Casual Observation

 Good Morning my faithful readers!  Glad to drop in on occasion as always, although obviously not as much as I used to.  With completing a doctorate and some other stuff going on, it is more challenging these days to just stop and smell the lilacs so to speak.  But, I wanted to just give a few impromptu observations just to let people know I still do exist - my time has not come yet, and hopefully will not for a while!  I am not sure where this is going to go, but we will see. 

For one thing, let's talk about changing seasons.  As I sit here watching this, the leaves outside are turning more gold, more red, and more orange with each passing minute.  This is western Maryland after all, and unlike Florida some years back, the seasons actually do change here.  Fall is a good time, and while I am sure that most people hear ad nauseum about the beauties of Fall, and the ability to indulge in Starbuck's Pumpkin Spice Lattes as well as practically anything else that has "Pumpkin Spice" flavor (even Pringles!  I love pumpkin spice, but when it comes to my potato chips, there are limits).  I like Fall for several reasons myself.  For one, no more mowing the lawn until Spring!  I give a big "praise be to God!" on that.  My lawn is relatively small, and it takes me all of 30 minutes to mow it, but it is still not a job I particularly enjoy.  I do, however, love how the lawn looks when I finish.  About 3 years ago, I got a new mower from Fingerhut (yes, I love Fingerhut!) and while it overall does the job, I keep losing the bolts out of the handle assembly, and have to jerry-rig it almost every time I mow.  That tends to get a little tedious.  I am debating possibly ordering a new mower in the Spring, depending on several things, and should that happen hopefully the jerry-rig ritual every time I mow the yard will end.  Bottom line, like most people, I hate the actual duty of mowing the lawn, but love the results. However, it does tend to go a little easier when one is not losing hardware off the machine.  The down side to this is that in a short time there will be snow, and shoveling snow is also a chore.  So, that means rotating things around in the shed to get my rock salt and snow shovel out, although I also do have a new snow blower I want to give a try to also.  In all, God allows changing seasons I believe to make sure we don't get bored with one temperature all year round, like they unfortunately have to in Florida, the Philippines, and Hawaii.  And, for the leftist hacks who yell "climate change" whenever they scald their hand on a hot door handle in the summers, let me say this - climate change is real, and it happens four times a year in most parts of the world unless you live near the polar regions or the tropics.  So, that should settle that debate then, although some "fact checker" (meaning a fat 25-year-old college dropout living in his mama's basement) may try to get me lynched for saying it. 

I wanted to do a bit of a memorial here too.  We have lost some pretty amazing people in the past several months, and one who comes to mind is Joe Bussard (pronounced Boo-sard, not "buzzard").As  a kid, I recalled Joe's radio program on the local station every weekend, when he would play some ultra-rare recordings from his vast collection, and although that program was geared toward the country/western audience, Joe collected records from a wide variety of musical genres, and he is looked upon as a legend among other collectors.  Although he had a run for his money with Greg Drust, who also has an impressive collection in Wisconsin, Joe was perhaps one of the premiere music archivists in the US.  

                               Joe Bussard (1936-2022), the legendary vintage record collector 

I think with perhaps the passing of my role model Chuck Cecil a few years back, I feel a sense of loss at Joe's passing.  Joe lived relatively close by in his hometown of Frederick, and I had a very high admiration for him honestly because he was the envy of other collectors for sure.  While I have just under 3200 total items in my own collection, Joe had tens of thousands!  He would scour every possible obscure place to find some of the rarest recordings ever issued, and in all honesty, I wish that someone who is managing his estate would digitize his collection to make it available, as it is very historically significant.  I also said the same thing about Chuck Cecil's hundreds of hours of vintage radio programs - my, how I would love to get a CD collection of those!  But, his daughter Sherry, out of respect for his wishes, does not circulate those. However, I think they have been donated to an archive somewhere so maybe in the near future hope will produce reality.  Guys like Joe Bussard, Chuck Cecil, and Greg Drust have done a tremendous service, and thankfully there are some of us carrying on the same work.  My old dream years ago was to host my own vintage big band radio show, and with the popularity of podcasts, I might still look into that after I finish my doctorate and other pursuits currently.  I talked about the 40th anniversary of my own collection which I just commemorated on October 1st, but the one thing I want to do with my music collection is make it productive in some way, but the question is how to do that?  Perhaps when I have more time to ponder it, I can come up with something.  Having collected this stuff for 40 years, and being a historian myself, perhaps I can make something educational from it.  I will explore that at some point. 

Onto other issues, I am on the cusp of some major decisions.  In all honesty, the house I live in now is becoming too cramped for me, and I need a new place soon.  I was contemplating buying this place, which I lease now, but other factors have come into play.  For one thing, the management company that actually owns the community I live in frankly is bad - while the onsite leasing manager is OK, the overall company is made up of greedy individuals who expect a lot and give little, so that is a sign to move on.  Many of our residents in our community here feel the same way, and our Residents Association is often at odds with the property management for many valid concerns.  Lately, I have been looking to move back to my home state of West Virginia, and so far the most viable option is Charles Town, so I have begun a search over there for a nice house.  My parish church, after all, is there now too and also Maryland is just becoming too unreasonably unaffordable (thanks in part to bad Democrat politicians both at the state and national level).  I was planning on sticking it out here until I finished my doctoral program, but for some other reasons it is looking more feasible to move soon. As with a lot of things this year, there is much uncertainty about things now, so we will see how it plays out.  For my readers of faith, your prayers are greatly appreciated. 

That is just a few things I wanted to share today as I continue to enjoy my Fall break this week between courses, and I do not know if or when I will have more opportunities to talk.  Therefore, everyone, enjoy your Fall season, and will be back to talk soon.  

Random Thoughts

 As you may have noticed, I have not been writing as much lately - with my doctoral program and so many other things going on over the past couple of years, there has not been much time to write about anything.  However, in a couple of weeks, I am going to be having my 53rd birthday, and naturally that at times sparks introspection.  This sort of inspires me to give just a few observations about some things that have been on my mind lately.

Did you ever notice that the older you get the more you start perusing obituaries either online or in the newspaper to look for people you know?  I now go through that ritual at least once a week, and peruse the websites of about five funeral homes in places I have lived from the time I was a small child until I graduated high school.  Many of the people you know the best will pop up in your formative years like that, although obviously we all make friends and acquaintances throughout the course of our lives.  Thinking about how I check the obituaries now every week religiously, I started thinking, "my goodness, this is morbid!"  What makes it even more morbid is that now people I grew up around who are actually younger than me are popping up in the obituaries these days.  One in particular was a neighbor boy I knew in Kirby, WV, as a young kid whose name was Tim.  I had known Tim for about close to 45 years honestly, and he was actually about 2-3 years younger than me.  Yet, a couple of weeks ago, I saw he had passed away.  Now, seeing that, and then also losing my parents over the course of two years, it really forces one to think about the future.  Over the past couple of years, a lot of things have gotten much more uncertain now than they once were, and that is quite a reality check when you think about it.  So, it got me thinking as well about what legacy do I want to leave behind, and who will be the steward of it?  Unless I get married in the next couple of years to a younger lady who can produce a son or daughter for me, it does not look promising.  And, I really do not want the cabinet full of memories I have - pictures, documents, and other stuff - to end up in a garbage dump somewhere.  Luckily, God has answered a few prayers in regard to that, but I will talk about that more at another time.   However, an important word to keep in mind as one gets older is legacy, and it relates to another word, destiny.  The legacy of those who have gone before us does play a very important and significant role in shaping our destiny, and destiny cannot exist unless it builds upon legacy, and that makes me want to soapbox a little. 

We all know about "cancel culture," and those who are most guilty of perpetrating it are some of both the most evil and the stupidest individuals who ever walked the earth.  These are the Antifa types who tear down statues, desecrate artwork, and even are screwing around with classic movies to remake them in their own image.  These are well-funded individuals too, and as iconoclastic as they are, they unfortunately are now the establishment despite how they try to paint themselves as "revolutionaries."  In recent history - the past 130 or so years at least - often what is called "revolutionary" is actually systematically dystopian.  Many of its proponents are failures in various areas of life, but instead of using their personal shortcomings as a lesson to do better, they take on a "victim mentality" and instead seek to destroy that which they failed at.  It is, as one person put it, "revenge of the herd."  When I watched one of Dinesh D'Souza's documentaries once, he was interviewing this actor who basically said what should be obvious - those who are the biggest proponents of "cancel culture" were themselves rejects of the culture they are fighting to cancel. However, there is a serious problem with this deeply-flawed logic - they have no sense of purpose, legacy, or destiny, nor do they care.  While they try to reinvent society by destroying many things, they are forgetting something - what if, a couple of generations down the road, their grandkids rediscover what was destroyed and then move against "cancel culture" by cancelling it??  It could happen.  I was part of one of those generations myself.  My mother's generation, the Baby Boomers, were very iconoclastic - this was the beatnik and hippie group of the 1960s and early 1970s.  Then, they gave birth to my generation, Generation X.  The defining legacy of my generation was the fall of another "cancel culture," the Soviet Union.  Many more radical Boomers were ardent Marxists (Bernie Sanders comes to mind) and idolized the Soviet system and also thought Mao Zedong was their hero.  But, my generation had a President that thought differently - Ronald Reagan.  And, thank God he did.  So, while the Millennials burn down cities as part of Antifa, they are so stupid that they know nothing about Tianmen Square or the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Many do not even know about the horrors of the Cristero Wars in Mexico, the Holodomor famines in Ukraine, or the atrocities of the Nazis - as a matter of fact, they often look more like the barbarians that initiated those atrocities rather than being "inclusive" as they often try to be, using their fake pronouns and other junk.  Even as I write this, the server that was created by some of these techno-geeks in Silicon Valley spell-checks Tianmen Square!  It was forgotten.  Legacy is vital and it is important for the survival of our human race, and when we start to neglect that, we tend to, as the philosopher Santayana wrote, fall into the predictable trap of repeating those atrocities - his exact words were something like "those who forget the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them."  It works kind of like school - if you fail the 6th grade, you have to do it over again.  We have a society of ideological failures - they occupy the boards of corporations, the offices of government, and they control the media, the universities, and entertainment.  Despite how "counter-cultural" they claim to be, they are the ones controlling the culture.  And, they risk destroying some important and valuable legacies we should preserve as a nation.  Although this is reaching epidemic proportions now, we who appreciate and preserve history still have options, so we need to take advantage of that while we still can.

Despite the fact that major tech platforms are controlled by iconoclastic ideologues, the good thing is that they cannot control everything.  On Facebook for instance, family members can still share treasured family photos, and that is something we can take advantage of.  We need to know our family "story," and the availability of social networking makes that more accessible than ever.  So, I would encourage you to save and print copies of those pictures and compile albums of them - also save videos and other family documents too, as they are your treasure.  Starting on that level, it is also worth noting that although Amazon and EBay are now controlled by iconoclastic leftist ideologues, they are still good marketplaces where many things can be found, and on a societal level this means we need to take an interest in other media that the Left wants to "cancel," and buy it up to preserve it. If we do this, we insure the survival of Western Civilization.  We have to take small steps in order to make massive change, and it starts with efforts such as buying a rare book off of EBay which otherwise would not be available.  Legacy is vital to our survival, so let's preserve as much of it as possible. 

I know that I bordered on political with this today, but it has been something close to my heart for a long time.  We need to safeguard the next generation from the disasters of previous generations, and it takes each of us doing small things.  Saving a precious family photo, for instance, could have a great impact on your great-grandchildren. Therefore, as you think about these things today, please take this into consideration.  Also, writing down your memories is a good practice too - I do this in two different ways.  First, I keep a regular journal, and secondly I also am writing my life story down and update that every year.  I also hang onto all my old calendars, church bulletins, check registers, tax and medical records, academic records, and other things.  I want to have as complete of a life history as I can once my time on this earth ends, and this is my way of insuring that happens.  And, I just need someone to leave it to, and that too will come to pass as well.

Thank you for enduring my rambles today, and I will hope you visit again soon.