Returning to the Fold of Nature vs. Nurture

 "You can't go home" is common.  Vaguely I understood what it meant.  In my adult life I have been most successful living away from home.  This meant living in a city different than my parents.  I never openly disparaged Fayetteville.  She provided a rich solid environment for my social and musical education.  It was not easy, and my two years at Washington Drive Junior High School were spent in fear.  I used Fayetteville and the comfort of my parents' stability as respite in needed situations.  I came home more than once.  Often I would realize I needed greener pastures.  It would be helpful to explain this phrase, "You can't go home."  Anyone?  Bueller?  Shall we guess?  Without beating this dead horse, most of us know why.  The best reason may be children spend a lot of time trying to escape their homes.  Many movies have been made about "locals, " and for some reason it usually involves a beach.  It may be your hometown doesn't offer employment.  More importantly your hometown may be small, sheltered, and base not offering you the cultural or social opportunities you seek.  Fayetteville, North Carolina is this; it is common knowledge.  Most kids that move away do not return.  While I speak about Fayettenam in jest and with levity, I have pleasant memories.  I made the best of it.  Quickly I discovered that a partner or mate of the opposite sex was good.  America has lost touch with this notion.  Our population has been pitted against each other in many ways.  Without disparaging the LGBT movement, I feel they are responsible for this gender war.  It vitally is important to me that today's children be exposed to unbiased sexuality.  We have lost this also.  Parents are molding their children with premeditation, and it may be that heterosexual behavior and its implications are too challenging for the LGBT community.  (No pain, no gain.)  The basic "War of the Sexes" or natural push and pull of gender are crucial for human development.  Without it human beings are deprived of essential tools to traverse life.  In the film "Soylent Green" or was it "A Clockwork Orange," mention is made of seeking to abolish the human orgasm.  Without it humans would be more compliant with no desire for personal gratification.  God gave us gender and sexuality for a reason, and anyone who has experienced healthy sex understands this.  This physical, emotional, human bond helps us survive a brutal often cruel world.  What does any of this have to do with cumming home?  Only now am I discovering this.  You are your parents' children, and when you are home this is what you are.  It is a necessary relationship.  If and when you return home as an adult, those who do know you know you as your parent's child.  This is not liberating.  While it could be helpful finding employment or for social support, to be happy one has to be an individual.  That means not being defined by your parents or society.  If you return to your childhood home as an adult, you must start over.  How many times in life can we begin anew?  I have done it  moving to different places.  Each time I embarked on a new geographical journey, I reaped the benefit.  Returning to my childhood home as an older adult is challenging.  It is because we are winding down in our lives, not ramping up.  The energy does not exist to recreate yourself again.  What I have found without being egocentric, is that the person into which I have grown has outgrown this community.  As a product of diverse, often international places, my values have grown.  My knowledge, talent, and skill have become competitive to the local community.  It is likely your community does not understand you.  This feels oppressive.  In our current political environment we are being brainwashed into fighting what is not just like us.  In Fayetteville it is LGBT.  There are so many clicks of people, and they seem to revel in their separatism.  Solidarity is not an overt quality of Fayetteville, North Carolina.  The times I relocated to continue my education, I was met with open arms and a more challenging artistic pallet.  Nature vs. Nurture is this predicament.  Can your inner self continue to evolve and define itself in the midst of a colloquial agenda?  "No man is an island entire of himself."  I am realizing it is a near impossibility.  Trying to play jazz in a community that does not understand jazz music?  Playing gospel or praise music in a community that is conservative, staid, and segregated?  Trying to find heterosexual companionship in a community that favors LGBT behavior?  Let's add insult to injury.  Since Covid 19 Fayetteville has become survival.  Gentrification is imminent and poor areas are being developed, but traditional middle class areas have succumbed to degenerate behavior, poverty, and crime.  Murder is common.  Drug use has driven this statistic.  Try reinventing yourself to an audience of junkies and indigent homeless people.  It would seem Jesus is speaking.  I ask myself not to discriminate against those less fortunate, but finding common ground is difficult.  Fayetteville has become a sacrificial lamb.  The influence of Ground Forces Command and an Apache helicopter range are brutal.  The glamor of Pentagon money is gone.  I returned from the sea to help look after my aging parents.  Families deal with parental aging differently.  Assuming offspring have their own families, it is likely parents remain in their own homes or move to assisted living.  Having an adult child return home is challenging.  While I was living with my mother, an agreement emerged.  Consequently and without my asking, she bequeathed our home to me.  After her death in November of 2024, the shit hit the fan.  Everything in Fayetteville changed.  Her death had a sizeable influence on Fayetteville.  A stable and respected figure now was gone, like many others in her influential generation.  The foundations of our community began to move.  My friend calls this progress, but I am not sure that is appropriate.  What are these changes that seemed to come in one fell swoop?  Gentrification all ready had begun in Fayettenam, but the opposite also emerged.  The shopping center nearest our neighborhood fell victim to the pandemic.   Both the workers and patrons of local stores began to exhibit stress fractures physically and mentally.   It became more difficult to find healthy competent workers, and the clientele of the stores changed.  What once was a middle class shopping center became overrun with poor, drug addicted, indigent vagrants.  The products in the grocery store changed, and often the shelves are empty.  The employees work diligently, but the shoppers no longer are blue or white collar workers.  They are strung out looking for the bathroom in which to get high, or trying to steal.  Shoplifting has escalated, and the employees police the front of the store.  Is this our new experience shopping in America, or has our local strip mall morphed into the ghetto?  There is a word for this, and it is the same thing that happened in Detroit.  There has to be a local economic stimulus.  Napster and Steve Jobs annihilated the music industry.  In Nashville you have to pay to play.  What kind of absurdity is this?  The value of music has been lessened, because of its availability for free on the web.  I can't say digital distribution isn't convenient and rewarding.  It is immediate gratification, but the traditional process of creating and performing music has been undermined.  Bands plays to a track.  Our local economic stimulus is vape and drugs.  They may be illegal, but they are bought and sold like over-the-counter medications.  No one bats an eye, and you can get whatever you want.  The one thing that everyone used to pay for was the opportunity to "hook up."  Since the decimation of "Back Page," how are people getting together?  It is not by looking at a phone in the palm of your hand.  Sex always has sold, and the LGBT community has sealed the coffin on much of heterosexuality.  While our current President is unorthodox and is doing illegal and unconstitutional things, his irreverence to authority and tradition has its merits.  Boinking underage girls on an island is not a wise decision for anyone, and to see leaders falling from grace because of their libidos is insane.  America is so far behind the rest of the world culturally, it is no wonder our democracy is about to fail.