Is Your Microwave an Intercomm?

I began to have premonitions about the ease or difficulty of American life, when I became a caregiver for my mother.  She lived through the Great Depression.  She picked cotton in the fields and cleaned the chimneys of kerosene lamps.  She slept in the same bed with her six brothers.  I never realized how strong she was, until I no longer was her charge.  She became mine.  When this happened is when I learned who my mother really was.  It became clear to me although I had pitfalls in my life, others had it worse.  Jews.  Slaves.  The Homeless.  Addicts.  I could be kind to myself and say my life has been fortunate, but it has not.  I have been cared for, and I will have an eternal debt of gratitude for parents who provided altruistic love.  With that support I made the best of my life.  This life consequently revolved around music, not familial love.  There was never any time to stop my pursuit of musical enlightenment and settle down with a family.  If I did feel the pang to do so, the opportunity evaporated over time.  Ironically my married life came earlier than most, almost as early as Jerry Lee Lewis.  I was not an adult Rock 'n' Roll star.  I was fourteen, but I had been waiting for love since I was born.  My childhood had been difficult, not because of my family but because of our town.  Fayettenam.  I haven't dwelled on these experiences, because to be successful you must overcome obstacles.  Music was how I actualized my father's genetic musical talent and my own stubborn pride.  Music at an early age also provided the love I sought.  My musical ability, like Jerry Lee Lewis, provided the same thing for which he was persecuted.  The difference was, I also was fourteen years old.  The world looks differently at two adolescents in love than a seeming pedophile and an underage girl.  There are other cultures in the world that condone marriage at this age with predetermined contracts.  My first marriage began at fourteen and lasted seven years through high school and three years of college.  Needless to say the high school years were the most rewarding, because the responsibilities of a real marriage were absent.  Simply we plucked the best experiences of romance from the movies and actualized them for ourselves.  Several other marriages occurred, and each lasted about three years.  One of these did include cohabitation.  The only experience missing from my formative romantic relationships was offspring.   Today I lament that absence.  My later life after caregiving is different than the new neighbors living around me.  College.  Marriage.  Jobs.  Homeowners.  Family.  Nothing ever told me to do these things in a particular order.  Instead I was compelled to pursue a music vocation, which entailed piano and trumpet performance, arranging jazz and commercial music, and composing contemporary classical music.  Later computer music production became the core of my interest, not C Sound or C Music programming language, but using a Macintosh computer as a miniature recording studio.  The laptop computer did revolutionize the music industry.  Unfortunately Napster and the iTunes store annihilated it.  A once viable and burgeoning cultural business acumen based around the production of American popular music was rendered moot in a few short years.  It became "streaming."  What reaches you through a compressed MP3 audio file, chosen by a conglomerate managing all available music on a mass scale, is not going to be quality.  It is going to be shit, the same shit that is on free over-the-air television.  I am thankful for the handful off free TV channels I receive, but an outside force determines how many and when I can enjoy them.  The same is true for my FM radio reception, which to most people would be an archaic dinosaur.  Over-the-air analog television and AM and FM radio were the norm in America.  The country was built and grew on these communication mediums.  If one studies the history of country music, for example, radio and its subsequent advertising are at its core.  It is a history of America.  We have lost that history.  We have lost decades of tried and true wireless tradition only because someone decided that microwaves were better.  When I look at my personal music collection, which contains many Time/Life music collections I have purchased for $150.00, I feel grief.  Why did I decide it was important to have this music?  AM Radio.  Soft Rock.  Disco.  R&B.  Gospel.  Each of these collections was a chapter in the cultural history of America.  The industry that surrounded this music and produced it at one time was more powerful than Hollywood.  This music embodied attitudes about American life, empowered personal expression, and emboldened the common man.  In a nutshell it was the conscience of America.  This music industry largely was responsible for integration, because music making rose above personal vices.  Interracial musical performances set an example for America.  Seeing African-Americans successfully performing on stage and on television finally showed the American South all Negroes were not slaves.  The oppression that forced that resultant behavior was a self fulfilling prophecy.  The freeing of slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln, and the massive loss of life incurred in the Civil War show the extreme shortcomings of a sheltered and uneducated people.  It took almost a century to cement this grievous wrong, but the Civil Rights Movement took America past this brink of insanity.  The music industry helped.  The shift to microwave-based wireless communications has not helped America as a whole.  It revised the American economy and handed wealth and power to a different sector.  Most people would agree the resulting commodities offered by the annihilation of television and radio are but a shell of their potential.  Why not let common people be the actors?  As my premonitions about the ease or difficulty of ensuing American life began to come to fruition, the rock solid foundations of our free nation began to crumble.  In many ways microwaves are the culprit.  A duality of magnetism and electricity coexisting on different poles transmitting through the air on every conceivable frequency, it is not surprise that the neglected infrastructure of our cities and towns has begun to crumble.  The naive and irresponsible belief is we the people will continue to live in the sheltered and easy existence of cyberspace.  What else is there to do when it is 110 degrees outside?