The Latest Chapter

 The familiar adage always has been, "You can't go home."  I never understood what this meant.  Most importantly if you go back to your childhood family, then this family only knows you as a child.  Consequently if you return as an adult, I am not sure your parents ever are able to accept you as an adult.  The rearing process, those formative years that require soul, are too strong.  They are a part of you.  "You can't teach an old dog new tricks."  I am not sure if this is true either.  It would seem most people adhere to this advice.  I didn't make a conscious decision to return home, but my mother needed help with my father.  After his stroke never was he the same.  We weren't wise enough then to understand this process, but at times it was a living hell for my mother.  Incontinence.  Losing is memory.  Finally she found a place for him, and it was nominal.  She had to go everyday to ensure he got the proper care.  After he died in 2017 my mother and I were in the house together for the first time.  I am proud to say she was able to stay at home until the ripe age of ninety.  Mostly it was inconsequential, but she began to have small accidents that presented challenges.  She broke her wrist falling over a gutter pipe.  She fractured her shoulder falling on the hard brick patio.  Ultimately the vertebra in her back began to give way.  I had to find things to do at home that were meaningful other than cooking for her.  I became a handy man.  Most importantly it was necessary to find shared experiences.  I took her life long interests in gardening, sewing, and cooking and developed my own skills.  I transformed our yard into a blissful garden.  I potted plants, planted a vegetable garden, and maintained the property.  The focus of my life changed, but because it was my childhood home it was not unfamiliar.  It seemed appropriate.  We forged a life together, and for me music was a small part of it.  Now that she necessarily has moved into assisted living, I am faced with forging yet a new life at the age of sixty-one.  For the first year I just continued with our pattern.  I planted another garden and I cleaned the yard.  The second year I became ill, and suddenly working in the yard began to make me sick.  I had allergic reactions to either pollen, bacteria, or fungi in the environment.  I never had this problem before.  Always I used to play in the woods as a child, and even up to this time I maintained the woods behind our house as motorcycle trails.  The emergence of poison in the woods seemed to coincide with overall strife.  Never had there been poison anywhere in these woods, but Climate Change, high humidity, and hurricanes brought about a change in the foliage.  All three kinds of poison emerged and became a menace.  I got it a few times.  Eventually I stopped working in the woods and focused on our own yard, which incidentally is one of the largest in the neighborhood.  This past winter when the oak leaves began to fall, I began my ritual blowing process.  I have a heavy duty expensive Stihl backpack blower, and it is the only possible way to gather the amount of leaves that fall over three months.  A blower.  Then you have to scoop the leaves in cans so the city will empty them.  Often it is ten or more large cans of dead oak leaves.  I have learned to enjoy this task and use it as exercise.  This year it made me ill.  Never have I felt such pain in my arm and shoulder with an angry accompanying rash.  My back hurts.  I have a bladder infection.  I get arthritis.  It is and was a world of hurt.  I had to figure out why the outdoor environment was contributing to his scenario.  Multiple doctors later, who never really tried to figure it out, I was able to piece together the diagnosis.  Bits and pieces of information from the CT scans, consultations, and lab work.  Eventually after seeing an oral surgeon and hearing his comments on my remaining wisdom tooth, it came together.  The disease is Actinomycosis, an anaerobic bacteria that behaves like a fungus.  It must be triggered by another bacteria.  All of pieces fell together, and each definition of the characteristics of the pathogen perfectly described my series of events.  It is serious, complicated, and can be deadly.  Instinctively I knew if I didn't figure it out, I would end up in the hospital without insurance.  What would follow was not acceptable.  I found insurance and partly it helped me figure it out.  Previously I talked about loss.  Suddenly I am faced with the prospect of never being able to work in the woods or yard again.  I think Covid has something to do with it.  (as the Boeing C-17A Globemaster lll glides over our house)  My mother is being evaluated for Hospice care.  Suddenly I cannot maintain our yard.  Music is difficult because of the constant low frequency rumble from low flying aircraft.  The need to relocated is emerging.  All of the things you were doing previously no longer seems possible.  Your life must change, again.  Luckily we have prepared, but living in limbo is not fun.  If a man is what he fights for (or what he does), what if he no longer can do the things he did? 

Different Chapters

 I have experienced loss before.  It came early, and I was not prepared for it.  I tell myself I am prepared for it now one, from experience, two from maturity, and three because of financial support.  Money or lack of it didn't have much to do with it.  The depression that results from loss is the challenge, because loss is tangible, real, and undeniable.  I feel most often loss is a result of people.  We are capable of losing a job, a friend, or a pet, but losing a loved one is the most challenging.  It is the most challenging not because of the loss of emotional fulfillment, but because your life in most cases revolves around the other person.  Certainly in a marriage this is true, but perhaps not as much as in the past.  Today I see examples of much looser marriages, and with the rise of the LGBT movement bisexuality has become common.  I have couples in close proximity to me who feign a marriage, although one or both members of the marriage is gay.  The phrase, "His wife is his beard" was new to me.  Gay men married to women to satisfy the requirements of society.  Leonard Bernstein was an example of such a situation as was Cole Porter.  I believe it is possible to love more than one person, but deception is not healthy in any situation.  It is devastating.  I can't support such a choice, because it is untruthful.  Conversely if the marriage is the heart of the existence, then the loss of either partner will be challenging.  My wisdom tells me a more liberal concept of relationship functions better.  I have met couples who "Swing," allowing sex with outside partners.  It takes a particular kind of maturity to engage in this practice, and not everyone can do it.  My loss was an acute combination of several things.  It was like "falling from grace."  I had a run of notoriety, when I was a Graduate Teaching Associate in South Carolina.  My band was a semi-finalist in the Hennessy Cognac Jazz Search, and we got to travel to Los Angeles to compete.  While this accomplishment was important as an entry in your VITAE file, it in actuality was the beginning of the end for me.  I always wanted to have good fusion band, but that was not the focus of my musical study.  I have an education degree, and teaching was what was important to me then.  I got three years of college teaching experience while working on the Master of Music.  When the Coordinator of Jazz Studies died of a brain tumor shortly before the fall semester, they hired me as an adjunct to cover his duties for a year while they did a national search.  Somehow, and it was easy and not my fault, I began to believe I may get the full time professorship.  Of course a fresh Masters degree isn't enough academic criteria to obtain this kind of position.  I began to believe it anyway.  I was crushed when it didn't happen.  What I didn't expect was the severing of this academic tie devastated my life.  Everything I had been doing was in the academic circle.  More importantly your entire social and personal life had become this group of people.  I was ejected from this fulfilling scenario, but I handled it.  For several years I made the best of this lack of employment and continued to play paying jazz gigs.  There were periods in my life, including living in Columbus, Ohio, where I earned a living as a jazz pianist and commercial keyboardist.  I studied the history of jazz through the recordings of Miles Davis, and this lasted two years.  At some particular time when the stars aligned reality hit.  I had lost my respectable academic job which came with respect, and now my career was a lowly bar band musician.  The disparity between academia, the smartest and most achieving people in the world, and real life was stark and bleak.  It smells like stale beer and second hand cigarette smoke.  It was brutal, because as a musician and a composer, your soul is in your music.  When it is taken from you, the void is substantial.  That is the way I feel now.  Society around me, this neighborhood, rejects music as a vocation.  More astutely, they are not educated enough to understand and appreciate the music that I do.  That is a bold and callous statement, but the example is the difference between black and white church.  If white people are not comfortable in a Pentecostal or praise worship environment, there is a reason.  The depth of emotion expressed in this music is too much for some people.  They prefer a more conservative tone, like most white church.  Hymns and a message.  I'm not sure how our neighborhood ended up being square, but it may be because of the early toll of the bugler.  Military life is not about artistic spirituality, or at least it doesn't seem like it.  Instead they reject cumbersome emotional sensitivity for toughness.  They are taught to kill the enemy.  Everything I had and had achieved  was eliminated.  The "Jazz Life," which still is in existence in Columbia, South Carolina and of which I was a part in the late 1980's, isn't reality unless you are involved with academia.  Academia is the foundation of society.  It sets the examples, it nurtures the players, and it provides the opportunities.  The alternative for jazz smells like stale beer and second hand cigarette smoke.  Reflecting on that it seems amazing to me.  It is called the "College Town."  It is Athens, Georgia.  Once it was Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  It has become Asheville, North Carolina.  These college towns are unto themselves  rife with hipness, creativity, and opportunity.  I learned quickly this is not the other American reality.  The other American reality is what we have now.  It is a mud slinging contest trying to get Donald Trump reelected.   A sitting President who incited a riot and led a gang of domestic terrorists to attack the United States Capital?  Even if he did hand corporate America a thirteen percent tax cut, withdraw from the Iran Nuclear Deal, and allow a pandemic, anyone that votes for Donald Trump is condoning criminal and communistic behavior.  We are all ready there, because SCOTUS and his other appointed judges confirmed what we feared.  They threw the sovereignty of the American people into the trash can proving the highest court in the land can be bought.  It has become good against evil, and that is why the tension is high in our everyday lives.  It will remain that way until the Presidential election in November.  It is embarrassing to know that North Carolina has become evil.  Because of the gerrymandered voting districts favoring Republicans, Donald Trump will probably win North Carolina.  It is distasteful and infuriating.  The problem is, the Republican-led corporate machine largely controls everything.  If you dissent or disagree with their money-making industry, they can make your life hell.  The military must be included, because they are a large part of the economy.  Think about it.  The war machine, which practices and prepares for war, easily can intimidate us, the American people.  Why does their presence not make us feel secure and protected?  The reason why the NRA demands guns in America, is because they feel at some point the people my be actually fighting our own military.  This is not absurd.  It is common in other countries.  Do we trust the leadership of our military?  The Commander in Chief is the United States President.  My loss and depression today is a combination of many things hitting at one time, and this scenario of uncertainty isn't helping.  Big Pharma and illicit drug manufacturers are not trying to cure us or provide pleasure.  They have been trying to kill us stunting America from within.  The population that is left are poor uneducated immigrants.  We don't know what an American looks like today.  Is this healthy?  Irish American?  German American?  When immigrants migrated here they were happy to begin a new life.  Now foreign cultures are trying to invade, and it has been for the worse.  If we can't rear healthy children and educate them well as the future new leaders of America, we should put down the baton.  We are all ready in the toilet.  

Soap Box Shouting

 The incessant shallow consumerism which accosts me ebbs and flows.  The offers on our home were not unreasonable.  They were above the county's tax assessment, and someone in dire straits may be tempted to accept one of their "cash" offers.  Would they come through?  Would they actually do as Mark Spain says and pay you cash for your home with no realtor's fee or closing costs?  Would one of these companies actually follow through on their offer and come up with the money?  If it sounds too good to be true, usually it is.  I have no qualms with these firms who call wanting to purchase your home.  It is up to the homeowner to know the value of his property and make decisions accordingly.  Most won't.  The approach they are using which is similar to television infomercials suggests these companies have authority.  A bank that holds the mortgage to your home does have authority, but second party vendors do not.  They feign authority, and this approach now is common in many scams.  Spectrum is insistent on trying to garner me as a customer, but I have no interest in their products.  We were Spectrum consumers, both with Roadrunner internet and cable television, but their profit supplanted their product.  Their price continued to rise, and the quality of their cable television  declined.  This was for various reasons spanning the scope of visual media.  One was the competition of and conversion to streaming services via the internet.  Currently visual media is a mishmash of services, and it is a headache.  I prefer the original television product with three major networks, a quality competitive nightly line up of shows, and a handful of public informative networks.  It was easier.  Turn the big dial to switch channels.  There was wisdom in AM radio, and it audio rendering was stimulating and easy to hear.  The acoustics of the world have been sacrificed, but that is another blog entry.  Even with five hundred channels I only watched five.  Usually they were movie channels for which you had to pay extra.  The consumer can choose if the product is worth its price, and television no longer is.  Instead it is continual propaganda.  I have over-the-air digital television, and in off peak hours there is some quality entertainment.  The continual infomercial with dialog over trite music is noise, and in many depictions of the future huge screens blast this propaganda at citizens 24/7.  It is wrong.  It is mind-numbing brain washing, and the FCC needs to regulate its content.  Government deregulation as a whole was a mistake, because quickly corporate America oversteps its bounds.  I have realized the influence of television in America's daily lives, and once it was important.  Escapism or seeing far away places with beautiful music, and scripted plots with talented actors provides a backdrop for our lives that no longer exists.  This was the original magic of television when it had integrity.  Like so many other tenets of the American economy, television has sold out.  On "Free TV" ninety-five percent of what I hear is false, and it should be monitored and regulated by a robust and active ratings system.  The spaghetti network of video media is out of control, and it is hurting American solidarity.  I had no intention of criticizing television, but my distaste for what it has become will not tempt be back to Spectrum.  The chasm created from lack of cable television is vast and subtle.  We use it as a backdrop for out lives, but that has become too great a temptation.  Now it is being manipulated to manipulate our thinking.  The cinematic examples of a future dystopian society are plentiful and depressing.  It is imperative America figures herself out quickly, because without a conceptual vision of our future, authoritarianism is imminent.  Donald Trump would like be become our new dictator. 

An Inside Attack

There are many disparate political, economic, and social issues to assauge.  North Carolina is Red.  It is a swing state.  The margin between Republican and Democrat is miniscule.  Like Georgia it is possible for North Carolina to flip blue.  The political volatility of the state is rife, aggressive, and unsettling.  It is a cat fight.  The anxiety and paranoia created by North Carolina flipping blue is tangible.  This neurosis does not come from Democrats.  They only want what is best for the citizenry.  This angst, fear, and trepidation is originating in the far right Republican ranks of the state legislature. Recently they chose to ignore forever chemicals in the Cape Fear River Basin.  These harmful toxins have been proven to cause illness and death.  Under the leadership of Phil Berger and Tim Moore, (who was going to resign because of sexual impropriety) the committee in the State Legislature punted on its responsibility to try to clean up North Carolina's watershed.  Instead of following the federal EPA's suggestions, they asked them to remove four chemicals from the list of dangerous pollutants.  They hedged on a vote and delayed discussion to a later date.   (They must be lawyers!)  Let me reiterate the gravity of this scenario.  The North Carolina State Legislature, instead of voting to try to clean the tainted water, ignored it.  They sided with industries and state utilities to do nothing.  They chose to keep polluted water.  A vote for their Republican Party and Donald Trump is a vote to poison North Carolina's population.  The effort needed to cover their tracks is what creates tension and anxiety.  Until November the state will suffer from this struggle.  It is good against evil, and good is losing with the help of the United States Supreme Court.  The replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris was surprisingly strategic for the Democratic Party.  It is clear who is the most capable of performing the duties of the United States President.  A vote for Donald Trump is not an honest vote for President.  It is a vote to diminish democracy and undermine truth in government.  It is difficult to know the difference between evil and Corporate America.  Democracy representing and protecting the people has been diminished.  The desires of the people were discarded long ago; the processes necessary to support democracy, like the involvement of the people, have been sidetracked.  We have forgotten how to fight, because we were blindsided with an antagonistic, covert, terrorist offensive.  America has been attacked from within, and only now are we discovering it.