The old world continues to molt away into the ether and something new that I am entirely unsure of is left behind in its place. No one will remember him within 50 years. No one on this year’s Grammys will be remembered much beyond that. I won’t even make it that far. Their names may be recorded in some database in the mausoleum of time but they are all only slightly less mutable than I am. America is not that old and it already feels like it is falling apart at sea. The Egyptians, the Romans, the Atlanteans all lasted millenia (that’s right, all of them and all of the others, too) before being swallowed by the desert or the sea until nothing was left but strange architecture, middens, and half-statues. We have been preceded in time by civilizations as advanced as us (though likely in different ways) or perhaps some that were beyond us. And now they are just slight hills in the desert for tourists to stumble over or they are no more than legends and wild-eyed speculations for potheads to toss back and forth like a football as the sun sets and the imagination gets looser. When was the last time anybody talked about Elvis before Lisa Marie died recently? The time between the Beatles getting mentions in the media is getting longer and longer. I can’t remember the last time I heard Frank Sinatra referenced. Jeff Beck died last week; turn a page. I feel like we won’t hear from him much again, Hall of Fame or not. That thing’s not going to last forever either. One easily accomplished electromagnetic pulse and all of recorded music is lost until someone gets the electrical grid back up and that’s only going to bring back vinyl. All digital music could easily cease for good, like it never happened. Almost like Atlantis.