As a child, I lived in a blue-collar “ghetto.” I use quotation marks for a reason. I will not presume to compare my early middle-class environs to the real ghettos of the day, where race and its resultant economic imprisonment defined and destroyed the lives of the truly downtrodden. It’s just that such neighborhoods, which were shared with rats and roaches, gave birth to some of the most acclaimed culture the world has seen. Meanwhile, in the intellectual ghetto of the upwardly mobile ethnic rainbow (e.g. the Poles, Irish, Italians), little cultural advancement could be discerned, with the exception of the introduction of the Tall Boy six-pack. Real ghettos build character, intellectual ghettos build characters, or worse, caricatures.

I was raised among proud and decent people who had neither the education, interest nor budget to surround themselves with art. Sure, we had access to the Art Institute of Chicago and the magnificent world it contained, but that was a long bus ride from the Southwest Side of Chicago, and not too many of my contemporaries and peers frequented the silent halls of that monument to Western man’s eyes and soul. You would more likely find kids from the North Side and the North Shore roaming that institution on any given weekend, children of doctors and academics and professionals. In our world, walls were meant for pictures of the grand-kids, affordable “art” prints in hideous frames, and most importantly, crucifixes and pictures of the tortured Jesus. Even our Catholic school educators were much more concerned with saving our blemished souls from the evil sins of which seven-year-olds were capable than they were of expanding our consciousness and understanding of the world through its cherished artistic treasures. Our classes were more apt to be found gazing at the stations of the cross which defined the perimeter of our parish church interior than at a Monet or a Picasso or a Van Gogh. Besides, Van Gogh cut off his own ear (the sin of self-mutilation) and eventually took his own life (the big one, the mortal sin), so he was not worthy of a good Catholic kid’s attention or consideration. He was just a freak show and a sinner. This unfortunate state of affairs was one of the major factors in the rise in popularity of the Margaret Keane paintings, you know, the Kids With The Big Eyes. There is a certain irony involved here, paintings of kids with big eyes adorning the world of kids who were encouraged to have no eyes at all. Or to only have eyes for Jesus and his mom.

Now music, that was a different story. Any middle-class family could afford a hi-fi, and with it the multitude of available recordings. Everything from Mozart to Mantovani, from Basie to the Beatles, from 101 Strings to Ten Years After. There was the good (Duke Ellington), the bad (Trini Lopez) and the ugly (anything by Al Martino or Don Ho). The nature of LPs and 45s, the formats of the day, necessitated that the discs be flipped after 20-35 minutes of music. The advent of the automatic record changer provided a little more wiggle room, but also wreaked havoc on the fragile surfaces of your favorite albums. You could listen to the radio, but in addition to being confined to the DJ’s format, you also had to endure the endless stream of ads and public service spots. In short, the radio was for listening to while driving and washing the car, the hi-fi was for listening, period. As a result of this machine and its more primitive predecessors, listening to music became an event, a purposeful exercise of intention, a plan for the evening. In much the same way that attending a live performance focused your brain on the concert, so did the hi-fidelity and stereo recordings focus your energies on being both close to the machine and selective about your audio choices. When we became teenagers and discovered reefer as a listening aid, we not only had our aural senses enhanced to the edge of ecstasy, but we also had yet another reason to sit on our asses and do nothing but listen. This world is no more.

We now have digital mp3′s and millions of songs to choose from. What’s more, we can fit ten thousand of those songs on a device which is not large enough to be strategically placed so as to make Michelangelo’s David decent in mixed company. In our shirt pocket we can transport enough music to fill more waking hours than we actually can expect to live. I’m not going to launch into an old-fart rant about how much better things used to be. I have digital recordings, I record my weekly radio show in mp3 format and e-mail it in to the station where it is aired, and I consider the digital world to be an inevitable, if not wonderful, bit of technological progress. However, an unintended (I think) result of this plethora of sonic choices is that music has now become a soundtrack for our lives. It is no longer a focal point, just ambiance. Here’s the music I jog to, here’s the music I have sex to, here’s the music I use to drown out the crazy world. We can sequence the sounds of our choice and through a small, nearly invisible device, fill our heads, hearts and souls with the world of our own making. As Descartes wisely observed, I have ear buds, therefore I am.

The notion of music becoming a soundtrack for our lives precedes the advent of the digital age. We have watched so many movies and TV shows whose dramatic moments are telegraphed and enhanced by the soundtrack. What used to be the exclusive domain of people who professionally scored motion pictures with synchronized musical compositions, people like Elmer Bernstein, Andre Previn and, of course DeVol (who blessed us with the watery music of the TV show Sea Hunt), has now been ceded to merely a selection of already written pop tunes. So the disposable sounds of the day fill our ears as the actors on the screen either frolic in the park with their new love, or perhaps plunge a piece of rebar into some unfortunate’s eye socket. Romance or brutality, it’s all accompanied by the tunes du jour. And now, add mp3 players to the mix and, voila, we are all in a movie and we are all maestros.

My unsolicited suggestion: Pull out the ear buds when you are in the world. There are birds to hear, neighbors to talk with, laughter to join in on, and a thousand other sounds, all disconnected from the little device in your pocket. Besides, don’t you want to hear the screeching tires of the car which might hit you as you cross the boulevard? Imagine getting crushed by a speeding vehicle while the wrong song is playing. Hey, that’s my street-crossing song, not my last-one-I’ll-ever-hear song! Leave the musical score to the writers who work on the TV shows in Hollywood. They’re better at it anyway. Listen to some music when you have the time and the attention to spare. This isn’t a movie. This isn’t a show. This is life, and if you give it a chance, you might be surprised at what you’ll hear.

This point was driven home to me in a most startling way when I lived in a very tough neighborhood in Chicago some twenty years ago. I arrived home in my car to find a crowd in front of my building, news cameras, on the scene reporters, cops, firemen, ambulances, just like on TV. On the sidewalk at my apartment’s front gate lay the lifeless body of a young man, face down, his head surrounded by a pool of blood. It seems the poor guy had flashed the wrong gang sign to a couple of punks he encountered on the street. As we well know, this can be a death sentence. As I stared at the corpse, I no longer heard the sirens, the chatter, the speculation, the screams and the sobbing. It was just him, me, and silence. I remember thinking, where’s the soundtrack? There is no soundtrack.

It is indeed spring. It has sprung, or whatever it is that it does. The trout are hitting in the local lakes, the trees are budding out, the sun is warming the longer afternoons, shoots are coming out from whatever crevice they can, and women, no matter how homely they may look in January’s early-fading evening light, are gorgeous creatures of infinite wonder and promise. Birds are singing, hormones are flowing, pheromones are wafting, and dreams are blooming. If not for this ritual of rebirth, we would all be faced with the bleakest of landscapes and the darkest of nights. It is the annual reaffirmation of life on this planet, perhaps life in this universe. Even the lowliest of those judged undeserving in the world of man are graced again with this opportunity to become. Whatever the hell they please. Answering to no man, to no law, to no demand.

On this breezy and sun-basked day, I have resisted the inner voice which tells me to sit at a keyboard, piano or computer, and grind out the effort to be productive. Productivity is in the eyes of the beholder, and today is a day for simply giving thanks to whichever Lord one bows by embracing the truly holy trinity. The three B’s. Those would be Blues, Beer and Botany. You tell me what could be better (except, of course, for trout fishing) than a glorious afternoon in the garden, the dehydrating Colorado sun answered with chilled local brew and the soul and senses filled with the strains of Leadbelly singing songs long forgotten. Fingers full of dirt and half-empty bottles, ears full of real stories of life and love on this blue ball hurtling around a generous star. Goddamn! Pinch me! But please, don’t call me. Wait until tomorrow when I will undoubtedly answer the nagging call to abandon true connection and again pursue the means to keep the lights on, the beer cold and the CDs in the changer. Small price to pay for a day like today.

It’s difficult to write this, not for any reason other than my head is still spinning. I thought I had somewhat of a grip on what was going on in the news, you know, economic collapse, creeping socialism, War Without End on the road (coming soon to a location near you), etc, etc, etc. Suddenly, out of the dusty urban blight of our southern neighbor’s capitol comes: The Dreaded Swine Flu. Not just the DSF, but a pandemic! Immediately the “Look, I learned a new word today” legions of what passes for a free press in this country jump on the story, the fear, and the word. Add pandemic to the list of words which the “media” have mindlessly tossed into the lexicon: tarmac (once a lowly runway), impacted (when not used in reference to a molar), empowered (thanks, Oprah), ad nauseum. So now we have the story of the month, a new fear, and multiple sources of distracting misinformation. Excuse me, but from this less than lofty perch what I see is the goddamned flu!

Cooler heads, many of whom have medical diplomas hanging on their walls, point out that nearly 30,000 people die each year in America from the flu, or some virus which falls into this general category. Many of these victims are already weakened by chronic health problems, advanced or underdeveloped age, American diets, and a host of other immunity-defeating conditions. Along comes a virus, sets down beside us, and frightens Miss Couric away. Yes, but what of the staggering deathtoll in Mexico from this new invader? Let me venture an uneducated guess. Mix one part grinding poverty, one part urban overcrowding, two parts total lack of access to adequate medical information and health care, add mutated virus, stir, and serve. Muerte on a grande scale.

The hysteria is not restricted to our hemisphere. In this time of prolific international travel and instant electronic transmission of unsubstantiated “facts”, the advancement of hype and hyperbole knows no geographical boundaries or lingual limits. Nations of the world have united in their determination to turn what should be a non-story into the latest rage. Reports from the world’s capitols keep us aware of the count of new cases among each populace. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has ordered the execution of every pig in the Land of the Pharaohs. The irony of the massive slaughter of animals whose meat is a religious taboo to the bulk of the citizenry is not lost.

Even our own president, who thus far has demonstrated a keen ability to discern fact from fantasy, is at a podium warning us to wash our hands and cover our mouths when we cough. Where have I heard that advice before? Thanks, O-Mama. I’ll cut some slack to the Commander-in-Chief, as he is also a politician who knows that when popular hysteria explodes, he must throw his two-cents in as an insurance policy against getting blamed for a microscopic mishap by Sean Hannity and his network of nattering nabobs of neo-con negativism (I love throwing bullshit back on the assholes who shat it in the first place).

So now, as most of us are struggling to figure out which crevice next month’s rent is going to ooze from, we have yet another boogieman to hide from under our collective bed. Maybe the government can save us, immunize us against the danger of this prickly porcine trespasser. As I recall though, the last time we undertook a massive immunization project to ward off this microbial menace (see swine flu, 1976), more people were paralyzed from the vaccine than died from the actual disease.

The saddest part of this whole episode, aside from it confirming our national gullibility, is the fact that once again, an innocent animal has been slandered by having its name attached to a perceived problem. When it’s time for a slab of hickory-smoked ribs, or a side order of bacon, we worship at the altar of the Other White Meat. But when we need a focus of blame for our fat-laden diets or stubborn refusal to take care of ourselves, we point the finger at the poor pitiable pig. As I understand it, the Giver of Breakfast Links has nothing whatsoever to do with this latest virus being transmitted to humans. Ah, perhaps it’s the endless chatter in Washington about the elimination of pork that has inspired this latest misnomer. When all is said and done, I think we can really trace the source of this latest Chicken Little scare to an affliction far more widespread and eminently more insidious than the Swine Flu. That is the Peter Pan-demic, which is manifest in the steadfast refusal of the hordes of politicos, pundits and press to just grow up.