Back in the day (Oy, at 67 years of age, I have a whole lot of back in the days…but I digress), receiving a gift certificate from the National Record Mart (when record stores where alive and well and thriving in the city of Pittsburgh) for your birthday or Bar or Bat Mitzvah, was a little bit like manna from heaven. No matter the precise price of the certificate, the joy was more about the ability to walk into a store full of vinyl browse for hours either holding onto an album or just letting your fingers meander to the 45’s. All of this music, while clutched in your hands a certificate to purchase exactly what you wanted, was pure happiness indeed. The thing however, AFTER buying the record of your choice, was to make sure that when it played it remained almost as new as the first day you brought it home…record players and those darn needles had a bad habit of scratching the record and your best song ever suddenly sounded like a crying baby. Nothing worse than broken record, with the needle always seeming to find the same exact spot to ruin your listening pleasure.
When I wake up in the morning, after hitting the john (again at 67, lots of new habits seem to find footing), I will look at my phone, mainly to see if I missed any calls, secondly hoping that during the night Trump was impeached, and thirdly (and I admit this freely with a bit of unsettled turmoil in my gut) that the third world war had’t begun. Ever since Putin won the presidential election I made a vow to myself that I no longer would watch any cable news, as I found most of the entertainers on those news shows either shills for Trump, enablers for Trump, or so full of themselves that watching them speak would cause greater emotional harm to me. So I try and rely on the free printed press for real information (I am not so sure how long the free part of free press will be appropriate). Each morning as I reach for my phone, I think will today be like the day before, and all i will read is how Trump and the Republicans are once and again acting as hypocrites, and once and again, some headline banner will read this time Trump out did himself and is headed for trouble.
Somehow, as smart as we Americans believe ourselves to be, we find our selves in the same set of circumstances that our own history taught us was a bad place to be in the first place. Mike Pence is in South Korea, forgetting that the Korean conflict was never resolved in the first place, yet eager to let the world know we are ready to finish off what we never completed in the first place. We are once again firing bombs in Afghanistan, a war mired in the mangled and dead bodies of both the people of Afghanistan and out own Troops. We are involved in Syria, and calling our Iran, rattling sabers and inciting the kind of propaganda that only causes more hate. We are pretending to defend democracy around the world, while in our nation, the rights of women, the LGBT, the poor, the elderly are quickly and quietly being denied. And every time, I reach for my phone all I can think of, is that damn scratch on the new record I just purchased from National Record Mart and how pissed I am that the only sound I hear is the needle stuck in the same place.
