It doesn’t take much to feel like a visitor from a foreign planet. Humans are good at making anyone even a little bit different feel like an alien. So I look at myself and realize I’m an anachronism. A stranger in a place that was once my home.

My body is a great place to start. It is rebuilt, an imitation of a human body. Fake breasts with no nipples. Replacement parts all over the place. Missing internal organs. No belly button.

Yet nothing makes me feel more out of time and place than reading posts on Facebook. The inability of average people to use grammar, to write in full sentences, to understand that “loose” and “lose” aren’t the same word. This leaves me feeling as if I have been inter-dimensionally transported to “The Planet Without Grammar.” Forget typos. I get that. We all make mistakes and usually know it. How often I have wished I could go back and correct them.

No, I’m talking about all the millions of people who don’t even know they are doing something wrong because they never knew their own language in the first place.

Then there’s music. I sound like every member of every older generation throughout history, but this didn’t start when I became a senior. It started when I was a music student and had to listen to 12-tone music. That was music?  It sounds like Tom cats locked in a trash can. Howling, banging, shrieks, crashing, thumping. No rhythm. No melody. Just noise.

I can get into a rhythm without melody. I can enjoy a  melody without rhythm. When you remove both?

What, exactly, makes it music? Please, someone, explain.

Where do noise and music part company? My inability as a young music student to grasp what it was about these sounds that made them admirable as music signaled a lifetime of “not getting it.” Whatever “it” has been.

There are so many things I don’t get. Politics. Ignorance. Movies without scripts. Books without plots. Published authors without talent. Voluntary illiteracy. An international lack of compassion for the poor and needy. Environmental destruction for short-term goals which will have permanent and devastating planet-wide repercussions. Genocide.

And the old standby, stupidity.

When I said I’m an anachronism, I wasn’t kidding. I am. Daily I grow worse.