What the hell happened?

From the ages of nineteen to sixty-three, I and my trumpet spent many summers at either Revere Beach, Massachusetts or Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts, playing with many different bands at a few different venues.  The glory days of the Massachusetts North Shore are long gone now, and at age seventy-one, so are my trumpet chops. The latter would be quite diminished by now anyway, I suppose, but not practicing very much threw the dirt on the box.  

Last weekend I was noodling around on my piano--nobody would ever pay me a nickel to play that, I should emphasize--and it occurred to me that even now in my dotage, I have only to think about gigging to miss it.  The sharkskin suits, the haze of smoke, the tinkling of glasses, the cutting edge of a tight horn section, even the cute outfits on the cocktail waitresses--those things seem gone forever.  In the few places that still have live music, nobody's wearing suits, either on the bandstand or at the tables.   The eight to ten-piece bands with which I made my bones are nowhere to be found.  AFM scale is only for the BSO these days, and I struggle to imagine how the world got so miserably fucked up.  

But the young people seem content, apparently unaware of the better world that they missed. They walk around looking at their stupid phones instead of where they're going.  They dress like I used to dress to wash my car, and while we're on the subject, even the cars suck. They have these head restraints that don't let me wear my expensive fedoras.

Don't get wrong.  I'm glad that the LGBT community has civil liberties.  Marijuana should have been legalized decades ago. The more effective cancer treatments are a blessing.  It would be hard to give up my  49, 55, and 70" flatscreens.  But for every good thing that has arrived, ten good things have disappeared into history.  I never cared much for drive-in movies when they existed--not that I ever saw the movies--but I'd love to spend a summer night at one now.  I'd even watch the film at this point.

This is how an old fart talks. Once we start talking like this, at least we know that we won't be grumbling for long.  But Mother of Christ, what the fuck happened?

Drive in movies were lots of fun. Don't know of any current films that would be drive-in worthy like the old classics like "The Dirty Dozen", "A Fist Full of Dollars" or "Goldfinger".

Clubs and gigs were fun when there was a smoky haze. You could catch great musicians for small money. I got to see the John Coltrane Quartet in Paris in 1965 for only the cost of half a dozen beers. Women wore skirts when there was live music and people danced. A few older guys who were veterans of WWII and Korea had tattoos. Ear rings were worn by women. Nowadays you can't even smoke in a bar or club. And a beer costs $4.00 instead of a quarter. And most of the musicians' tones come out digitized, delayed, pitch-changed, compressed, enhanced through the PA instead of from amp speakers.

Cars? Fuck. First they all cost a freaking fortune and most of them whether they are made in the USA or Japan or Korea or Bumfuck all look basically the same. A Cadillac sedan looks like a Hyundai sedan. A Porsche looks like a Nissan. Now the new cars handle better than the old ones and are mostly a good bit faster. However, look at the fucking traffic. Maybe you can go flat out for miles out in the desert but gone are the days when you could get on Interstate 95 and bury the speedo at 3 AM. And the roads were better years ago. Now you drive interstate and every town you go into the roads look like those in Shit Hole Third World countries.

Marijuana has been used for years when it was illegal. I don't care if it is made universally legal because I won't smoke it or take any drugs or alcohol anymore. I did enough of that shit for 10. Making it legal is a government revenue grab and a chance to monitor peoples' behaviors. Wait until all the pot user data gets into the hands of insurance companies and if you have pot prescriptions or credit card receipts for pot, bongs, hash your rates go up. I don't trust governments with shit any more. Same with queer people. If you are, you can do your thing and its legal. So just shut the fuck up and be queer quietly. They had their own places to go party years ago. Everyone knew it and was cool with it.

As far as flat screens, I'm in on that. Got our first one two Christmases ago. It's just a little one but takes up a tenth the space of the old CRT behemoth. I do prefer the color temperatures of the CRT jobs though, Sort of like the difference between an all vacuum tube amp and a digital one. But the old Fender weighs 70 pounds and the new digital Roland weighs 25 pounds and is louder.

I understand your concerns about government, Mongrel, but it's a binary choice,  You can trust the government in which you have a vote, or you can trust the corporate oligarchy in which you don't.  And if we let the oligarchs take over our government, well that's on us.  

That's why I'm so political at a time when I should be shopping for a brass urn.  It's baked into the cake.

I don't think either one of us knows how to straddle a fence and not take sides.  Our balls get in the way. We just wound up on the opposite sides of the fence when it comes to the ballot box, that's all.

But one thing, Mongrel. Straight people using the word "queer" in that context is as repugnant as white people using the word "nigger." You wonder why Trumpsters are looked down upon in polite society. That's a perfecct example.

The Mueller Report makes it clear that the president was too inept to conspire effectively with Russia, although he certainly tried; but he very obviously obstructed justice. DOJ Policy proscribes indicting him, so he needs to be impeached.

Speaker Pelosi can't be bothered to impeach the president, however, because the Republican-controlled senate obviously won't vote to remove him. It's easy enough to impeach a toxic president, but probably impossible to remove him/her from office by that means. There's no getting 67 senate votes for continuing to allow the legality of oxygen anymore.

Middle America is hellbent on maintaining this nation's status as the most socially regressive developed nation on the planet. They call it "American Exceptionalism." It seems that if one lives more than 100 miles from an ocean, one's brain atrophies from the lack of salt in the air.

Many timid Democrats are saying that we must nominate a Republican-Lite like Vice President Biden to beat Trump in 2020. I was forced to vote for a Republican-Lite, Secretary Clinton, last time. I really don't want to be stuck having to do that again.

First of all, there are no moderate solutions for our catastrophic problems. Second, at 72, I'm WAY too old to wait for gradual change.

My favorites are our own Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders. The problem with Liz, though, is even if she beats the president, Charlie Baker will appoint a Republican to replace her in the senate. We can't have that. We're going to need sixty Democratic senators.

So it's got to be Bernie. No problem there. Like Liz, Bernie is pretty-near perfect. My third choice, I suppose, would be Senator Kamala Harris. After Harris, though, Biden, Beto, Mayor Pete, the former Newark mayor, Amy Klobuchar, and the rest of them are pretty far to the right of me.

Even Bernie is to the right of me on health care. We need a National Health Service just like the UK's, not "Medicare for all."

Trump isn't what frightens me the most, however. Despite his allergy to truth, he didn't disguise who he was during his campaign for president. Despite that, 63,000,000 Americans voted for him anyway, and they got exactly that for which they voted--racism, zenophobia, and continued social regressiveness. My problem isn't with one person, Trump, but rather with 63,000,000 who plan to vote for him again. If we allow them to prevail again, our republic will then be at the "Caligula stage" of its history and thus irretrievable.