A very good jobs report for October—531,000 more employed and an unemployment rate down to 4.6%. Plus, the two previous months were revised upwards. There are now one and one-half jobs looking to be filled in this country for every person who's officially unemployed. Most of what was lost to the pandemic has been recovered, although hospitality and leisure is still a notable laggard. By now it should be perfectly clear to you why you can find a willing accountant or a banker but still can't catch a waiter's eye.

And that last task is about to get harder. The United States is reopening its doors to international travelers as of Nov. 8. (So long as they're vaccinated. Wait until Sen. Cruz gets wind of this!) Tourists have been shut out of the US for the last 20 months. And they'll all be looking to eat in restaurants! The best hope is that some of them will overstay their travel visas and take jobs here as waiters. It could happen.

And so it seemed it might for a brief moment, but now we can see that was just another dream turned to dust. The clouds of discontent that were gathered threateningly above our heads at the time of last spring's vernal equinox are still there. Discontent and enmity still abound, one half of the populace, or else the other, is wedded to insidious lies, the heart of our democracy itself is imperiled, and once again we're back to wearing these stupid masks every time we step out the front door.

Our world seems divided between those who are just dying to get vaccinated and those willing to die for their disbeliefs, and yet wise men, doctors and scientists are publicly repudiated and the public turns for truth to social media outlets and the posts of authors we surely know we're smarter than.

What to do?

The rock group Boston gave us the answer many years ago. "I woke up this morning and the sun was gone / Turned on some music to start my day / I lost myself in a familiar song / Closed my eyes and I slipped away…. "

It was for such times as this that the "Summer Song Jukebox" was conceived. For us to lose ourselves in, exchanging brief moments of bitter sadness for ones of sweet melancholy. Not much of an exchange but the memories are good: idyllic recollections of summers past triggered by old familiar songs that were the bookends of the years of our youth.

To help you get started, this listening guide was retrieved from a 2016 Labor Day post.

But by all means, do what you feel. (Summer Song Jukebox link.)

The Summer Song Jukebox made its debut 21 years ago, if memory serves. Like everything else, it'a growing old. I can barely remember making it now. I don't even think about it much anymore, just as we don't revisit the memories of our past summers as readily, and the lives and loves from those callow years grow steadily smaller and dimmer as the time passes.

But the songs and the sentiments are still there. Just waiting for you.

When I'm tired and thinking cold,
I hide in my music and forget the day,
And dream of a girl that I used to know.
I closed my eyes and she slipped away.

Below: typical jobs report news leads from the last five months of the year.

A more nuanced telling, with a longer-lens/time perspective, might simply be, "Slow but steady recovery following sharp pandemic contraction." Who cares about how we did against the estimates? Maybe the guys making the estimates are no good at their jobs either.

Besides, the whole month-to-month reporting mindset ignores the fact that after the first-month collapse, monthly numbers were almost all positive. Only a rare down-month or two for the overall job market even if it wasn't what optimists kept referring to as the "V-shaped" recovery.

Hardly a big surprise. What would you expect with a pandemic we obviously were totally unprepared to deal with. Smooth sailing? At the risk of crashing metaphors, it was a good bit more than a bad dream that fades with opening day. Not back on top in a month or two? That was the real dream. With the way we report job numbers, we make the monthly rate of job increases the enemy of the job growth itself.

But even that bit of nuance is not nearly nuanced enough. Most job sectors were not that severely affected by the COVID meltdown. The impact was pretty steep and choppy in leisure and entertainment, but other sectors? They took an initial hit but recovered rather smoothly and steadily if not spectacularly swiftly.

The drama in jobs was contained mainly in leisure and entertainment because people couldn't travel, for business or pleasure. Vegas was very unhappy. And restaurants couldn't seat patrons, and when they could, they couldn't find kitchen or dining room help to serve them. The airlines and the subways took a beating. (Hospital workers entered into hell.) The financial services industry had no such problems, as the numbers bear out. Sales might have slipped, but jobs and working conditions were not the issue.

From a distance, job performance graphs look pretty similar from sector to sector. All pretty much just like the "All Employees" graph above. But appearance is belied by differences in raw numbers and month-to-month growth rates from one sector and another. Most particularly, the leisure and entertainment scene has gotten a visibly rougher ride for the reasons noted above. It really all boils down to this. It's the sector where the most people are most likely to come together, en masse, breathing heavy. And when, and where, that happens, people get sick and disease metrics spike.

But the big number is the big news, so that's what gets reported each month. And always against expectations. Can't blame them, just doing their jobs. Scares the bejesus out of the horses and cattle though. And roller coaster headlines really don't paint a clear picture of how well or poorly the jobs scene is remediating itself. An incautions person could be drawn to erroneous conclusions.

What's a body to do? Probably not pay undue homage to aggregated monthly jobs reporting. It is what it is, as the mob is fond of saying. Keep an eye on the restaurants and hospital utilization rates. When those figures turn, up, down or sidewise, that will tell you where we're really headed. Those headlines? They're just for fun. Oh, and get vaccinated. What are you thinking?

This viewer tried shaking off the monkey of cable news, for a time, through immersion in the parallel fantasy world of televised '50s-era horse operas (whose program minutes do seem to be swelling). But the prized media fare of youth turned out to be not much better, upon revisitation. More entertaining and better written but basically, just endless streams of miniature morality plays, writ small, offering up some poor devils' whose tragic flaws invariably lead to dusty and violent deaths. Not infrequently snaring up an innocent bystander or two on their way. A young woman, say, or a child. Or a dog. Or a horse. Daytime TV programming is such a large hole to fill, and dying is so pathos-worthy.

Some 3,358,814 unfortunate souls crossed over in 2020, the overwhelming majority of them (75%) from disease. Heart disease, cancer, stroke respiratory diseases, diabetes and kidney disease are the most cited. Alzheimer's is its own category now. And the newcomer in 2020, COVOD-19, which vaulted all the way up to #3 on the list (with a bullet). Influenza and pneumonia are also a separate category. Unintentional injuries accounted for 192,176 deaths in 2020. Less than coronavirus and right above strokes.

• More than 38,000 people die every year in crashes on U.S. roadways. The U.S. traffic fatality rate is 12.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. An additional 4.4 million are injured seriously enough to require medical attention. (Association for Safe International Road Travel, 2021). More than a quarter of all traffic-related deaths are the direct result of alcohol impairment according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

• There were 19,379 deaths due to gun violence in the US in 2020, according to data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. (Highest figure in more than 20 years.) An additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun. There were 611 mass shootings in 2020 (defined as four or more people shot or killed in a single incident excluding the shooter), up from 417 in 2019.

• Over 81,000 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in the 12 months ending in May 2020, the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a 12-month period, according to recent provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Synthetic opioids (primarily illicitly manufactured fentanyl) appear to be the primary driver of the increases in overdose deaths, rising 38.4 percent from the 12-month period leading up to June 2019 compared with the 12-month period leading up to May 2020.

• In 2020, 1,127 people were killed by police. There were only 18 days in 2020 when the police did not kill someone. Black people (who make up 13% of the country’s population) accounted for 28% of this group. Only Rhode Island and Vermont reported no police killings in 2020.

• At least 11 Americans were killed while participating in political demonstrations last year, and another 14 died in other incidents linked to political unrest. Nine of the people killed during protests were demonstrators taking part in Black Lives Matter protests. Two were conservatives killed after pro-Trump “patriot rallies.” All but one were killed by fellow citizens. (Data compiled by The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a non-profit, working in collaboration with a group of researchers at Princeton.)

TapTheForwardAssist, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

• A total of seventeen death-row inmates, all men, were executed in the United States in 2020, sixteen by lethal injection and one by electrocution (Tennessee).

• There were 264 federal, state, military, tribal and local law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty in 2020— the highest since 1974, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund reports. The COVID-19 virus accounted for 145 of those deaths. Forty-eight officers were shot and killed: 30 by a handgun, one with his own weapon, and 13 by rifle fire. Forty-four officers were killed in traffic incidents. City law enforcement officers were hardest hit, with 122 line-of-duty deaths. Sheriffs accounted for 68 deaths, followed by 31 state and highway patrol deaths.

• In 2018 there were more than two and a half times as many suicides in the United States as there were homicides, based on a report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The states with the highest suicide rates were West Virginia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico. Between 1999 and 2018, Suicide rates for males were 3.5 to 4.5 times the rate for females. Among females, suicide rates, based on prior years' data, were highest in the 45–64 age group. Among males, rates were highest for those aged 75 and over. Most common methods employed were firearms, suffocation and poisoning.

On the brighter side, BuzzFeed reported last January on the personal stories of 17 people who looked death in the eye, and saw death look back, and returned to tell about what it was like to be clinically deceased. Make of it what you will, if you're brave enough to click on the link above to study their reflections.

Ah well, getting late. Time for bed. To sleep, perchance to dream. Hopefully about something else. Maybe the tail end of an old '50s Western before nodding off.