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.