“It wasn’t always like this,” she told me.

You see, me Ma, she’s been around the block, as they say, being a marathon runner and all that.

We remember our ancestors who were awarded land by the Crown all those centuries ago.

And it weren’t too long ago, when me Ma’s Da’s Da, invited to supp with the Queen, said, “Why, I wouldn’t set foot in the same room with that German impostor!”

But seein’ as you don’t know what I’m talkin’ ’bout, y’ought to know more, right?

If it ain’t always been like this, when has it been?

Or will it?

Like last night, sittin’ in the dark, watchin’ them kids from Knoxville, Cookeville, Nashville and Texas swingin’ to the oldies, music spun up on hard disks by the DJ crew Winter Wonderland for the Huntsville Swing Dance Society…

I got to thinkin’…

Yeah, and that’s why I’m still here this morning, wonderin’ why it is that this is not what it’s always been like.

When did we teach kids to dance in low {earth} gravity conditions?

They weren’t born on your home planet.

The last direct descendant livin’ on Scottish soil had died, revertin’ our ol’ homeland back to the Crown (and yes, the Queen is still one of them German pretenders to the British throne but who’m I to care, bouncin’, as I am, out here in the hinterlands of our species’ solar system settlements?)…

Am I just a fractal projection of a 2D surface?

Or is that a holographic computation upon a 4D equestrian equation equal to none and summarisation of everything?

I think me oxygen level is out of balance with me nitrogen mix.

Besides, them dancers what celebrated the 13th birthday on Friday the 13th at KCDC, they’s got their time to shine in the sweaty spotlight.

Oh well, not like the dinner theatre in X27B is any more real than any other history, past or present tense, tension or predisposition.

But the sentiments are the same.

As me Da said to me Ma, “And it’ll never be like this again.”