And Then the Moment Turned Splendid | Eastern North Carolina Now

Happy New Year! And thanks for the humor within the perspective of The Real.

    Just a couple of nights back, I spent a few minutes watching CBS on Paramount+ (I do not have cable) just to bring in the New Year, and ... It was truly an eye opening experience.

    I did not know the hosts because I normally do not watch CBS (I have Paramount+ now for a short while to view "1923" and "Tulsa King" - great cinematic television), but tonight CBS was my connection to the ball drop.

    Unimpressed as I was with the banal banter of the hosts, I was equally unimpressed with the music from Nashville. It was terrible, almost not music, actually pathetic in quality.

    What was funny to me and my wife is that there were pre-positioned young, pretty girls, happily standing in the front row actually mouthing or singing the words to these hapless, fecklessly constructed songs as it there was some point of meaning there for them, or somebody, somewhere ...

    Even if and when some over made up Taylor Swift wannabe made her way on that New Years stage, brandished a perfectly cute painted blue, with yellow butterflies on the soundbox of the acoustic guitar hanging from her perfect shoulders. Yes, the front-row-pre-positioned-pretty-girls also mouthed the words to her pathetically constructed song; a song that required this musical pretender to strum two chords - a full G, and a variation of G that I am not familiar with.

    That was it, the basis of that song was two separate renditions of the G chord.

    I don't know how many chords there are. I can play hundreds of chords well enough to assimilate interesting sounds within varieties of progressions, but I know I am just scratching the surface here.

    This failing Taylor Swift wannabe knew and played two chords, and how do I know this: This "musician" interloped back on stage for a second song, and guess what - she still played just the same two G's.

    I don't know which was more of an embarrassment - the novice musician pretending to be a variation of a country styled Taylor Swift, or the front-row-pre-positioned-pretty-girls mouthing the pathetic words to a pathetic song on national TV.

    Then, in the midst of my half considered critical thoughts of what makes real music, I reasonably considered that my wife and I are pretty pathetic ourselves for even allowing this drivel into our cozy den, so we shut off the TV, laughed a good bit at the obvious; and then my real reality kick in ...

    I fully considered how fortunate I am to have had the company of my good wife for the last 46 years. We have had some sadness yes, but a whole bunch of laughs. Life is surely a comedy if you just take the right peak from time to time from either wing on this stage of life.

    HAPPY NEW YEAR!