I am about to go to sleep but it seems that I will awake into where I did the last time.
We are approaching 170,000 DEATHS to the virus and the Music from the outside is dissonance. I went to to see a student perform outside at a pizza place a few days ago wearing a mask. To be more precise, I went to the show and, in accordance with the working Musician Creed, supported the establishment by buying product that funds the operation. When I went inside the pizzeria, very few people were wearing masks while I wore a high level mask. I refused to take it off to fit in, all those decades of being the outcast coming in handy. For the record, no one was a jerk, but there was this sense that the virus was over with and it all all a lie by this point. The people outside were not spaced far apart and no one wore a mask. I kept my distance and did my best to support the immense talent of the young student. While I do not wish to cast emotion and narrative on those unspoken, I would like to say that I was looked at like a fly in the soup.
Allow me to say the following: I have and shall continue to bend my life into a tesseract to support my students. If this had been within normal times, I would have been there early, helped set up, and helped the student in every way with the gig. My track record of thirty years supports this. The fact that I had to be at a literal distance when this young student was performing was crushing, but I did it...wait for it... BECAUSE IT WAS FOR THE COMMON GOOD! It SUCKED! I wanted to jam with the kid and help lift him up and show his excellence. But I did not because of the virus. And it hurt like absolute hell.
What this made me realize was that, here in this part of New Jersey, people just do not give a f*ck. It doesn't matter anymore. No one has died and the corpses are not lining the streets so SCREW IT! WE WANT TO BE TOTALLY FREE LIKE BEFORE!!!! Yeah, that is what we are around here and if you cut again the grain you are a leftist moron.
Oh, yes, the virus had, via the present attitude, polarized the concept of wearing a mask. I know I mentioned this before but I was allowed to be thrown into the pit of others who think my attitude is insane. For the record, I sincerely hope that nobody gets the virus. Period. That being said, Camus said in "The Plague" that Fortune is not something that should be tempted. In the novel, he states that the very weary volunteers of the front line would not take all the precautions they KNEW they should. It is a subtext that maybe Jean Tarrou, the beloved friend of the narrator, skipped these precautions and wound up dying of plague. Even the most remedial boxer knows that you never EVER let your guard down when you see your opponent weaken.
As I have promised, I will not get into broad politics within this blog as Camus did not do so in his book. Camus was concerned with what the common people did. So, allow this entry to be, at best, something Dr. Rieux would have written down via being among the people. The narrative descriptions of the novel made me want to become one. That being said, I do not feel the need to go into deep details here about my visit to the pizza eating contrarians of biology and the better good. There will be countless articles describing the landscape of this era. Trust me on that. The internet shall give COUNTLESS descriptions of this time.
For the first time since this plague has entered the collective narrative, there was a sermon in church at Sunday Mass that touched on the damn thing. While watching it online, I screamed in my seat. FINALLY! Finally, the clergy has chosen to address the issue is a VERY VERY light way. For the love of God! Even in Camus' "The Plague" they had a Catholic Mass dedicated to the plague early on! Yeah yeah yeah, I know. Religion has been discounted and diluted over the decades since that book was written and the importance of the institution has been depleted for many reasons. Yeah, I get it and do not condemn it.
But that is the point, isn't it? We, as a society, have no center. None. No leader has the balls to make the call to do what is needed. No religious leader. No political leader. Few parental and group leaders. We are left with desire for autonomy and "freedom" to dictate the direction of death via amoral biology. Molotov cocktails have a more complicated set of directions.
After I type the last sentence of this entry, I will be off to bed. But I am having a difficult time figuring out what is needed upon awakening each day. My life, like so many others, has been eviscerated from what was once the routine we placed our reality upon every day, no matter how variable. As a Musician, this life was never ever ever ever EVER a solid place to stand. But we all chose that via the hope that we would survive because what we did was beyond the realm of the stock broker, the billionaire bond trader, those who chose the typical path. We were spiritual preachers unto who God would forever shine upon as we deliver something no other could translate. Well, all of us are having deep meditations with the Old Testament people named Job and Noah as to how we are to survive this literal flood and draught.
Tomorrow will be another day, and I am so very grateful for that. Another day means another day of hope and creative possibility. Alas, that does not mean income. To those of you who have secure day jobs at this time, I would ask that you place yourselves within that deep fear you have about losing your job via the caprice of those above you, and you ALWAYS have someone above you. That low grade hum of dark fear that you have way deep down about all your security vanishing within an instant, well, those of us who live a creative life have that as our constant bass line. Every moment of every day. How will I pay the Visa bill? How will I pay the water bill? How will I pay the health insurance? That is the 60 cycles per second hum we have at every moment of every day. Google that sound and see how wonderful it is. We are now all in the same boat, even of you don't want to admit it via your ear buds on full volume with your favorite podcast and playlist.
That 60 cycle hum is waiting for all of us when we awake, whether we like it or not.
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