in the book to amass and save their fortunes.  To discard a family home because of potential emotional strife is wasteful.  Real property or real estate is one of the most valuable commodities, and it should be respected.  The grift is the grief of the absence or passing of a family member.  The family home is a reminder, not a commemoration.  It is possible to transform the home into a healthy future living environment but not without considerable reflection, remembrance, bereavement, and toil.  I can't say there is any pleasure in the loss of a loved one.  There may be an inheritance, and down the road that should be an asset.  It is a scenario relying upon patience.  There is little immediate gratification, and often you may regress in mental adjustment.  You will experience more loss trying to resurrect a family home.  For this reason most families chose to move on.  They leave the difficult tasks to others, mainly an estate company who will bear the burden of finding and organizing family belongings.  I know from first hand experience I have learned more about my mother's life sorting through her belongings than having been reared by her.  Perhaps this is natural.  The parental relationship exists for a reason, and while children can be friends with their parents, the priority for parents is to rear healthy and productive children.  This means discipline, structure, and boundaries.  While I lived with my mother the last ten years, it was more difficult than my childhood.  An adult child living with an aging parent requires an extremely strong will.  My mother was more demanding than I remember, but looking back I saw it was her teaching methodology.  It forced me to excel in my decisions and finding solutions to problems.  It was easy enough, because her lack of knowledge and experience in certain areas made it easy for me to find successful remedies.  She challenged me with her shortcomings, and with thirty years of experience and knowledge I was able to solve most problems.  Now that is no longer is present in our home, it is a different ballgame.  Things have become much more difficult, because the senior voice is absent.  With its head strong will, holding of power, and authority gone, there is nothing against which to rebel.  Your mind becomes awash in doubt, uncertainty, and weakness.  You are on your own, and your neighbors are not your family.  They are not blood.  They are not kin.  You are competing with the Jones's.  There is ZERO support.  If you succumb to your emotions, then you will suffer.  You must use your mind.  The home by nature and design is intended to support you.  That could include a family.  Perhaps not.  How does and can a home support a human being?  It must provide the things one needs to survive.  Above that requirement if a home is to be happy and nurturing, it must do more.  It must do more today, because the concepts of community, fellowship, communion, and solidarity have come into question from a Trump presidency.  Donald Trump effectively divided the American people and cast them against each other for the first time since the Civil War.  A large faction of Hippies protested the War in Viet Nam, and the Civil Rights Movement recognized and fought against discrimination.  Domestic terrorism, mass public slaughter, and hate crimes were not the norm.  Radicalization has made life in America more difficult.  Your home is all you have, whether it is a trailer, a van, a tent, a bunk, or a luxury condominium.  You need for it to support your physical, mental, and emotional needs, because the minute you step outside into the urban battle field you will be tested.  The home with its support is meant to revive you from battle.  Uncluttering decades of family belongings may be the first step, because these things while sentimental, will not help you in your daily routine of survival.  Determining what can remain to remind you of your roots, and what must go because it has become a deterrent is an arduous task. 

Whining and Dhining (about Piedmont)

 By nature I am not a whiner.  Cumberland County is in the 80th percentile for not having access to appropriate medical care including primary care doctors.  Robeson County is higher.  North Carolina used to 50th for the highest teacher pay in the country.  Now we are about 47th.  You can bet on sports via "Sports Book," and loose your money over your smart phone.  You don't have to be present.  If I need to shop for groceries, I can frequent the local Harris Teeter and battle the Nazi lesbians who hate men.  (I think they must hate everyone except for their prey, some other lesbian who potentially may submit to be their lover)  It is a brutal shopping experience.  If you want to experience discrimination, try being a 60 year old single man in professional clothes.  Charlie Rose.  Harvey Weinstein.  Jeffrey Epstein and the rest of the sexual harassers who have ruined the reputation of most white men.  The White Devil.  "Kill de white mon."  This is what I utter under my breath when I shop, and it relieves the tension.  The most depressing thing is being surveilled, walking around my house and knowing the army is listening.  (Perhaps it is the NSA)  The only time I can sleep peacefully and restfully at night, is when there is a short lapse of an active freight train on the CSX tracks less than a mile from our neighborhood.  They run constantly 24/7, and they use sundown as a ruse to disguise their rampant activity.  Fayetteville is the only city that gets hotter after the sun goes down.  What could have been considered normal train activity now is radical like many things in the United States.  It begins at 5:00 a.m. every day.  Who goes to work at five o'clock in the morning?  They have to pay shareholders.  When the direct to Charlotte Red Eye flight offered by the new Piedmont flies over our neighborhood at 5:15 a.m., I am jarred from slumber.  The pilot does not climb to a traditional altitude to spare citizens below.  Because they think we are sleeping, and because they want to get to Charlotte as speedily as possible, they fly just above the treeline.  I wake up to a vacuum of absent air sucked into jet turbine engines replaced with heat, vibration, and toxic micro-particles that penetrate the walls of our homes.  It happened this morning.  I was sleeping peacefully in a cool temperature with a short lapse of traveling freight, and suddenly my body begins to ache.  First my shoulder and arm and then my hips and legs.  The air is sucked out of my bedroom, and I wake up in a vacuum of excessive heat and vibration.  The plane sucks the air out of my bedroom and replaces it with lethal pathogens.  Who needs a foreign terrorist when we have Piedmont?  Ask Johnny Carson. 

Sour Grapes/Strange Fruit

To continue to harp on the past ills of a nation seems futile, but without an astute understanding of those possible crimes against humanity, again we may be susceptible to such assaults.  It was suspect that a virus emerged that targeted a specific undesirable sub culture of American life.  Homosexuals and intravenous drug users?  Could nature be so specific to target a group and accelerates its evolution hundreds of thousands of years to attack only them?  With the concrete knowledge of biological and chemical warfare within national governments besides our own, it is logical viruses have emerged.  Whether they escaped or were released will be the seeming eternal question.  With the emergence of a Donald Trump presidency, illicit white collar crime has escalated.  It is easy to extrapolate that covert agencies, of which the FBI, CIA, and NSA are a part, easily could sanction and utilize such weapons.  Nefarious spy planes cloaked by a myriad of shell companies roam the American skies looking for terrorists.  The Patriot Act after 9/11 easily provided the means for such surveillance.  It has not changed, but the prevalence of domestic terrorism has shifted to overt public slaughter.  The availability of assault weapons to the general public has fueled this practice.  In an uncanny resistance to the desires of almost all American citizens, Washington continues to fuel anarchy in abstract ways under the guise of Capitalism.  These irresponsible decisions discarding common sense and favoring every tenable but questionable industry suggest that anarchy is a favorable for Capitalism.  Warfare is positive for the economy whether in blatant, violent, murderous attacks on civilians or more subtle pandemics disguised as natural occurrences.  Rather than shoring up America's traditional historical economy such as textiles, agriculture, and manufacturing, we have chosen to undermine these native middle class industries and outsource them to cheaper foreign markets.  We have forsaken the American people and sold them out creating a chasm between the elite rich and the poor.  We have become a Third World country, and with the continued insistence of Donald Trump may transition into an autocracy.  It would seems there is a large contingency of American citizens who no longer ascribe to the freedoms of the United States Constitution.  Government has become a place for these traitors to rally, and we have seen this with the January 6th insurrection and the stymieing of regulatory agencies.  With these overt and public assaults on Americans, it is not difficult to discern that foreign agents may have infiltrated our state and federal government.  Currently there are sitting members of Congress, many within the GOP, who continue to stone wall needed legislation to get America moving again.  If we are to become woke to something, it is the subversive activity of these individuals.  For a subcommittee to suggest the origins of Covid 19 are not important, further is to deny tangible and subversive white collar crime seeded in our government.  It becomes a game of, "He said, she said," to save face and cover ones accrued assets.  Who specifically prospered from Covid 19?  Who prospers from war?  Who continues to undermine more grassroots lifestyles and an economy favorable to something more than global dominance and warfare?  Harping against the rich could be cast as sour grapes, but when Billie Holiday sang about "Strange Fruit," it became necessary for America to confront her demons whether they were Yankee or Confederate.  Lynching freed slaves never was right, and pathological genocide whether against homosexuals, drug users, or everyone is a crime and a sin.  It will be left to God to judge, and He will.  

Surveillance and Public Health

 Trying to come to grips with the Military Industrial Complex being a major influence on your life has proven difficult.  I have no grudge against the military.  The military is a core part of the Fayetteville community, but with BRAC's induction of Ground Forces Command at what is now Fort Liberty, civilian life in Fayetteville has waned.  Most everything revolves around the military lifestyle, and civilians necessarily do not have to fall in, report for duty, or follow orders.  The disparity between the freedom of civilian life and the stringency of military life is substantial.  When I play quiet jazz on my piano at one o'clock in the morning in my garage, my playing is met with a barrage of artillery fire.  If I have carnal thoughts or desires, no matter how innocuous and contained, my immediate environment is inundated with surveillance.  Is it may imagination that the frame of our house pops from the immense pressure of infrasound?  My ears begin to ring with annoying tinnitus from the Frey Effect?  Fort Liberty trains soldiers, and a large part of their focus is ISR, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance.  Every method of surveillance is in use at Fort Liberty.  Cavalier gung-ho recruits push the envelope of respect for civilians in close proximity to their training areas.  It is easy to justify any training activity in the name of national security, but there is overreach.  For two years we listened to Department of Homeland Security surveillance planes circle above our neighborhood.  They were testing and training on Sierra Nevada produced sensor pods mounted on the planes, but the children at Vanstory Hills Elementary School did not benefit from that nuisance.  Surveillance relies upon electrical energy in many forms, and most of it is invasive to human anatomy.  The new Cold War is electronic warfare, and much of it is wireless.  We have dug ourselves into a hole with the mass proliferation of microwaves used in surveillance.  That the United States would allow a network of low altitude satellites to surround the Earth is unconscionable.  Once the internet was desirable, and now it has become exploited.  A "Stooge" government has proven to be the source.  Two faced foreign operatives feign American sentiment and integrity, but behind their public activity they are working against America.  Scott Pruitt was the prime example of this.  Donald Trump appointed a host of stooges who have no interest in representing the interests of the American people.  If public opinion of health has diminished, and still we are a democracy, then all of the politicians in Washington cannot exonerate Anthony Fauci from his actions during the Covid 19 pandemic.  If you work for government, and you are paid by the taxpayers dollars, and if we are a democracy, then the peoples' opinion is relevant.  If they see Fauci as a menace, then it is substantial.  While his position at the CDC or NIH may not be elected, it is not immune from public opinion.  It is us who were dying. 

Up or Down?

Often when one is doing "ship" work, the refrain of, "I'm back in high school," resonates through the cavernous metal corridors.  The "I-95" is the longest corridor on ground zero of a cruise ship.  It is where most of the business takes place running a floating hotel.  The crew traverse this corridor most of the day, because like Disney World, employees are not allowed to use guest spaces.  There are two mess halls, a store, a bar, and offices for personnel.  All of the provisions that are needed for a cruise are loaded into a marshaling area on the I-95.  All of that is beside the point, because being back in high school sometimes is how it feels for a college educated adult to accept work in the cruise industry.  That applies to musicians.  There is truth to this sentiment, and consequently there is political maneurvering in the ranks of entertainers.  I didn't have time to think about it, but when I was dumped into the caldron of boiling water, my jazz skills kept me afloat.  My ability to play jazz sets allowed me to survive.  Ironically these sets did not benefit the guests.  I was used as fodder to amuse other senior musicians.  My jazz sets on one particular ship existed, because the guitarist liked to play drums.  The sole purpose of the sets never was to entertain guests.  It was to provide practice time (at a high level) for a guitarist learning to play drums.  This was not the only hypocrisy.  Several bands on several ships had their material sequenced and recorded, and they just lip-synced.  As I toiled with the most difficult piano music on a ship, show after show of "Fly On" entertainers, which required practice and rehearsal, incumbent bands would just coast through their gigs doing little.  There were two bands on one specific ship, where they faked playing.  It was infuriating to me.  I penciled a little note on the scheduling board about how few hours one band played, and the wrath of the Cruise Director descended upon me.  He demanded that the chief of security sit for hours and watch security video until they found who had written the note.  I wrote, "Foster Trio, seven days, four hours work."  I became a terrorist for such an inane comment written in the wee hours of the morning under the influence of alcohol returning from the Crew Bar.  The reality of the situation was, the response would have not been so savage, if it had not been true.  It was, and I hit a nerve.  They went to the extent of falsifying a schedule to try to prove the Foster Trio had  worked a normal load.  Ship politics, but this was not the case overall.  This was my second least favorite ship, the first being a non-smoking ship to which I was transferred abruptly for being cast a homophobe by the interim Cruise Director.  He was homosexual, and they were intimidated by my musical prowess and masculine spirit.  The new bass player wanted to sleep with me, and I was not interested.  With two days notice they transferred me to another ship, where I had to stop smoking cold turkey.  Again I played jazz set after jazz set for no guests.  It was just proving my worth and value to the incumbent musicians.  What does all of this mean?  What does it mean to kowtow to the popular trends, uneducated tastes, and popularity?  That is American pop music today.  Instead of expressing a viewpoint or opinion, a feeling, or a reaction to life, pop music caters to the lowest common denominator of immediate gratification like social media.  Some social media has value and significance, and Youtube is one platform that has become indispensable for the archiving of classic music footage.  With that massive catalog of information comes the same petty jockeying for position.  Those who are incapable of understanding and appreciating your work are those who are unhappy and unrequited.  They may be jealous and vindictive, and it is best to go around them quickly.  Life is too short to argue with those who love Donald Trump.  The majority of my cruise life I spent trying to survive.  Never was I comfortable or secure in my job performance, and perhaps that is a good thing.  It keeps you working.  It is a recurring refrain in life that the dues you have paid expire, and you must start anew.  Paying dues.  Abandoning your confidence and accomplishment and feigning being a peasant again.  Was this the message of Jesus?  The perfect metaphor for the high school mentality of cruise ship work is, "What is jazz?"  The answer from there is, "Jazz is anything.  It's what you want it to be."  That is not a traditional or historical definition of jazz music.  The reality is jazz is a highly evolved, complex, spiritual, and artistic musical language that could be considered the voice of freed slaves trying to survive in a predominantly white world.  "Holy shite, Batman!"  Should we change the definition?  How could anyone ever conceive of such a thing?  They can't, because they don't have the knowledge, experience, or wisdom to understand.  Does it mean they are not capable of learning or appreciating?  No.  The beauty of jazz is that it can communicate at a visceral level with gut level intent.  If you can feel, then you can understand it.  This is what art can do.  Life is a delicate balancing act of cognitive study and understanding with a hefty dose of raw emotion.  Art will not be art without the affective component.  As jazz evolved over the decades the Avant Garde slowly took over.  Like Abstract Expressionism in visual art, direct, raw, and sometimes brutal gestures were used to illicit an immediate emotional response abandoning some of the more sophisticated styled and techniques.  Rock 'n' Roll took the place of crooning Swing-based music.  African culture can be seen as an example of this aesthetic often cast as primitive or barbaric by those from the West.  Upon closer scrutiny most of the values in Western culture are present in African culture.  It is more dire and immediate, because there is no time for sophistication.  You are trying to survive.  The luxury of time, leisure, and amusement can breed sophistication.  Human beings it would seem intrinsically feel the need to create, progress, and evolve.  Until now.  If you take away the security of human compassion and empathy, and pollute the environment with inciting rhetoric and noise, we have no choice but to devolve to survival.  There is virtue in the finer things, but there can be a balance.  Without them and without art, man has no where to go but down. 

OJ is Dead

"Where do I begin?," in the remarkable sound of the voice of Shirley Bassey, the vocal metaphor of James Bond, 007.  On a more dour note the world is falling.  Inflation.  I couldn't afford to buy tomatoes.  I bought a zucchini in plastic shrink wrap, and it was a cucumber.  I ran over the back legs of a squirrel.  I couldn't avoid him.  Before I slammed on brakes in a 45 mph zone to miss an opossum.  It upset traffic, but he lived.  Across the street they had bunny drama.  Their dog caught a baby bunny, and they tried to save it.  The dog killed it anyway.  It is what dogs do.  It is what cats do. With pets you have the gut level emotional drama.  I can't handle that everyday.  It is inhibiting.  The most important things:  I had to sanitize my Macbook Pro, because it was infecting the skin on my hands.  When Covid first emerged, it infected my hard contact lenses; my eyes were compromised for two years.  Now I soak the lenses in diluted bleach.  America has returned to her roots of the Lost Colony.  The physical challenges of Mother Nature are taking their toll, because we have forgotten her.  She is Queen.  We are not.  The largest problem we face today (in addition to the burning of fossil fuels) is microwaves.  We are being cooked in abstract ways, and it is a beautiful and stealth non-lethal weapon for our enemy.  It will prove to be lethal, if we let it proliferate.  Our bodies are suffering, and we have turned our back on Mother Nature's  healing power.  We are destroying her rapidly.  I stopped at a traffic light, and on a pole twenty feet away was a disguised cell phone transmitter.  I am tired of opening Youtube videos and seeing unknown pundits telling me things they think are true.  Stuck poop.  The best conceal carry holster.  A laser flashlight. 
All profess to be the ultimate judge of product quality or health.  Who are they?  We were a better nation with three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, tightly regulated, competitive, and uplifting.  A weekly viewing schedule with reasonable advertising.  Now a TV show has its own channel.  Big Tech or Social Media has dealt a blow to America by undermining this traditional network of broadcasting.  Oversight.  Regulation.  Truth.  Misinformation, Spam, Propaganda, and Gas Lighting.  Disguised private aircraft are problematic with their phased array antennas.  Why should I feel pain, when a commercial jetliner flies overhead?  Other than burning hot gas turbine engines, what else could be onboard a commercial aircraft that would cause harm to human beings?  What is the answer?  Wireless internet for the passengers.  Microwaves.  Phased array antennas are unnaturally heating the Earth.  My aunt died on April Fool's morning at 5:00 a.m.  She is in a happier place. 

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

 Patiently we are waiting for the "documents case" and the Jack White led insurrection case.  SCOTUS will rule on presidential immunity in a few weeks.  Will the Supreme Court of the United States prove their virtue and allegiance to the Constitution?  They will find that President Trump stole and sold national confidential documents for his own gain.  With that information Hamas infiltrated and attacked Israel.  Benjamin Netanyahu took the bait, and like a devoted leader pledged to annihilate Hamas, the terror group responsible for the attack on the Jewish nation.  Donald Trump's son said how valuable the real estate in the Gaza Strip is.  It is the holy grail of the Middle East, that waterfront property.  Bibi has gone extreme, and Israel's response, with no humanitarian sentiment, proves Gaza, the geographic location, is more important to future real estate deals than its population.  It is genocide for economic gain. 

Losing a Democracy

 When looking at fallen democracies or established military dictatorships, the formula is loss of freedom of the vote.  This freedom of the vote, and its instilled intrinsic power to elect a leader of choice, becomes compromised.  This can happen many ways; if Americans paid attention, we could see the danger clearly in the elections of communist countries.  Also we would see it in democratic nations on the verge of collapse and conversion to autocracy.  There are many shades of gray and nations in differing stages of oppression of freedom.  The consensus is one powerful candidate (Padimir Vlutin) dominates the election manipulating the procedure.  This practice has moved to the United States, and the opportunity for anyone to run for office has been quashed.  Money controls the system, the vote.  The Grand Old Party manipulates the vote in America the same way they manipulate the courts and the legal system.  With an encyclopedic knowledge of the law and its implemented loopholes, the playing field of the vote is slanted.  This unfolded in Florida, when George W. Bush antagonized Al Gore until he conceded the Presidential election.  Gore  won like Hillary Clinton in 2016, but the GOP manipulated the system to win.  The population is eliminated from the choice, the populace.  A few people make this choice.  America never has been a true democracy.  We have had peaks and valleys of virtuous political action, and now we have a low point in American history.  Many types of unfair and illegal shenanigans have tilted the playing field of political election.  Gerrymandering is the most obvious.  North Carolina, after many legal battles, continues to sport illegal voting districts favoring Republicans.  The 2024 Presidential election (if we call it that) is the most obvious example of a democratic process gone wrong.  Americans can agree this election, because of the limitations projected by Covid, does not resemble any other in recent memory.  The traces of compromised living in the work place, at home, and in the school systems linger suggesting America has regressed.  We are  gimps, and our previously robust methods of governance have waned.  We should call this election the "Special Presidential Election," because it is operating under the auspices of special social entitlements.  The things that Trump rails against are in play for his benefit.  He lies and tells you one thing and stabs you in the back for his own profit.  This is not an insult or defamation of character.  It is  fact.  If those who love Donald Trump would take the time to read or listen, they would understand this evil.  Should Joe Biden and Donald Trump be treated as special needs patients meriting appeal, and appeal, after court case simply to remain viable candidates?  It is an absurd TV sitcom, and this is what Donald Trump understands.  The integrity, vitality, virtue, and historic value of our Constitutional processes have been soiled by baby spittle.  It is insulting to America, and their will for freedom.  The most low brow and benign hi jinx have challenged the pinnacle of world freedom.  The Three Stooges have toppled George Washington, and we are along for the ride.  Ultimately the Supreme Court of the United States will decide if Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for crimes he committed during his term.  Two impeachments suggest a pattern, and the deep pockets of Super PAC's shoring up Trump's devastating financial losses should wake up.  Their continued support may be the loss of America.