The New Frontier Part Two

Blogging is a relatively painful experience for me as I never learned the joy of typing, hence a perfect way for me to spend an hour typing out even a short paragraph. At times I am so envious at the ease which good typists race across the keyboard and magically make stories come together , something I will never achieve. I have often, and truthfully stated that I would exchange two college degrees and assorted other college hours for the ability to play guitar like Eric Clapton,as college degrees come and go but God-given talents are few and far between. As previously stated Americans have always had safety valves in the frontier until the US became settled in 1892 with the end of the frontier era. There was an interesting book about a decade ago called THE POPCORN REPORT which made the premise that it was the first time in history that the civilized areas of the world was more dangerous than the wilderness. Now that got me to thinking ,and the author was right on the money. We often have more people killed daily in Central Kentucky in automobile accidents, shootings, and acts of violence than in the battlegrounds of Iraq! Early Kentucky settlements in Kentucky often had huge numbers of settlers killed due to Indian attacks, accidents, and illness. Some historians calculated that the average Kentucky settler lived only two years after they crossed the mountains in the 1770s and1780s. The year of 1777 was known as the year of the "Bloody Sevens" because so many Kentuckians were killed by the British and Shawnee Indians during a siege that lasted nearly the whole year. Those settlers certainly had the intestinal fortitude just to come across the mountains. Can you imagine how bad were the conditions along the east coast to make them cross the formidable hills as a safety valve? We, on the other hand must constantly look to diversions in modern life for our own safety valves, and there certainly seem to be a myriad of choices to lure us away from the everyday , mundane hours of our lives. Some choose the easy route of narcotics or alcohol to bring some sort of relief, while others will go deeply in debt to attempt to buy relief in the form of happiness. One thing is certain: the wealthy never have to seek relief as much as the poor. Happiness and relief can fall on people with new hobbies as Jimmy Olsen and Pepper Anderson found in Golf. Maynard finds relief catching big fish , and he was recently crestfallen when he found a comrade who supplied him with fishing bait was moving out of state. "You can replace a wife, but a source for big shad is moving and can't be replaced". True quote. Olive can replace total depression on a single visit to the cosmetics counter at Lazarus, and my brother will sit for hours waiting for a turkey or deer. Speaking of which, countless billions of dollars are spent yearly by otherwise intelligent men in the pursuit of wild turkeys. How some creature with a brain the size of a large marble eludes all these grown men is beyond me. Some men ride Motorcycles, and others drive fast cars. Some women buy clothes and look better through plastic surgery;the common denominator being that we each have our poison, the only difference being how much we need and how much it costs.Youth makes a difference as the population of the United States is obsessed with youth and vitality, whereas the true youth is obsessed with the money that the Baby Boomers are spending in pursuit of their youth. No person is happy with what they have.First time job applicants out of high school want supervisory jobs from the start without consideration that they have no skills. Newly wed young couples want new homes in the best subdivisions with Hummers in the driveway. Job skills have gone South and no worker can seem to put in a 40 hour week;I have become the person at 56 that I ridiculed and despised at 26. The other day Olive and I were going to a job site and she was driving with 50Cents screaming hate filled invectives out her CD player and I felt really,really old. I felt like my Dad as her ranted about the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. I don't understand rap, and I don't much like Kenny Chesney, who reminds me of a precocious chipmunk. Musically I'm a dinosaur looking for a tar pit to fall into-headfirst. It takes so long to type this that my trains of thought meander around like some old man trying to go to the bathroom, and paragraphs? Hell, I'm lucky just to type with some of the proper letters. I would trade a lot to play like Eric Clapton , and I wouldn't have to type. I'd let my guitar do my talking for me.