Cheesy Rat Blues

I wrote this a few years ago and am reposting it on January 11, 2025, the 6th anniversary of my father's passing. I share it today because I will be thinking about and feeling him today and a few more after that. I'll be back to my regularly scheduled programming soon enough, probably after playing some more Wayne Shorter.  ******* Five years ago my father visited me in the early part of December for one of our annual Christmas time get togethers, something our relationship at a distance permitted on a yearly basis. Usually we went to a restaurant, other rare times both he and his wife would visit me. The joint visits were always dicey; his wife's personality required varying levels of management. But 90% of the time I was a good son and did my best to make accommodations. This particular time my dad was visiting my home and I was making us big salads for dinner. His limp had progressed (regressed?) well past the walking cane stage to full blown walker by this time.  It was...

"Two years beofre Ellington died, in 1972, Yale University held a gathering of leading Black jazz musicians in order to raise money for a department of African-American music. Aside from Ellington, the musicians who came for three days of concerts, jam sessions, and workshops included Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams, and Willie (the Lion) Smith. During a performance by a Gillespie-led sextet, someone evidently unhappy with this presence on campus called in a bomb threat. The police attempted to clear the building, but Mingus refused to leave, urging the officers to get all the others out but adamantly remaining onstage with his bass. "Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain't strong enough to kill this music," he was heard telling the police captain. (And very few people argued succcessfully with Mingus.) "If I am going to die, I'm ready. But I'm going out playing 'Sophisticated Lady'...

The phrase "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations", or IDIC for short, is the foundation of the Vulcan philosophy of life that symbolize "the elements that create truth and beauty" from the tv show Star Trek.  Their symbol for this philosophy is an off centered triangle overlapping a circle that looks like this: I wore a velcro patch of this symbol at my grad school graduation when I became the first person in my family to earn a doctorate degree. I also hit up fools with the Vulcan hand salute too: 50% of all students across all fields fail to complete the dissertation they start, and the number of Latinos who earn a doctorate is less than 10% in 2021. The numbers were worse in 2016 when I walked the stage in my fancy viceroy looking robe. So yeah, it felt special, a small bit because so many of my sci-fi heroes were scholars or accomplished academics. To be honest the only person who could have graduated from the Vulcan Science Academy in my family was my fa...