Ever hear of Irish Alzheimers, goes the joke. You forget everything but your grudges. Yes, I acknowledge being quite infected. Media figures who have gone from liberal "back" to conservative are another preoccupation and they talk about an epiphany or some puffery about the moment they "got right".

One grudge they hold and one I understand while attempting to lean away harder than I work in any "boot camp" class is about the college professor who blew creation myths for them: You know that murderers' execution? A disgrace. Well, you think President 37 is good, here's some things you don't know---and volumes more about history. The universe had to have been made by an entity? Okay, you'll accept evolution but as a wondrous directed system?

Hoo boy, you're in for it, and I personally remember the dry mouth and even blacking out sensations. For many free thinkers, that's called nostalgia but on some of the left as well as the right the messenger had to have washed their hands in the blood they presented. Any of those days is a smudge on the calendar. And these sensations can remain stronger than the truths and further revelations they broached.

At the Jazz Festival the other weekend drummer Teri Lynn Carrington presented a jazz combo which featured that rather in favor drifting beat for which Esperanza Spalding (seen at the Festival another year) has been a leading---drifter, and there were guest singers. Dianne Reeves was introduced with---did I hear correctly?----Angela Davis. The latter has a strong association with the liberals I didn't like in the early 70's and I let this further push down my sunken brow about how the musical content this year---okay, I lose: the musical content wasn't as "progressive" as poor me would have preferred.

One part of Angela's recitation about the higher rate of young black men incarcerated, and what set some of us off in 1972 was the party for her jurors after the aquittal. I don't think she's been accused of anything since, and what about all those fine young southern white men who, fresh out of a trial in which they'd received the preprinted "not guilty" verdict from the bored jury, bragged they'd killed that [black fella].

Two wrongs don't make a right. Well, depends on what an individual thinks is either. Like musical taste!

I may not have liked jazz and classical snobs of a certain bearing going back 40 or 50 years but I listen to a lot of the music for myself----and with input from others. Much history has been learned since then, too.

It's hard figuring out an end to this essay. Likewise for "the grudge".

Well, while attempting to express compound sentences with detail it is from one side, and a side they are, many of us have taken shots by those a lot like they who felt, on the surface but a solid surface, the professor was right but wanted to push this way, way down.

To heck with Dan G. Keep listening, reading, learning. disagreeing and feeling awkward. It means something is happening.