Light Years Away

I had a pretty strong inclination to see myself as having been lazy or selfish for not going out to busk on this Tuesday night in the middle of April The weather conditions are pretty much perfect. If there was no light breeze, making the 78 degrees feel like 72, then it would be optimal.

And, busking always leaves the door open for lady luck to walk through so that, even on Tuesday nights there are millionaires who have daughters named Amanda ready to throw a few hundred dollar bills in your jar if you are playing the song "Amanda," and he had just gotten a text from her, type of thing...

There has been so much to catch up on lately, here. The identity of whomever left the comment pertaining to Dorise Blackmon's memorial ceremony, has been like a riddle I believe I can solve. The commenter left too many clues...

Before the comment had been left, there had been the party at Tanya Huang's that I hadn't gone to. Because of the timing of the second installment of the comment, I wondered if it was some person that was planning upon confronting me in some way at that party and the frustration of not being able to vent in that, or some other passive aggressive way, drove the person back to his keyboard...

Then, there was the faintest whiff of a "cancel culture mob" in the form of maybe a half dozen transgender looking early 20's aged people who somehow materialized nearby my playing spot, where there was already a mixed race couple of musicians who had taken up the spot under the lamp post, where I started playing 11 years ago until the guy who slept in the bedroom right behind where I sat started to ask me politely, if I would stop playing at 10 PM each evening. 

But, the little gaggle of what looked like teen aged boys that had breasts, seemed to have some connection to the heavyset black kid playing an electric cello through and amp and the skeezer looking white kid with an out of tune acoustic guitar that was also being amplified.

I had politely asked them how long they were planning on playing there, to which the white kid snapped: "We just got here." This kind of belied the fact that a middle aged couple had been sitting on the stoop which used to be owned by Barnaby Chancellor, and applauding and encouraging the duo throughout the 15 minutes or so that I gave the guy to come out and ask them to stop.

It was only when I had grabbed my phone and was about to compose a text message to Ted Broughey that the two musicians kind of hastily jumped up and started scrambling for their gear, and after a quick thank you to the couple on the stoop, who seemed to be telling them to go ahead and play longer and to not worry about whatever guy slept in the room behind the lamp post...

The couple had been very rude to me when, after the cello and guitar guy left, I walked over to tell them about how, I had begun playing there and had had to make an agreement with "the gentleman who lives there" that I would knock off at 10; something that my drunk and stoned mind failed to keep track of on one too many occasions, and, hence I had had to find another spot, and bring my own spotlight in order to create it, type of thing.

The couple was so rude, with the guy basically telling me that he wasn't interested in anything I was saying (I was kind of trying to make the point that A: I had been playing in their new (as in a couple weeks) neighborhood for 10+ years, and so I knew that the young mixed race musicians had been cut some slack by the guy who sleeps behind the lamp post because he had apparently waited until almost a quarter to 11 before rapping politely on the window. Or, the sight of me reaching for my phone might have put the fear of Lilly into them, who may even have encountered her before I'd gotten there -even though they had "just started"-

So, one of the groups of transgender (and hence, not really Lafitt's Blacksmith Shop Tavern") looking youngsters, walked off after I had failed to name any of the gay strip clubs (I think they purposely leave the names off of those clubs to instill a little bit of the tittilation that comes from being inside the loop and, for example, knowing that a certain place is a gay bar and that you know the name of it, even though there is no sign on the place. There is a man dancing almost naked up on what looks like a combination stage and bar, and there are very interesting records playing, usually. At least half of the time it is music by an openly gay artist; and the other times, it coold be almost any song from anywhere and very often is one that makes me say, sometimes above my breath: "I've always thought this was one of the weirdest songs that I couldn't decide whether I liked it or not?   

I had decided to take my time setting up my stuff. It was already past 10 PM, and I hoped that the guy who lived by the lamp post would dispatch with the business of moving the duo down towards the more noisy end of Bourbon. 

As I sat and just listened to them play, the transgender types seemed to become impatient and ultimately, in between going over to the lamp post musicians, apparently to encourage them and, in my mind, to tell them to not stop playing just because some white boy showed up and he's been in the block for 12 years. type of thing, they made a couple forays towards me, asking me during one such venture, if I knew where the gay strip clubs were. After my failure to refer to any of them by name, but only by pointing out "up two blocks" to them; and even starting to wonder out loud: "I wonder why they never have their names on signs or in neon..."

This apparently unacceptable level of unfamiliarity with regard to clubs that I have walked past countless nights; and on some such occasions even paused and glanced in to see what kind of gay guy would be dancing to "Too Shy," that Cazha Googoo song. was what merited me a snubbing and having the information given to me that I, by dint of not having been able to name just one gay club was on "The Gross List."

The young boy with C cup sized breasts, sculpted eye brows and a liberal dose of face makeup's words, not mine...

Feb 28, 2024

Daniel...you are not the intellectual giant you would like to think you are...and you are usually regarded as a joke to most who ACTUALLY know you because of your smug know-it-all ignorance in life in general.

You act like you have something to say, but NOBODY is interested in your inner monologues where you drone on and on about the most inane things ever which is why barely anyone comments on your page here. That and you are a bullshit artist.

I've known Dorise Blackmon for MUCH longer than you did. Really, that probably doesn't matter...but when I was in conversation with her in 2020 your name popped up...and someone else who was there made a comment about your criminal history. She looked you up and went "Ugh...well, I don't need to support that guy anymore."

Later she commented about how she needed to be more careful about who she supported, because she realized that you were (HER WORDS)..."a gross monster."

YOU ARE.

Nobody put words into Dorise's mouth other than her.

So yeah...you probably shouldn't have showed up at her memorial service. I was there too...and many others questioned why you were there, including those closest to Dorise...so yeah you should have shown respect by not showing up!


In other news...

Sheep's Cheese

I got a 2 pound brick of sheep's cheese from the Mediterranean Market.

They seem to have a diet which supports a long and healthy life; though not one as an elite athlete, perhaps.
I'm not really sure in who's footsteps I'm following by eating the sheep's cheese. At the time I bought it, I had thought about the Mediterranean Market out of the blue. The place is a medium length walk to from the apartment, further than the Brown Derby but not as far as the Ideal Market on Broad Ave. 

It is your sheep or goat cheese connection and your grape leaf wrapped delicacy headquarters...

 

But it is light years away from them in that it saves you from having to go overseas just to get some really good local honey -local to some place in the Mediterranean...

I've Changed My Opinion

 "I wouldn’t make a post responding to the comment, that’s all the mystery commenter wants. If you ignore it and don’t give it any credence, which you shouldn’t because anyone who doesn’t want to put their name to their words means the words aren’t worth anything."

Unknown commented on "A 4 GigaNight"

Feb 28, 2024

Daniel...you are not the intellectual giant you would like to think you are...and you are usually regarded as a joke to most who ACTUALLY know you because of your smug know-it-all ignorance in life in general.

I was going to put the whole comment here and then pick it apart line by line, and apply a theory I have about whomever left it; but. I'm just going to do something else right now. Sorry I don't have any more energy to devote here....

Probably From Around March 17th Until Now

Events are unfolding faster than I can unpack them and put into words.

I just woke up and it's just past noon and I am feeling good after a half hour during which I eliminated whatever it was I ate last night I had done pretty well in that department. I remember going to buy a Big Texas Cinamon Bun from the machine here. I sort of remember eating it. I remember testing the "pate" style food that I had gotten for Harold. I had cleaned his plate and laid it by his water then opened the can of turkey flavored pate for him. And then in the throes of a mental glitch, remembering that in the past Harold had not favored any flavored food in "pate" form, it tested it by putting a small forkful in my mouth, found it to be seriously lacking in salt and a little bit bony in flavor, as if a fair amount of bones went into the grinder along with the rest of the turkey.
I had tested it on myself rather than by letting Harold have a sample, and finding it unacceptable, had spit the small forkful into the trash, and had set the can aside, deciding to feed him something else. So there was the turkey pate with the divot forked out...
Then the previous day began to play like a movie in my mind.
I had walked a good ways from where the street car only goes, these days, down Canal street. There was a white guy about my age and close enough in intelligence that I was able to make idle chat with him. I told him that I felt like I was only getting 75 cents worth, out of the $1.25 I pay for the street car, now that it only goes three quarters of the way to the Casino.

"I never thought of it that way."
The conversation started when, after texting something on my phone, probably to Jacob Scardino, I made the joke to the guy, "If this guy doesn't tighten up on his punctuation and his grammar, I'm gonna block him!"
"Well, how old is he?"

I really had been in the abstract when I made the comment; there really wasn't any text right in front of my that I'd been referring to. But I had seen plenty of the punctuation and grammar that I was hypothetically referring to, so I played along.
"26," I said.

"Oh, well there you go," said the white guy of about my age who had said "excuse me," when taking the other half of the seat we were in.
At that point, I thought of joking something like: "You're entitled to up to 50% of the seat," but let that joke go.
I was one Paradise Park 19 ounce beer in, on a trek to the music store to get new strings and a new harmonica before I squandered the money I have on stuff like Paradise Park IPA lagers.

I then played devil's advocate (if I'm using that right) and said: "I don't know; you can tell it's the end of a sentence just by looking at it; why burden your buddy by expecting him to waste a thumb stroke to add a period?"
"Yeah, and the commas and the capitalization..." said the guy, who is probably in middle management somewhere.
I had to walk a whole half mile to the music store that I thought closed at 7 because it closed at 7 as recently as 2 months ago...
I decided to fortify myself for the arduous trek by lighting up the first weed roach I encountered once on Canal Street and having gone only about 50 paces. I did this and was soon at the Unique Store where I applied the wisdom I have gained about "moderation" being a good thing and only got a one dollar shot of brandy to go with the weed I had just finished. It tasted beyond nasty, like rubbing alcohol warmed up mixed with candle wax or something. I pocked the little bottle that had only one nasty sip taken out of it and began to walk straight down Royal Street where I passed interesting things, heard a really good ragtime band and bought some kind of beer at Rouses Market, where back at the beer cooler the ragtime would swell in volume whenever someone opened the front door. As busy as they were there was almost a Leslie speaker type effect as the door was in constant motion.
THE DAMNED STORE WAS CLOSED! and had a sign indicating their hours of operation as (now) being 11 to 6. I had gotten there at 6:24 PM.
I figured that the 24 minutes of bullshitting with everyone all along Royal Street, stopping to shoot a 2:10 length video of the previously mentioned ragtime band at one point; had been worth getting to the store too late. I still had an all day bus pass, that is good for another 4 hours as I sit here.

There is more to the post; there is the Tanya's Party part.
Then there is the cancel culture attack at the Lilly Pad, spawned by being doxed by whomever left the comment on the Dorise Blackmon memorial story; causing a raging group of trans kids to accost me at my playing spot, ending by quoting the comment of "unknown" verbatim....
Then there is the next day when everything seemed to have tilted back to where I could play at the Lilly Pad, rather than some trans band that had shown up ostensibly to drown me out while their loyalists cheered them on from where they had stationed themselves, like pawns in the game of some cancel culture mob that organized online then prepared their Friday night attack.
There is more to this that I will unpack...
I will just leave a marker as a reminder to myself.
The Young Black Man With Breasts And Wearing Eyeliner Who Asked Me Which Way The Strip Clubs Were story (coming soon)
The Weekend had arrived for Tanya's party story (coming soon)
I had decided, upon getting the invitation to it, that I wasn't going to go to it unless I was in a period of fasting, or just coming out of one.
I didn't want to show up in any polluted state, despite the invitation's reference to bringing one's own booze and the the mentioning of an outdoor area, something perhaps designed to ease the mind of any tobacco addicted, or marijuana addled individuals.
And, sure enough, the day for the party arrived and I was beset by demons all around me. I pictured entering Tanya's house, after having taken my shoes off, and then had to find a clean pair of socks. I then pictured there probably being cups of green tea (in front of a Buddha -maybe some guy dressed as the Buddha, Jacob suggested.

The Tanya's Party That I Didn't Go To And Why Not story (coming later)

I have an all day bus pass. But it isn't an all time buss pass, for as long as there are buses type. That would have been more than 3 dollars. So I must go...
I will hopefully get to the present here in the blog before more indescribably things happen...off to the music store!!

The Toll For Neglect

This blog is one of a few things that I've slacked off on the past couple years.

Getting some kind of job and/or disciplining myself to busk 36 hours a week, has been another derelicted endeavor.

Learning the correct Funk & Wagnell's way of placing the word "derelicted" in a sentence has been put on the back burner, even.

But, yeah. "When you're standing still, you're going backwards," one of my mentors told me when I was around 14.

I'm totally responsible for not having made the migration to another blog hosting platform that isn't going to censor this blog...(victimize me with censorship, sure, but through my own damned fault).

Had I been more ambitious, this enterprise would be affiliated with that Linux based cloud service that's $100 a year and will allow your blog, this blog! to reside in a Linux based cloud, so that the data warehouse that will store it will in short order be situated on some massive satellite, so that, even if some World War III type situation breaks out, like some crazy people joke about the possibility of, and the Google Servers are nuked; as the strategy of any war planner worth a ruble or yen would call for; after the dust settles and the radiation clouds have mostly dissipated, survivers will still be able to read my blog, scrolling with their blistered fingers. 

Yet I have procrastinated, and it is still on this platform, where only the people who knew about it prior to the shadow banning would even know how to get here. 

Hope For Change 

One would hope that certain war mongering power hungry types at the top will one day die. And, when all the "bosses" who are essentially "calling the shots" now are dead, they will have to be replaced by people from millennial generation and gen z and that will hopefully be the end of The War Machine because those stoners can hardly tie their shoes, never mind master mind world wars...  

An Invitation

When Google is making sure that hardly anyone sees a certain blog, then I guess its author is at liberty to write whatever hare-brained thing that comes to mind; as he tries to make sense of the shadows on the wall...

Tanya invites me to join "the party."

I still haven't found the key to unlock the joy of writing just for the sake of it, with the journey being the reward, type of thing.

The obnoxious Big Tech bosses, already controlling what 90% of the people with smartphones are going to see and hear every minute of every day leading up to the November election, are really getting on my nerves with their shadow banning of this blog.

If I'm going to say positive things about Robert F. Kennedy Jr (*flag goes up somewhere in Mountain View, California*) then the algorithm is going to make sure that the post is seen by only a select handful of people -those already deemed to be lost causes -boomers and other incorrigible "Trumpers-" whose votes will just have to be annulled the "2020" way.

By them finding, for each, a corresponding "gullible person of color" who has been captured by the Google algorithm. One that they can scoop up in a van laden with pizza and a keg of beer, and whisk off to the polling site ("We can register you on the way there" [ using this app that Zuckerberg was generous enough to have underwritten the cost of, and made available to Meta users, upon whose phones records show that neither RFK Jr, nor anything positive about Trump has ever appeared]."

I'm starting to wonder if there isn't indeed wisdom in the perpetuity of the deep state and its "perpetual war" machine. Maybe, to hell with Trump, Kennedy and Ramaswami, and maybe Karrie should go jump in a Lake.

Maybe I should feel gratitude for the piled up bodies of dead Jews, and dead Palestinians, stacked to one side to leave room for some dead Chinese and dead Arabians to come. We might should thank the bodies for this high standard of living that we all enjoy in this, "the greatest country in the world." 

Maybe I had everything backwards. Maybe the MAGA candidates are ironically making America "less great" by throwing a monkey wrench into the business of war. Maybe I should blithely snicker at the sight and sounds of groups of people of color, holding their phones and screaming "I hate Trump" at the night sky. 

Maybe I should be investing my unemployment checks in Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics stock and thinking: "You go, people of color; do your thing, don't let Kamala and me down! Listen to what your phone say's!"

The Chinese did not give their citizens the same "M-rna" type vaccine that it was insisted that U.S. citizens, to include the children and, certainly, all the members of the military, be force fed. I sure hope that the next bio-weapon, er, virus, that is being developed doesn't decimate the U.S. military, while leaving the CCP-ers unscathed! That would fuel speculation that Biden and company have been useful idiots all this time; and that might be quite a leap to make...  

Can You Promise At Least 6 Ongoing Wars??

I was thinking today about how interesting this blog might be still, to this day, if I were to still live under the wharf. 

Need a lift?

Nee

Chances are that, if I lived there when the Covid thing came into play, I would have, one way or another found out about the nice hotel where the city was putting the homeless people. I remember seeing the tent cities dissapear from under bridges everywhere and hearing the news that the homeless were being housed in a pretty nice hotel. They were being fed and I would imagine given some kind of funds for use on "personal items" ie. bottles of booze, weed and crack rocks and maybe toilet paper. So, I suppose that, as soon as tourists started trickling back into town after the emergency had been lifted, I would have been back to busking, in a race to see if I could restablish an income at such a time that my hotel room and money for personal expenses had dried up. So,it's hard to speculate with any certainty about whether or not this blog would be more interesting if I still lived under the wharf. I imagine I would have returned to there, sometime in the fall of 2022, and them might have endured some hard times over the course of the next year and a half, which would bring me up to this time now, when it is "different." This is the word used by Jonah the kopra player who used to make $100+ a day quite regularly playing that interesting instrument. Now he is peddliing a pedicab instead because "the Quearter is different now," according to him. Things will hopefully become interesting enought to wrtie about here. Even though this blog is shadow banned by the algorithm. I suppose I could fool the algorithym by using sarcasm. I could say that we need to start as many foreign wars as possible, so that foreigners will kille each other off, using weapons that were made in the U.S.A. and they could reduce the world's population to a level more comfortable for the likes of Bill Gates and other science buffs who have calculated just how many people need to be pared off the three of humanity. It can't be Bill himself, because we need him alive in order to direct the operation. But, if we can sell weopons to both sides and ciphon money off the treasuries of both nations that way; and then give the job of rebuilding those wiped out nations to good old American ventures, then it is quite reasonable to expect the U.S. citizens to enjoy a quality of life that is at least 5 fold better than anywhere else on the planet that is still standing. This is how a magnificent, well oiled war machine should work. We all live lives like the ones portrayed in the "Happy Days," sitcom of the 1970's and the rest of the world will just have to war amongst themselves for the scraps that fall off our table. This is why offense is taken over people migrating here illegally, just so they can ride the gravy train. They are supposed to be in their hell hole countries aiming U.S.A. made rifles at their non-Christian contemporaries... This is why I'm going to definitely vote for an "establishment" candidate this fall, be her democrat , or republican, that doesn't matter... Sarcasm,-and algorithm'ss inability to discern it, and adjust the blog author's social credit score accordingly...

68 Degrees On February 21st

And, so I'm going out to busk until the sun goes down or I make my kratom money whichever comes first...

A 4 GigaNight

Back, After Almost A Month Without Internet

I started a fast about 6 hours ago. But, not before the "one last hurrah" of a package of Little Debbie™ Glazed Donut Sticks.

I guess I was sending the message to my brain of: This is the kind of thing we will be flushing out of every cell of the body, right down to the mitochondrion. 

Sort of like putting a blood hound on the trail of a missing child by letting it sniff her dirty socks before setting out to search the countryside...

I wonder if the spelling of "Donut," rather than "Doughnut" on the product has anything to do with copyright issues. Perhaps the Dunkin' people have registered the name "doughnut." (Christ, I've already Googled "the plural of mitochondria," and now I have to look up "Dunkin' Doughnuts." I guess I'm a little rusty after not having been able to blog for about the past month...).
It's almost like you might glance quickly and see "DO NOT" -as much a warning as part of the brand name of the product.

I chose them as the lesser of evils. They have soy AND palm oils in them, so I guess that means only half the amount of soy oil as they might otherwise have, with only half the toxic effect that the former produces in me. And, "less than 2%" of titanium dioxide doesn't sound like it can hurt you much.

40 days of 40 bites...

The 12 Pound Tin of Jambalaya

The fasting seems to have been ordained by circumstances, the chief one being that Lent, a prescribed period of fasting and prayer which I have never seen "religiously" observed by any of the Catholics that I've ever known, is in full swing. 

People will bicker over the significance of one word in the bible -"Man was created in our image," is one that comes to mind. This has spawned debates over how many Gods there actually are as, every iota of that book being divinely inspired, every word is important.

Not so much when it comes to the passages about Jesus fasting for 40 days and 40 nights to prepare for His imminent torture. These verses are slighted over and the following in the Lord's footsteps is amended to perhaps not eating meat every Friday during Lent, or perhaps even skipping the last meal on that day (but having a few crackers handy to quell any cravings that might emerge, should they become unbearable).

Unlike the interpretations of other words and phrases, which people have undoubtedly been burned at the stake over, the "40 days and 40 nights" has either been spun to mean "a long time," like the duration of time taken to flood the whole earth, back in Noah's time. People could only count to ten back then (20, if they were wearing sandals) and so, "40" probably was used instead of the word "innumerable," by those divinely inspired men. Like when a car doing "a hundred miles per hour" flies past you on the street. It might have been going 82 MPH, but "a hundred" gets the point across.

The Baptists that I bivouacked with for about a year or so in the late 1980's were of the same mind. They didn't smoke, drink, nor wear beards or mustaches, but they seemed to make up for lost time in the church basement, where vats of strong coffee, along with cakes and pies and puddings awaited them. I would add that, neither did they do drugs, but given the way they seemed to substitute food for all other excesses, I'm sure most of them were whacked out on "doctor prescribed medications," if not drugs. Every word is important.

I think the consensus, in these religions, is that Jesus was a master of fasting and praying and, until you can walk across a lake, you'd better stick to just skipping a meal every Friday during Lent, and not hurt yourself trying to copy Jesus, type of thing...

So, Fat Tuesday arrived, the parades started on time, and I was once again looking out my window at a spectacle that would not be seen again for another year. I started to question just what what I had in common with the hundreds of people lining the streets, celebrating. Do I even belong as a member of humanity?

I found some encouragement in the fact that so many people had turned out for the parades, though. I think it would have been downright depressing to see the floats passing along a deserted street, their occupants holding beads, trinkets and lit up objects with nobody to throw them to. I was glad that the population weren't all holed up somewhere, smoking crack, and not to be bothered by wholesome family fun.

I still felt a bit alienated, but could see alcohol containers everywhere and figured that I would at least venture out to walk around drinking for free and, who knows, might find myself whooping it up as I jumped up and down with my hands outstretched, trying to get a glowing rubber ball or a light-up Frisbee thrown to me. I always wondered just how the guys on the floats picked out their targets. Of course, families with children usually walk away laden with beads around their necks and carrying a couple bags full of more, mostly plastic items (nothing heavy enough to injure someone caught by surprise and hit in the face with it).

There was one time when I had gone out to watch the parades and, noticing that nobody was throwing anything my way, began to sulk a bit, and was probably standing with my arms folded and my head down, feeling sorry for myself and wondering if that was New Orleans' way of telling me I wasn't wanted here, when a pretty nice object -a stuffed animal or something- came flying off a float and landed right at my feet, having obviously been aimed at me (the throwers are pretty accurate, having had so much practice).

I went out to Canal Street, where it became evident that a lot of cans of "hard seltzer" had been handed out, as part of some promotion, probably off the back of a pickup truck, with the White Claw Hard Seltzer logo painted on its side. These were all over the place, still cold, and with just one sip taken off a lot of them. I finished 3 or 4 of them, as I wandered around, stopping at one point to squat down and kneel in the grass by the trunk of a large oak tree, as I finished one. I then looked and saw a small pipe sitting in a nook in one of the roots of the tree, with its little bowl stuffed with what turned out to be some good weed. Is New Orleans still telling me I'm not wanted here...?

I started heading towards the Brown Derby, after smoking the bowl, but then aborted that trip. I had been thinking of getting a dark beer, but had gotten drunk enough by the time I was half way there, off of unopened cans of beer laying in the grass in various spots, that I figured it was not necessary to spend any money. It wasn't Modelo Negro I was finding; but it was free...

I went back out after the parades had passed, and spotted a half dozen huge tin trays, covered with tin foil and full of jambalaya. I was on my way to the Winn Dixie to get some food. I had to kind of watch how much I spent, I thought, because having no phone and no Internet, I had no way to check the balance on any of my plastic cards. I had grabbed a bottle of spicy brown mustard, but then thought: what if the jambalaya isn't there any more? Mustard could probably wait, as I would probably rather have coffee and bottled water and "superfood" powder from WalMart to get me through to the end of the month, instead of mustard with nothing to put it on...

Getting back to the neighborhood, I saw that the tins of jambalaya were still there, so I was able to balance one in my arms and tote it, along with my groceries minus mustard into the Sacred Heart building. I started to regret not having spent $2.49 on the spicy brown mustard, but caught myself, and pushed the thought away. It takes discipline and practice to be able to invoke the Law of Attraction by feeling joy and gratitude for things not yet manifest -like someone who has ordered something they have always wanted and is tearing the wrappings off a package that arrives a few days later, thinking: this must be it!! already thrilled to have the thing they have always wanted, even though they haven't seen it yet, type of thing...

So, instead of even thinking about the mustard, I felt grateful for the things that I did have. 

And, there in the lobby, on a table where people leave stuff that they don't want, like the cans of green beans that come in the boxes of food that certain residents get, was a cardboard box, the size of a bread box. In it were probably about 2,500 little packets of...mustard.

It's coming upon 12 hours into the fast, and I'm hungry. My mind is trying to trick me with the idea of: Why don't you just do a carnivore diet, and fool your body into thinking that it's fasting? Then, you can probably even sell your plasma while detoxing at the same time...
The mind: always suggesting you turn stones into bread then eat them...

Response To Comment

One of the last posts I put here before having my Internet connection die, was the one about Dorise Blackmon's memorial service. An "unknown" left a comment that I paraphrase as: Dorise was never a fan of yours after she found out about your child porn arrest. You should have paid your respects by not showing up.

If it's disrespectful to speak ill of the deceased, then, what is it to put lies in their mouths?

Dorise let me stash my extra guitar at her house, when I was homeless. I was walking towards the music store, in 2013, to buy a guitar tuner when she pulled up in her car with her girlfriend in the passenger seat and asked me where I was going, then told me: "Wait here 5 minutes," after I'd said I was on my way to buy a guitar tuner, then returned 5 minutes (out of her schedule) later and handed me a brand new Snark™tuner.
I've sat and hung out while she played about 240 times. Once, she and Tanya had started playing the song "Daniel," after I showed up. Since I was in a hurry to get to my spot that night, when the song got to the part where Elton sings: "I can see Daniel waving goodbye," I waved goodbye and walked off. About 3 hours later, when I was walking past them again, they stopped the song they were in the middle of and Dorise asked me: "Do you not like that song, 'Daniel?'" 

Since they played instrumental versions of songs, they hadn't associated the "waving goodbye" line in the song with the way I'd walked off. And 3 hours later it still seemed to be bothering Dorise.
Then there were the times I showed up after they'd packed their gear in their van and Dorise would motion to me to walk with her and would buy me a veggie burger at a nearby bar.

All this after she found out about my "child porn" arrest. That happened in Mobile after I had wised off to a new Lieutenant who had taken over the downtown area and was against buskers, seeing them as little more than panhandlers. (He and a female officer walked up on me when I was busking,  with him asking me, derisively, "What are you doing?" in a tone that implied: just what the hell do you think you're doing?!

I looked at them and said: "Golden Slumbers," by The Beatles, off Abbey Road.

"No, I meant what are you...oh, a smartass!"

I was searched, and amongst the pictures on my phone were some taken at a nude beach, which depicted nudists of all ages. Perfect, for the Lieutenant. I was charged with possession of child porn, held for about 2 weeks, then had all the charges dropped after a grand jury refused to return an indictment after seeing the "evidence."

But, then I had to leave Mobile, as the new Lieutenant knew I would have to. Because people trend towards being like "unknown," and, after seeing my picture in the local paper after the arrest, then seeing me back on the street 2 weeks later, along with a follow up article in the same paper, stating that the charges had been dropped "in the interest of justice" because none of the images had turned out to be pornographic, the people had already deemed me guilty by accusation.

"There's that child molester!"

It's like these idiots who say that president Trump is a scoundrel because he's been impeached twice and indicted x number of times; when they were the ones who impeached him twice, and indicted him x number of times.

"Just because you got some fancy lawyer to get you off the hook doesn't mean you ain't a pervert!" said one yokel, to me.

Yeah, I did pretty well busking the night before, and was able to hire OJ's "dream team" of lawyers.
That's how they run homeless people out of town. Another way is to fine them pretty heavily (for their means) and give them, say, 60 days to pay up, or go to jail for 60 days. When 60 days are up, the homeless guy is then some other county's problem; long gone, and never to be seen again because they would have issued a warrant for him -60 days on the original charge; plus maybe 10 more for "failure to appear" in court. The guys in the jail were saying things like:: "I know one thing; as soon as I get out of here, I'm getting the hell out of Mobile! F**k this place; these cops are assholes!" 

Dorise had been a street musician her whole life; I think she was shaking her head over the way the cops in some places act, and not over the nude beach pictures from Wilmington Lake, Vermont, and wasn't just pretending to be my friend over the course of 10 years.

Alex Carter

He lives in California, and used to frequent this blog. That was when he was considering of "retiring" in New Orleans and probably wanted to to have some contact and potential life-lines here.
But, the last I saw, he has changed his plans, and now wants to retire in Hawaii. So, he has no need for Dan McKenna. Now he is online, kissing the asses of Hawaiian people; trying to ingratiate himself; sending gifts.

He doesn't seem to have grasped the concept of: wherever you go, there you are. This magic move to somewhere is going to be the key to his happiness, the change will do him good, he thinks.

He has changed religions a few times; tried about a half dozen diets, dabbled in everything from drawing caricatures, making and selling ribbons, gathering and selling seashells, and flat out panhandling. He does profess to hate "bums," though.

He has taken up about a dozen different musical instruments, as if there is such a one that is going to unlock his abilities. It doesn't seem like he will ever realize that he, himself, is the constant. 

It's always going to be Alex Carter playing the trumpet, or Alex Carter playing the violin, or Alex Carter playing the flute, or Alex Carter playing the ukulele. There's a pattern here.

So, he is going to move to Hawaii, where he will soon find himself annoyed at the "zombies" and bums, perpetually trying to be of service to people and garner appreciation for it, swapping one occupation for another, thinking that it is the environment that is "the problem," and, most likely starting to formulate a plan to get out of Hawaii, because he will have found the land of "The Rolling Surf," to be so much like where he moved from that it really hadn't been worth the trouble and expense of getting there. Alex in San Jose, Alex in Hawaii...

Jealousy would be my guess as to the motive behind "unknown"s comment, since I'm 99% sure it's Alex Carter. He's old and set in his ways and it's easy to recognize his voice in the comment. Even the way the verbs are placed in the sentences is an identifier. He saw the pictures in the post of me in the company of the tribe of New Orleans artists -my tribe- and he couldn't stand it. I know, I'll tell him that his deceased friend never really liked him; that will be a good use of my time! 

The timestamp on unknown's comment being within an hour of when Alex posted something to his own blog...another amateur mistake made by someone trying to pretend he is someone who knew Dorise well enough to know what her feelings (that she never expressed to me) were...

Woke liberal leftist trash (who, in all his anecdotal blogging, never once mentions ever having a girlfriend; so there's something to be read between the lines, too. I think Wendell, the flute player, might have said that the guy is a faggot)

The Temperature Speaks For Itself

 

The coldest temperature that I ever busked in was 37 degrees, and I remember that, in between songs, like if I was talking to someone, I had to keep my hands wrapped around the neck of the guitar. If I let go of it, the next time I fretted a chord or something, I would feel how the neck itself had dropped in temperature and it might have taken a minute or so of playing before the stinging in my fingertips subsided. At 37 degrees, I just relied upon a few simple chords that could be played using the strongest muscles in the hand, like a G major chord, played by wrapping the thumb around for the bottom note and using the third finger for the top note. The pinkie was kind of out of commission at that point.

I used to play at a Kangaroo store in Jacksonville that was across the street from a bank that had a large sign that alternated between time and temperature. I was able to not how every degree that it dropped below 50 became noticeable. As the temperature went from 44 to 43 was when the stinging in the fingertips started, with me having to blow on my hands in between songs and to keep one hand wrapped around the open position frets to keep the neck as warm as possible.

It is 34 now, according to the Bourbon Street webcam. At that temperature, I would be telling my hands to form certain notes and chords, but there wouldn't be enough strength in the fingers for them to obey.

If it were a matter of just sitting at the Lilly Pad with the guitar, wearing gloves and not playing, but rather just making myself visible, I might consider going down there. When it starts raining and I duck under the overhang to wait it out, I often get tipped by people who might make the observation of: I guess you're out of business; that sucks... before handing me a 10 or a 20. But, in a cold weather situation, the tourists are usually hurrying past, trying to get into the warmth of the bar as quickly as possible. It's unlikely that I could draw any of their attentions with the simple 3 chord songs I would be relegated to playing; the ones that are played using the thumb and the ring and first fingers.

Although, I will say that 99 times out of 100, I am rewarded in some way for just going out there. There are the tips that come from people who admire the courage, or desperation, of someone busking on a 43 degree night. "I don't know how you do it..." they might say. And it is also probable, in such situations, that someone who is in the 1% and might have about 500 bucks on them will drop a 50 dollar tip, thinking that that might be about all I stand to make on such a night. On more than one occasion different people have given me like 65 bucks and said: "Get a room, and get out of this cold, or sit in some bar, buying a drink every hour or so until the sun comes up" type of thing... But I would say that, more than 90 times out of 100, I end up thinking: I sure am glad I decided to come out...

But, right now Harold is inside with me, and I think I'll do the Wim Hof breathing method exercises for a half hour and then I might call Lilly. I'm sure the first thing out of her mouth, while skipping the formality of saying "hello" (she has caller ID and almost never say's that, but often continues a conversation from a previous call. The last time I called her, as soon as it connected, she said: "He's really polite; he's a nice guy, really polite; the girls thought so..." which was referring to Jacob after the time that we were busking and Lilly and the girls stopped on their way into the house and chatted for a bit.

During the pandemic lock down, she would answer with: "Did you get the vaccine?" and I would say that I hadn't even left the apartment all week, telling her that I had stocked up on groceries and cat food and was hunkering down. Not even Lilly's worrying mind could envision me catching the big "C19" from Harold.

"You can't be sure, Daniel, maybe cats can spread it without getting sick themselves, and then you would be screwed. It's a horrible death, Daniel; horrible!"

She would then talk about how her and the girls had been bed-ridden with vaccine related symptoms, taking Tylenol and NyQuil, and basically suffering, probably to the same degree as they would have, had they gotten the virus.

It's just astounding how the Phizers and Modernas of the world, that account for something like 70% of the advertising revenue of what people had been conditioned to regard as the "mainstream" media, working in cahoots with the Bill Gate's and other Davos elitists of the world, were able to pull the wool over so many eyes. 

Something like 72 news channels are owned by a handful of people, who were able to create the impression that "everyone, everywhere" was saying the same things; and so that became truth by preponderance. Not aware that they were all following the same marching orders, people would "flip through the channels," thinking: "Oh, look, they're condemning Trump, too! And, so is this channel, and this one. They all are! If I was Trump I would just resign, because, obviously everyone is on to him, just look at all these reports, from Whoopie in the morning, all the way up until Colbert before midnight. "Everyone" can see what a jerk the guy is!"

I know some people are gullible, but, how hard is it to see that the democrats literally accuse "the other side" of doing exactly what they (the democrats) are doing?!
Rachael "If you take the vaccine, you won't get Covid, you can't spread it, etc." Maddow actually said she wasn't going to air Trumps "victory" speech, because she refuses to air "misinformation." Wow...

I guess Don Lemon at least won't shame all of the previously healthy young people who have dropped dead, the world over, in the past couple years; because of some factor that has surfaced in just the past couple of years...hmm 

Funny how those incidents didn't get any media coverage. Even when that Buffalo Bills player collapsed on the field during a game, none of the announcers said anything like: "I wonder if it's one of those vaccine related heart issues that we've heard about..." Oh, my bad; I guess they wouldn't have heard about that; unless they were watching some podcast that they could get themselves fired from their jobs just for watching...
Russell Brand has shown about a 3 minute video of nothing but young athletes collapsing on tennis courts, basketball courts, soccer fields etc. etc. etc.
Oh, but I'm forgetting, Russell was accused of an incident of sexual harassment that allegedly took place like 20 years ago. I guess that means that video was Photoshopped or AI generated...just the type of thing that someone anonymously accused of such a thing would produce. Sometimes I forget.

"Is There Anybody Else Up There?"

I admit that, at first, I was apprehensive. I noticed that the lion's share of people had capitulated to the fear mongers who have a monopoly on the mainstream venues.
Even Catholic people, who would normally have their throats blessed at the start of flu season each year, seemed to have relegated that particular article of faith to voodoo or witchcraft. Some kind of invocation to the Holy Spirit to ward off that year's strain of flu, is all well and good, but "not if my life depends upon it," type of thing.

I was waiting to see if the city would be coming around yelling: "Bring out your dead," pulling tumbrels stacked high with cadavers, before even considering taking a medicine that later was proven to put healthy people under the age of 35 at a greater risk than from the C19 itself. (those statistics come from insurance providers, whose livelihoods depends upon cutting through the hype and the lies and analyzing hard cold facts.

The tumbrels never materialized, and at the same time, I was seeing footage on the local news of the hospital down the street being overrun with C19 patients. On one such day, I had been to the very same emergency room because of a toothache, I think it was.

There was no such crowd of patients. Furthermore, there was a follow up report maybe a week later, ostensibly to illustrate that the situation was still dire. I recognized the people shown as being the same ones from the older broadcast; the guy in the Houston Astros shirt alongside the short pudgy lady with her jeans tucked inside her boots. Yeah, that was them...still in line a week later...

It (the way fear had weakened people's faith) reminds me of the joke where I guy falls over a cliff and is hanging by that little tree branch that cartoon characters always seem to grab on their way down.
He is trying to hang on and is yelling for help: "Is anyone up there? Help!"
Then a voice like thunder cascades down, saying: "This is the Lord, your God. I will save you, but first you must have enough faith to let go of the branch..."

The guy thinks for a second, then yells: "Is there anybody *else* up there?!"

Well, I've managed to stay up all night again. The sun will rise shortly. It's 24 degrees outside with a wind chill that makes it feel like 17. There's still a bunch of stuff I wouldn't mind staying up longer in order to get to...
The highlights from the 2 playoff games that I missed because, in the case of one, I went to the memorial service for Dorise Blackmon, who passed away last November, on a day that I had been thinking about her for some reason... 

Christmas Eve Eve Eve Live on Bourbon Street at the Lilly Pad

From The Big Head To Canal Street

Thunderstorms; heavy downpours, Harold entrenched somewhere dry...

The uncluttered living room, which is where I spend all my time now, when I'm home; reminds me of a jail cell.

Some of my most content moments were spent while in solitary confinement in one county jai or another. All I needed was a good book and coffee and I would stay up all night, reading by whatever light filtered through the bars.

What has to happen is, a period of extreme boredom has to set in. 

Going from a busy lifestyle with all kinds of choices, and plenty of stimuli, on the outside to being thrown into an 8 foot by 9 foot cell with just a minimalist cot, and a stainless steel toilet/sink combination, with 4 walls, a ceiling and floor with bors in ther front and a slit of a window in back can bring this about.

Pacing back and forth is an option, and looking out the window at whatever the view is, another.

One time, in Jacksonville, I was on the 6th floor with a window that faced west. The sunlight would beam through the window for a few hours each day, right before dusk. Using a pencil, I would track the beam by putting marks on the wall, showing, for example, exactly where it fell on the wall when the evening meal showed up, and was pushed through the bars.

Soon, I had a functional sundial, accurate to within a couple minutes.

With the changing of the seasons, the exact spot where the sun went down would shift (to the left, if it was fall) so that it would go down to the right of some tall skinny building on the horizon, perhaps, but would shift, a quarter degree or so, to the left (if it was fall) each day, and might disappear behind the tall skinny building for a few days, before starting to touch the horizon on the other side of it. This became like a calendar of sorts, and I was able to protract where the sun would sink on whatever day I was slated to get out.

 I always liked the solitary confinement situations, where I would only be let out for an hour each day. This is an arrangement that is used to punish inmates who break the law, somehow, while in there. They can't put you in jail for attacking or stealing from someone, because you are already in jail. So, they make it "worse" for those hapless souls by locking them in a special cell (called a "lockdown cell," by the unimaginative institution) by themselves for 23 hours a day. Most other inmates hated this, as they were the gregarious types that would pass time, like 8 hours a day of it, playing Spades in a groups of about a half dozen. They would loudly slam the cards they were playing onto the stainless steel table, accompanied by a gutteral vocal ejaculation, the way Karate guys do when they punch and kick and break pieces of lumber.

I guess the idea behind all that racket is to add an element of intimidation and underscore the power of whatever card they are slamming down, as if to say "Take That!!"

After each card is so presented, in the manner of a basketball being slam-dunked, it's greatness is then hailed through the barking out of a series of various gutteral groans and ejaculations. These are invariably delivered, at least by the black inmates, with as much "bass" being put into their voices as possible.
Because of the acoustics of a jail pod, these notes get really muddled and it sounds like a pack of dogs all barking at once. Things like: "What cha gonna do?! Huh? What cha gonna do?! I got this hand; I got this hand, you ain't got s***!"
The irony is that, a lot of times it is a fight that breaks out during a card game that gets one or more of them sent to lockdown.

Those types hate the solitary confinement. Another aspect of the punishment is that the lockdown cells are in an isolated part of the jail so, no talking half the night through the bars.
And, if the locked down inmate can't read, that's even worse.
But, I always enjoyed the peace that came with isolation.
     

I can't really tell which came first, the chicken, or the egg...

With the "chicken" being the uncluttered living room, and the eggs being the ideas.
It might be that I was ready to make a change, and decluttering the room was part of it. Or it might be that the spaciousness is helping me to keep my thoughts simple.
When all you have in a room is a couch, it's easy to sit on that couch and appreciate being alive and having air to breath. Then when I bring one item in from the other room, where I shoved everything. that item gets my full attention. That saves me from spending only 5 minutes on 25 different things and not getting very far into any of them. This gives me the chance to gradually add things to my environment. Just a guitar and one method book is enough to keep me busy. And it is a high quality of focus.
But, since the water from my bathroom sink comes out piping hot, but the tub's faucet is lukewarm, it just dawned on me that I can get some kind of attachment to connect a hose to the sink, and I can use that to fill the tub with hot water. I've had a lukewarm shower for about 2 years now, and only now did I think of that...

Then, I was thinking how nice it would be to have some kind of jogging application that uses GPS on my phone, so I can start jogging and not have to measure or guesstimate the distances I might be running.
Not long after having that thought, I accidentally clicked on the Google Playstore app and, front and center on their page was a jogging app that does just that.
So, with fun added to jogging, especially for a statistician like myself who loves pie charts and graphs, that was a fortuitous discovery and might help me realize one of my new year resolutions, which is to start a jogging program, so as to help phase out tobacco, which is another one of my resolutions....
Right now, I resolve to get some sleep.
These are novel ideas that are coming to me, connecting the dots between things that have been right in front of me, forever, but that I just never noticed.
Earlier I tried the app while slowly jogging from where there is a large bust of some historical figure's head in the park to Canal Street, finding it to be .42 miles. Eventually, I would like to be able to run that distance in 2 minutes. 

My Stripped Down Environment

I woke up for the first time in 2024,

and was in my stripped down environment, which I could ascertain the reality of by opening my eyes and scanning my surroundings.
The "decluttering," as promised by the author of the decluttering book, has returned positive results in the way of organizing my existence.

Before, I would wake up and then situate myself in front of my laptop, where I would succumb to the powers of suggestion and wind up retracing the previous day's  cyber journey and wind up clicking my way into what was threatening to become an habitual state of mind.

No Longer In That Rut

There was a literal rut in the couch cushion that was forming from me sitting in that same spot, day after carbon copy day.

My living room was cluttered with about 25 things that could only hope to attract about 4 percent of my attention each.

Now I wake up in the openness with a couch and 4 walls and immediately turn myself inward, fostering a feeling of gratitude, which is ironically "for everything I have," as I sit in the almost empty room.

So far this year I woke up with the idea of plugging my full sized USB keyboard into my Android phone, thinking that it would circumvent the "thumb typing" that had been my only method of blogging here using my phone, after the hot spot data runs out, typically half way through the month.

The encroachment of clutter...

I have already typed this in in about a third of the time it would have taken me with my thumbs -a great discovery made less than 8 hours into the new year!

The only thing I haven't been able to do is to add a photo and then to continue putting text in. Going to the editor, I see the photo displayed, but am unable to click in an area outside of it to resume typing...
But, I guess there are more ways than one to skin a cat...
I'm going to try to put a photo in now that the text is done. Done, except to add that I am about to run to the Brown Derby, where I should have a whole months worth of food money on my card, but where I might just get some juice in order to do a beginning of the year fast and cleanse.

$271 Friday Before Christmas

Yeah, and follow that with a $3 New Year's Eve, but more on that later, I guess.

The alternative to embarking upon the juice fast and cleanse would be to go and sell plasma. It seems like the 3 dollars I split with Jacob last night is earmarked as bus fare to go and do just that; and get the 40 bucks that I would have been satisfied with from last night's playing.

It's not like a couple people didn't come and smoke us up and one of them give us some magic mushrooms. Peace of mind: priceless!

New Orleans New Year