Messenger Blog

Hey, Jacob, how's it going on this Tuesday after a Monday that was Columbus Day, and thus, more like a Sunday?

I trust that the tracks we laid down Saturday, at the "museum of crap," were adequate compensation for taking that night off from busking, I look forward to hearing that session (end of message).

The Sum
We made something like 44 bucks playing for maybe 2 hours on "Boardwalk," last night.
Boardwalk, in the realm of busking in New Orleans, is the spot right where Rouse's Market on Royal Street sits.

It was most likely available because it was a Monday evening.

Park Place would be a couple blocks down, where the Rib Room, and whatever hotel it is part of, sits, and is where Tanya Huang has first dibs at. She will often pay one of the homeless people the ripe sum of 20 dollars to plant their cardboard right there to sleep, so that, when the sun comes up and people start to stir, they can hold the spot for her, maybe even by sitting there with some kind of musical instrument from early morning, until she arrived around 11:30 to play from noon until maybe midnight, something that happens from Thursday through Sunday.

Doing the math yields a 48 hours work week for her. though it might hover just above 40, due to her knocking off before midnight on Sundays; because they're Sundays.

I'm pretty sure we knocked off before midnight, it being a Monday like a Sunday...

I been seeing that guy for years walking around with that guitar on his back, but ain't never heard him play the thing...

And, across the street from us was the "I've been listening for 57 years," guy (above).

I could intuit from his body language, after we had arrived to find no other buskers playing, that he was eager to finally hear me play, after 13 years of seeing me going to and fro with a guitar on my back, stopping to listen to Tanya and Dorise, Doreen's Jazz Band, or one of the "old timey" bands like "Yes, Ma'am," that have like a dozen members, on any given occasion, and maybe even a tap dancer. (I always wondered what it must be like to be in such an outfit and, seeing a dollar go in the tip bucket, think: I just made 8 cents!). But, the guy who's been sitting there for 57 years kind of perked up a bit, in anticipation of having a 13 year long curiosity satisfied. He had:..I been seeing that guy for years walking around with that guitar on his back, but ain't never heard him play the thing!.... written all over his face.

Suddenly, I was more nervous over what that guy's impressions were going to be, more so than the fact that we had lucked upon the Boardwalk of the French Quarter being available. He was going to be the measuring stick of whether or not we were "ready for prime time." 

The Sun

The sun was in our faces, but the shadow of the buildings across the street was only about 10 feet from us, and was creeping towards us. 

After starting to play "Ain't No Sunshine," for the guy, and getting the sound kind of balanced and mixed in the process, it was aborted about half way through, partly because I remembered the inherent folly in trying to play something for someone based upon sizing them up. 

One of the highlights of the evening ensued when we did one of my songs called: "The Sun Told Me (everything's gonna be alright)" and 4 one dollar bills went into the case, and then a fresh 10 dollar bill during another McKenna song, perhaps: "Crazy About A Crazy Girl."
I think the tip tally was one twenty, one ten, two fives and 4 ones...
Then arrived Elijah, who had landed on the "go to jail" square when we were playing at the Lilly Pad (St. Charles Place, for trivia's sake) and whose arrest caused enough of a stir that Lilly told me not to play there for "a month, to let things cool down."

He is out on bail, thanks in no small part, to Jacob, who had been the guy's contact on the outside (maybe the only person who had accepted a collect call from "Orleans Parish Prison" from him).

He looked a whole lot better than he had on that night when the police thumped him up against Lilly's shutters, causing her to check her camera to see what the ruckus was, and then causing her oldest daughter to rush out in a full blown panic, thinking that the plain clothed officer involved was a tourist who was beating on me "because he didn't like your music, or something..."

That had been too much drama, and had revealed to "the whole neighborhood," which had stuck its collective head out the collective window, the extent to which Lilly cares about me and wants to protect me. And, due to neighborhood politics that are beyond the scope of this post, and beyond my comprehension, the one month cooling off moratorium on me playing there, was enacted. 

Lilly is in a court battle with a neighbor over the right to the alleyway between their houses. Lilly considered it her property and, at one time, told me that that was where I should play, right in front of the gate to that alley; to mark her territory, in a sense. But after the initial ruling was not in her favor and a judge said that the neighbors could use the alley for things like painting that side of their house, and were thus entitled to their own copy of the key to the gate, Lilly told me to move over a few feet onto her step but no longer right in front of the gate. She felt like she was ceding land to the enemy, I believe.

But, up walked Elijah, looking much better than on that night when he was being accused of being a thief and a crackhead, by a group of people sitting a couple stoops down from us, and then later being arrested for "robbery' and handcuffed up against the house. He had gained about 5 pounds of weight and was no longer shiny with sweat, very nervous and a fiend for everything in sight, asking for one of my cigarettes, was that weed in the rolled up one? Could he have a sip off of whatever we were drinking (kratom tea) etc... 

He apologized to me for the situation with Lilly that had arose when he "went down." It was a chance for me to be vindicated a bit over having come across as kind of a jerk for running him off a few times. Jacob and I are a duo; we've been working on our sound for a couple years. We've never rehearsed anything with you and would thus be just winging it and having a ragged jam session; which is fine when just hanging out somewhere; but we're out here trying to make some money during these 3 short hours...or words to that effect that I would tell him. I'm sure Jacob was wondering what harm could come of letting him join us, and maybe looking at him while rolling his eyes, as if to say: I don't know why he can't be more accepting of people, excuse him for being a boomer, set in his ways and close-minded....I apologize for him... 

Now, at least, Elijah realizes that I wasn't just using Lilly as an excuse to not have to play with other people besides Jacob...

I kept looking over at the guy whose been listening for 57 years, for some kind of indication on Elijah. As he and Jacob talked, I checked to see if the old guy would shake his head or make the finger across the throat gesture. For, if anyone would know that the guy is bad news and to be avoided, it would be that guy. But he gave me no warning glances.

After I came out of Rouses Market with my first beer of the day -a "hazy" IPA of some sort- Elijah was sitting next to Jacob with his guitar out, and asking for "a low 'e'" to tune to. And we were suddenly a trio, without myself having been consulted.

All the conditions were right for me to just let the matter go; there was no Lilly enforcing a 2 musician limit at the spot, the guy had just gotten out of jail and seemed to have cleaned up from whatever mess he was in that had landed him there, the sun had finally sunken behind the buildings across the street putting us in some blessed shade....
I couldn't hear Elijah hardly at all on the other side of Jacob and the amp, which had been placed as far from the mic as possible to eliminate feedback. So I just tried to play my best along with Jacobs bass notes, which I could hear.
Then, of course, a 20 dollar bill went into the case. Was it $10 for Jacob and I, or was it $6.66 for all three of us?

Thankfully, Jacob had broached the subject of tips while I had been in Rouses, with Elijah having said that he didn't want "his share" of the tip jar.

I wound up getting another beer, a Foster's Ale in the "oilcan," and then, as if the penalty for each beer is one more party-crasher, up walked a another musician, who probably lacked the skill to make a living busking on his own corner, but who could certainly blend in with a group (for a share of the tip jar).

He had a story. Doesn't every skeezer have one? He had just had a near death experience, complete with the tunnel of light, and the voice of his his mother telling him to turn around an go back -there are people who need to be skeezed, God has plans for you; your work on earth isn't finished, type of thing....

He was a likeable guy; but I couldn't help wondering what he was even playing, since he was even further away from me than Elijah; and I couldn't help wondering what a Grateful Dead concert would be like if, by the second set there were a half dozen random hippies on various instruments jamming away on Morning Dew, whom Jerry had said: "I see you brought your mandolin (flute, zither, trumpet) come on up and join in; the more the merrier!" to.

I didn't have to be able to hear how the 4 of us sounded. The old man got up and started walking off to somewhere else. I caught up to him around the corner and said: "We ain't no Doreen's Jazz Band, huh?"

He said we were alright but: "Just don't mess with my spot..." That was kind of funny because after we first got there, we had considered setting up there because it was in the shade....

In A Vise

I've been going through a toothache situation for nigh on a week...
The pain goes entirely away sometimes; such as this afternoon. So I wish I hadn't told Lilly about the thing at all. Now she is liable to call me any time and demand an update as to the progress I have made on it. 

I was too lazy to go to the emergency room. Last night I went there and, after a couple hours decided to leave; not having brought a book to read and being subjected to that Seth Meyers late night guy whom I once watched through the entirety of one of his shows and did not laugh at all. I shook my head over the fact that their must be a lot of people who think he is funny...

Anyways, I walked up to the receptionist type nurse and said; "I'm not feeling very well at all, I'm just going to call this off..."

I thought it was funny and befitting someone whose upper jaw feels like it's in a vise...

Zappa Played At Least Once, Shown Here, On A 1971 Gibson SG Deluxe

Too Nice Out Here To Hold A Grudge

I went out around noon Sunday, like I usually do, except this time I brought along a heavy stick made of carved redwood, that was given to me by David the water jug player before he passed away, for use as a self-defense weapon.

That's because Steven stole my two towels plus my laundry card (and tried to steal the coffee filter, which I caught him in the act of, capturing the whole exchange on an audio recording that I was making with my microphone and guitar at the point I decided I wanted a cup of coffee and discovered that the filter was nowhere to be found.

Arriving home, I went to Elizabeth's to see if she wanted me to empty her kitty litter boxes and tote the three bags "full of it" to the dumpster.

But Elizabeth's hip was bothering her and her balance was off and so she didn't even want to assist in the procedure, so we put it off until today.

Then I went to the store and got one strong  beer, and returned to watch more football, followed by the videos that I had put on my stick in the computer lab.

 The "government" phones have stopped supplying data to the masses of low income people -one month short of the election, go figure ...

It's apparent that they don't want "the American people" to be enlightened by any news source outside of the state controlled propaganda outlets that most people see all day, every day...

Government phones have a small amount of data alloted to them, and after that runs out in a week or so, they'll only be useful for making phone calls and texting.

They will have no idea about any "stolen election" or anything else, for that matter, such as planned protests, marches or God forbid, storming any capitols....

I did not encounter Steven which is probably good because I don't know if I could have held back from cracking his skull with the stick over two towels and a laundry card...

So here it is Monday.

I felt pretty good after waking up at 10:00 in the morning having only had a huge cake to eat the night before made with three eggs and a cake mix that I stole from JR's vacated apartment.

While I call out Stephen for stealing from me. In my case, jr's food and his bag of pipe tobacco are going to be no good a year from now when he gets out of jail for aggravated assault -the same thing I was thinking about doing to Stephen.

A 206 was left unlocked by the police when they arrested Jr, on a charge that may have him gone for at least 6 months according to what those in the know have said.

I'm thinking of taking his guitars and bass for safekeeping, which dovetails into what Jacob is doing for the guy named Isaiah, while Isaiah is in jail. There has seemed to be 2 of everything in my life, since I started noticing it.

So it is back to the computer lab to load all kinds of News sports and information videos on to the stick along with maybe another Bob Dylan album and maybe one of the Beatles first couple albums since that would provide a convenient way for me to study the composition of music using just two guitars, bass and drums -something that came to be known as "a beatle band" by musicians.

It just crossed my mind to take a towel from jr's place... that way I can just let go of the grudge against Stephen and not wind up in jail, and then homeless like them, the way Satan seems to be trying to orchestrate.

Portable Words

 

So, Thursday, I get a summons for jury duty almost as if I am being punished for registering to vote, or something.  

But there was this letter, addressed to me, telling me that on the day before my birthday I have to, under penalty of law, report for jury duty, when I can't even make a doctor's appointment without tying a string around my finger.

And, there was the thing -and of course my first question is: do they pay you for your time? 

Otherwise I am going to send them a letter telling them that I think capital punishment is murder committed by the state, and I am vehemently opposed to it, or something, to get myself disqualified...

Even Stephen?

Then Friday around noon, I ran into this homeless guy named Steve that I have seen hanging around The Holy Ground. 

He offered me 20 bucks a night for two nights of staying at my place, claiming that all he needed was a little space on the floor to roll his bedroll out.

In order that I didn't have to go and sell my plasma for 75 bucks,  I took him up on the offer and we went to Sacred Heart and Sherry at the front desk recognized him and said hello and; apparently this guy had stayed with another resident named JJ and JJ had kicked Steven out in the middle of hurricane Francine, when she was pouring down rain, and had 75 mile per hour winds.

He called the police and had Steven removed from his place and so in Sherry's eyes, JJ was the bad guy.

Sherry knew that Steven was  "paying for everything," and JJ had shown immense ingratitude in kicking him out in the middle of a hurricane, but as often is the case in life, I found out that appearances can be deceiving; and it was Steven that I wound up kicking out (on a bright sunny day) because the guy came in looked at the place.

I apologized for how cluttered it was, and then should have backed out of the deal, right then and there. 

As soon as he said: "Yeah, you could say it's cluttered!" 

And then, after criticizing my refrigerator, telling me that it was broken because it should be a lot cooler and then saying the totally ignoramus type thing of: "gee I don't understand why it's not cooler because the freezer works..." he should have been out.

So that's the kind of ignoramus I was dealing with, one who thinks that a refrigerator should work because the freezer, which is a totally separate component, does. 

He went basically through the apartment loudly complaining about everything from a piece of hair on the sink to Harold having knocked some food out of his dish onto the floor.

The guy sprayed Raid in my kitchen without asking me first.  He cleaned the bathroom counter by basically shoving all of my toiletries into the corner end of it leaving them knocked down and in disorder.  Then when he cleared the bed off so he could sleep on it, he tossed all the items that were on it seemingly in random directions to clear a space for himself and I wound up asking him to leave after he finished his laundry. 

He had also said a bizarre thing about himself not having to buy cheese when he went out to get groceries because "we already have (the block of medium cheddar that he saw in the fridge while inspecting it like any renter would, I suppose) some."

His deal was going to be to try to slight me on the rent because he had made some kind of breakfast that would come out of his food stamps, I suspected.

"What makes you think my cheddar cheese is 'ours,' what's that got to do with a space on the floor to unroll your sleeping bag?" 

That thread of conversation wended predictably, with him espousing some pretty woke ideas while trying to explain why he is entitled to the cheese, and I reached the point where I didn't want to be sleeping in the same apartment as Stephen Henning, and so..

He almost left with my coffee filter in his possession.  

Luckily, I had the hankering for a cup, but couldn't find the thing,that he had admired openly the night before and even offered to buy from me.

So I encountered him with: "Have you seen the coffee filter?" 

He said: "No ," and then I went back in the kitchen and looked again whereupon he confessed that he had been about to steal it.

And then he became; I don't know what,  a Democrat? by starting to argue that somehow he deserved the filter, because he had been short changed on his $20 for some reason, maybe the refrigerator...

Anyways, that was my Friday.

And then Jacob and I went out and had a pretty good night, but I did drink.

And we went back out Saturday and we played in a different spot because Lily had run us off for bringing other musicians.

 Within an hour, we had -you guessed it- other musicians...

A man from Germany who played the "musical saw" as they call it, came along and became quick friends with Jacob.

In fact he had approached him and directed his request to jam with us mainly at him, in a slightly disrespectful way. But I had my reservations about him as he was kind of openly gay and so I doubted that music was his prime motivator. To most gays, everything is a means to the end of gay sex. A musical saw can help you hook up with queer musicians, and that's the extent of the purpose of a musical anything, has been my experience, and that's the way I had read this guy.

The guy hardly said a word to me, as noted, except for at the very end.

 "What about the tips?" of course was referring to whatever had gone into the case when all four of us (there was a drummer by now) were playing which it was implied by him was to be divided four ways which might have yielded $4 each, for him and the guy who came along banging a homemade drum.

 I am remiss for not giving the saw player $4. The way they came at me demanding it had taken me aback and I thought it more important that they understood that no agreement had been settled on. Most of the time musicians who ask to sit in will specify: you can keep all the tips, I just want to play.

It should be a privilege to sit in on an act that has practiced together and it should be that person's aim to keep up, and assumedly they like the sound of the combo and want to play along.

But saw man immediately said: Let's do something that we all know," and offered "The House of the Rising Sun" as a suggestion. We sounded really good. I went to get my first beer of the night, and when I got back there was now a drummer and, it was like goldilocks as far as there being someone in my chair and using my microphone. Good thing I had brought my guitar and harmonica with me or there might have been some slobber on the latter...

Jacob became angry. 

We should have given the musical saw guy 4 dollars...

Maybe 6..

Today I called Lilly..to be continued...

Consultant Brought In

I. B. Buggin'

Like I've been saying on major social media, I have nothing against palmetto bugs. I still can't believe they can't bite whenever I pick them up. They aren't equipped with any way to injure a human. There is no way I was going to stomp on the first one of them that I saw; one that was a mature size of maybe a half dollar. An oval half dollar.
I tried to leave food for the thing, and water, in a spot close to the closet where I had seen it go. I tried vegetables, strawberries, honey and even flour.
I had a roommate once, named Dave. He was studying biology at the same community college where I was studying English and music.
He was an avid student who grew pretty potent weed in a closet that was lined with aluminum foil and had "grow lights" that he timed the on-off cycles of to, in effect, speed the seasons up for the plants so that, they would bloom in the spring, have a robust summer and then start budding up with the approach of fall, all within like 14 weeks.
Two leafs off his plants, the least noticeable two that were on his plants; dried one inch under a light bulb, a process begun 15 minutes before Letterman came on, and smoked, kind of accounted for all of my drug use, in those days. I don't think I ever went to school baked; that was an end of the night, Letterman show, and then guitar playing way to end the day.

Fast forward 36 years...

And I still remember how Dave, whose yearbook "motto" was: "Dave's been confused," as he loved Led Zepplin along with biology.
Anyways, in our apartment, there were roaches. But never an infestation. Dave would place a certain amount of food in one spot, and the roaches would apparently wander no further than from their crack in the wall to the food and then back; and I guess they would adjust their birth rate to the daily amount of food and stay a reasonable sized colony.
Dave basically argued that "You're not going to see them crawling all over the house..." I remember him saying.
And, he was right about that. Never in the bathroom or any of the bedrooms, and certainly never crawling on you if you try to watch TV in the dark, type of thing...
But, the palmetto bugs....
Carlos had them.
Carlos left here in a hurry, owing almost $7,000 in back rent. That was kind of a shame because Carlos lived pretty well on the money he wasn't remitting to the landlords. He used to send me on errands and always made sure I was well compensated.
He apparently grabbed whatever of value fit in a couple suitcases and disappeared to, Bugloosa, Louisiana, (why is "Bug"loosa apropos? read on!) if the rumors are to be believed. It's possible that he will be able to live there rent free for a few years before having to leave and then get on some other program...
After he left, his door was left unlocked by the maintenance guy's. I remember that I could kind of sense it. They had gone to each apartment to put portable A/C units in them, and I imagine they left his door unlocked because they could tell there was nobody living there.
So, one night I had run out of something and it just flashed through my mind that the door had been left unlocked. Carlos left behind a little bit of electronics.
But, it was a wealth of things like nail clippers, toothpaste, light bulbs, you name it.

The first time I went in there, I went in with a flashlight. When I opened the door to a pantry type closet, there looked to be a pile of something brown on the floor of it. As soon as the flashlight's beam fell on it, the brown pile scattered in every direction and had vanished in a second. It had been something like 2,500 palmetto bugs.

Further inspection showed that mice, most likely, had bitten through everything that had been in boxes on the shelves. Empty boxes, and a flour bag, with holes gnawed through them were all that remained. It had been a pile of flour on the floor that the bugs had been all over. Carlos just can't turn his back for a couple weeks, and all hell breaks loose in his pantry.
But there were plenty of things, like unopened jars of peanut butter and other canned goods, and the refrigerator, which had never shut off, was great for a midnight snack, I recall.

Yes, the law of attraction...

But, the concern over finding that there are even a dozen palmetto bugs in one of my closets, is definitely informed by the horror I witnessed at Carlos' place.

So, enter David Saunders, the anole...
I named him after a kid from the neighborhood I grew up in...
Mr. Saunders is going to try to reason with the palmetto bugs and maybe reach some kind of agreement on population control, and other specifics; maybe make sure they don't abuse Harold's generosity in letting them live...
A Closet Anole

It seemed like a great plan, to capture anoles and let them go in the cat supply closet. But, they were really hard to catch. You have to aim for some spot near them and hope that they will unwittingly choose to run in that direction and into your hand. If you aim straight at them, you just aren't fast enough...

There is a lesson to be learned there...
So, yeah, after almost giving up, I came in through the back door, and there was Dave, just clinging to the wall in a little cove that offered him no escape, and I was able to grab him, at which point he may have begun to play dead; but now he is in the closet...

So Far, So Good

So this is it.

I can develop the technique of whacking the space bar on this keyboard. It's almost like playing a musical part where, at the end of each phrase there is a heavy accent.

The space bar(whack!) has to be hit like a rim shot snare after each word, but it is actually workable, thanks in part to Steveland Morris and the album pictured. I can type in time with an album that I was aware of, back when it came out.

I was 11 and had just won a radio station contest with the prize being that the top 15 albums on the Boston charts, in the summer of '73, would be delivered to the doorstep of our ranch style home in what wound up being 2 separate brown-paper-bag type paper wrapped (excuse me)

quadrangle shaped packages in the approximate dimensions of the box to the left with the name of such a shape defined...

The first package arrived just a few days before our family was to leave on a 2 week vacation on Cape Cod. It contained a typed note under an official WBZ-FM letterhead, explaining that some of the top 15 albums had plumb sold out, even in that behemoth of a city 50 miles, or exactly one hour, usually, away.
In my 11 year old mind the city was about 9 times larger than I eventually realized it to be after I was much older. But I imagined there must have been at least 25 record stores there in which to search for the top 15 albums on the Boston chart.

The Boston part turned out to be significant in that I got "Aerosmith," by Aerosmith, sometimes called their "self titled" one, which hadn't done well enough to make any top 15 lists outside of Boston. They were "the bad boy's from beantown," with that image underscored, I guess, by having the band on the cover looking like they might play you some rock and roll or maybe kick your ass.
I always thought of that as "the pendulum" swinging back from the Woodstock era, which had ushered long hair in as a fashion for young men -It was because enough girls liked to run their hands through it that, why would you want to cut it and wind up looking like a baby killer, so freshly back from killing that your killing crew cut hadn't grown out yet, type of thing.

Stevie Wonder's "Songs In The Key Of Life" is a true masterpiece that wasn't in the top 15 of the Boston rock and roll charts, at least not by the time I would have gotten it. It was probably bumped out by The J. Geils Band's "Bloodshot" album,which came on red slightly translucent vinyl.that was one of the more flexible records. I remembered the older records, some of which actually said "Unbreakable" on them. They were very stiff and hard to break but they would shatter...

The note in the first package promised that the remaining 7 albums would be sent as soon as they arrived in Boston. I thought about writing back to them asking: "Well, you play these albums on your station, so you must have at least one of each; could you just send me those..?" I would have thought they might have a direct pipeline to the record company's marketing people.I'm sure they would have air mailed the station a brand new Paul McCartney's "Red Rose Speedway," had they left their copy on a sunny window ledge or something...

So this keyboard with the stuck space bar key, might actually have ties to Alex Carter, whom I believe mailed it to me back in 2015.

At the time, my laptop had some keys that didn't function. I actually had all the characters I couldn't produce in a small text file that I would copy and paste into whatever I was writing if I needed one. An external USB keyboard hadn't occurred to me; I must have thought I would have to download and install some driver specific to whatever brand of keyboard it was.

I tried to liberate the key the other day and wound up making a comment somewhere that's body was like 27 pages of spaces. I began to imagine a message of 27 pages of spaces being part of some diagnostic that the keepers of the algorithm use,which, when sent resets that person's profile, overwriting it with nothing. I will know if the Ellen Alverdyan ads stop popping up everywhere...

In Which I Play A Song And Sing

@easystick

In Bed By Nine Thirty

 I'm kind of still pretty busy but fighting the urge to lay back and listen to about 11 albums in stereophonic high fidelity...

So, I'm leaving the Horsehead Nebula to babysit you all while I'm going to do the Wim Hof deep breathing method for about a half hour.

Don't give the nebula a hard time, and do what it say's...

Ready To "Be Safe Out There."

I guess I could be the one to write the groundbreaking book on the subject of: How to wean yourself off of screen staring.

Perhaps my spending "way too much time" on YouTube, and the feeling of being powerless over it is just an obstacle to mindful living and, once I get over the hurdle, I will be in a position to give advice to others.

It's like a palette of the seven deadly sins, along with every vice, is available on every DEvice...

I guess I should thank my lucky stars that I don't have a porn addiction, and don't have 3 thousand videos of it saved somewhere, unwilling to delete any one of them because, like, where am I ever going to find another birthmark on a girl's ass exactly like that if the video is removed from the server?

But, besides "lust," there is the "envy" that might creep in from watching videos of virtuoso musical performances, inspiring me to buckle down and start practicing with a metronome for 2 hours every morning, before doing anything else, only to wind up watching 2 hours of videos every morning before doing anything else...

Then there are the "anger" videos, depicting white people just like me being senselessly attacked or pushed in front of trains by what look like Democrats of color. Then, often the "highlighted" comment would be something like: "Good, white boy deserved that for bringing me over as a slave!" left by a 20 something year old...

I've heard a lot of people talking about how they are uncomfortable out in public now, unsure of what to talk about, or how loud to do it..

This little girl, who was a "prodigy," on the bass guitar, has had a channel on YouTube that started with a video of her playing her dad's bass for the first time at the age of 4 or 5.

She was using an app called Yousician, which makes learning like playing a video game. Instead of the boring polka dots on the sheet music I learned from, it's more like following a bouncing ball on the screen and using the bass like a joystick to hit all the right notes on time, with onscreen feedback rewarding you for nailing it with some kind of splash like a mini firework.

Now, she is about 11 years old and posts videos almost daily of her playing along note for note with bass players who are considered the best in the world. And she seems to be filming from the music room in her house which is chock full of bass guitars of all kinds, a drum kit, keyboards, and a full digital recording studio. Her dad has been running the channel, and I guess the talent of the girl has done most of the work, drawing the attention of those very same best bass players in the world, and she now seems to be living the life of the rich and famous; wearing new and expensive looking things, unboxing brand new thousand dollar guitars and other musical toys almost daily.

Her channel has something like 800k subscribers, and it is linked to a Patreon so people can send money, and she even has a store which sells hoodies and hats with her brand on them....

And I'm not jealous over the overt display of material wealth.

It's actually eye-opening to "how things should be done," these days. Get a good little video camera and then go to work making content, every single day if you can. Find a niche and even if your stuff is only fit for the likes of one in a thousand people; if you do the math that might equate to 10,000 followers, who might Patreon you an average of just 7 dollars a year; but -there you go; there's a career doing what you love, 70 grand a year for making a video almost every day. That could be life changing, because you will soon figure things like: If I get a really good night's sleep and eat only superfoods and get up every morning and meditate before going for a 3 mile run, my videos come out much more easily almost every day and they are better.

So, I'm grateful to Ellen for that awakening, at the very least -for being a textbook example of how things should be done in 2424... This isn't going into a studio to cut a demo and then mailing an EP on vinyl to the local rock station, hoping they will play it during their "home grown rock" segment, and it will start being requested, and then....

The emotion I get from being a follower of Ellen's channel is I keep fantasizing about saving her from drowning after she falls through the ice when she's skating; or shooting the gun out of the hand of someone who is attempting to abduct her away from her father (In Pirate's Alley in the French Quarter, for that one -I don't know where the imaginary frozen pond is) or her having type AB negative blood, which the hospital has none of and I encounter her distraught parents outside the hospital in tears because the nearest unit of that type that could be found is a 5 hour flight away, and it would be too late, and I ask them what's wrong and they tell me, and I say: "I'm type AB negative, where's the blood lab?" type of thing and I save Ellen's life, so she can keep playing bass as well as almost anyone else on the planet.

But, yeah, it's starting to bug me almost; saving the girl over and over in my mind in every imaginable way. But rather than look at that as a curse, maybe it's a golden opportunity for me to explore what the hell is going on in my own head that might only be surfacing now...

They are probably making about $15K a month, and, more power to them. I wonder if Ellen's talent has done most of the heavy lifting, or if her dad has some kind of education in "online marketing." Both could be true in this case...

The sun is coming up and I'm about to take a walk to Winn Dixie where I might just get the ingredients to do a week's long water fast. To wit: water.

Maybe I can sort through my thoughts and emotions along the way and figure out why I'm haunted by dreams about saving the life of a girl who seems to be doing just fine, thank you, on her own...

 

 

The Idiot's Guide To Useful Idiots

I am under the throes of video addiction at a level that concerns me.

I went to the blog of Alex Carter, something I do less and less of these days, as in maybe once a month, since the quality of his writing has diminished, commensurate with his having taken up drinking again.

He has astounded me by being a text book, central casting version of the California progressive liberal, or whatever is the label stuck to "them."

I am starting to think that some globalist actor, or at least some group of U-Cal Berkley drop outs whose job it is to maintain the code for the Google algorithm, has as a goal to divide the people of this country into roughly two equal halves, and then pit the one against the other.

And at this point in history, with AI in its infancy, and with the smartphone having been calibrated to be a mind control tool, the person with a hand on the algorithm's lever has probably surpassed in power those that grip the fossil fuel lever. The tech people have become richer, overnight, than the oil moguls that took a generation or two to accumulate their wealth; and I think fossil fuels have become your grandfather's means of controlling populations.

Was not one of the objectives of the "world-wide" lockdowns to take just about every car off the road, to put a squeeze on the people with all that oil money? Maybe even to devalue the money that they already have? That Arabian Sheikh who would show up at the casino with the murmurings about him being a billionaire, "with a 'b,'" having circulated with people trying to picture what a thousand million dollars would look like, and all that. Yeah, like him.

Fast forward, and it's the Google algorithm that has erupted like black gold from the earth, and the power shifted to where a Zuckerberg is worth 100 times as much as that sheikh, and then this pandemic happens, and all the cars are taken off the streets, worldwide. An easy task, when you have the complicity of the media that everyone is staring at the programming of, all day every day. Then of course, pipelines are shut down or blown up, and it begins to look more like a war between new and old money.

And the pandemic also has the feature that, every time a citizen gets a "free 'immunization,'" CVS bills the treasury about $23 bucks, and sends it to Big Pharma, while Fauci is appearing on bought-off "mainstream" media telling everyone to get six of them. 

And yeah, in all the confusion a guy with dementia gets installed in the Whitehouse, and the war machine cranks right up.

And there are people like Alex Carter in California taking PBS and NPR and the other 70 outlets owned by the same corporate interests, as gospel.

To me, it's like those logic puzzles I used to love to do.

They would describe a party for example. There would be 6 red chairs, 6 blue and 6 green. A party of 6 would show up, 3 of them would be wearing red carnations, 3 of them yellow. And then information would be given like, only one person with a red carnation is sitting in a green chair; three people are wearing hats; one of them is sitting in a blue chair; and he does not have a yellow carnation. Two people with red carnations arrived before anyone wearing brown shoes...etc

Then, at some point you have enough information to answer some question, like so who is the one that showed up last? Or something....

I look at the 72 outlets all broadcasting the exact same message, so that you could flip through all 72 "news" channels and hear: "Biggest threat to Democracy since the civil war..." 72 times. Quite unlikely that each anchor chose those same words. 

Yet, there are those like Alex who just think that that is the voice of truth; always has been...

I remember as a kid, thinking that the news was true. And, since Walter Cronkite probably believed that whatever he was reciting was factual, there was the added deception that his sincerity afforded, and I remember thinking that was "the way it is."

So, with the last person who was involved in the Kennedy assassination having recently passed away, I would vote for Trump/Kennedy just to get that burning lingering curiosity satisfied (the releasing of classified documents pertaining to the event).

In the not so far future I think there may be no geographic borders; the only station that anyone could hold of any import will merely be if they are online or offline. It won't matter from where.

Armies won't be fighting for any red white and blue or any other color flags, war will probably default to the simplest division of the race into two roughly equal halves. It seemed like it was shaping up to be all "people of color" against the Caucasians; that would have been a pretty even sided battle. I think the sticking point was that Asians and maybe even Indians could not be persuaded to join the "of color" side. Maybe the algorithm hasn't learned how to control their minds because of some language barrier; or maybe the Chinese, for one, are actually smart to insulate their citizenry from western decadence.

So, it think that perhaps Marxist's vs. everyone else might be the dielectric that keeps the population in a sustainable polarity.

It's interesting how, as a whatever I am, I can observe the mainstream media in lock-step and hear Judy Woodruff bare ass lying, and pulling a "report" out of her butt hole about Trump asking Netanyahu to prolong the killing until after the election lest it boost the Kamala Hilarious campaign. It's down to bold-faced lying because the group that the algorithm has cordoned off into the half that Alex Carter is a poster boy for* has been captured and in Orwellian style is ready to accept that war is peace and ignorance is strength, type of thing.

Never suspicious that all 72 media outlets are parroting the same Hitler-esque big enough lies repeated enough times; type of thing, and though us "right wing" people can notice, and wonder aloud just why it's so important, to the people with their hand on the algorithm lever, to keep Trump out of office and out of these wars. 

Us "conservatives" can figure out what color chair the man who gave the woman wearing a black carnation a piece of cake to is sitting in. But people living in places that have become crime infested shit holes like California have been trained to not even consider any other side to any story. I wonder if they even have access to a RFK Jr. speech or if the telecom companies throttle that data. Carter has said that the Internet is "spotty" out there in San Jose. Spotty like it is in Iran, he might mean. Seems to me they can't be stupid enough to believe that RFK Jr. is a radical lunatic just because the radical lunatics they see all day every day on their phones say he his...

A Trump administration would be a catastrophe; even though we had 4 years of one and it wasn't. It takes 8 years to impose a dictatorship, I guess, and Donald was just getting warmed up...

*Alex, who was a fist pumping supporter of the BLM scam, should be right there alongside those holding the "Free Palestine" signs. He IS them in every other ideological way, with the Trump Derangement Syndrome being paramount. But, since he sent his saliva to 23 And Me, and it came back that he is like 0.4% "Jewish," well, that's a whole different kettle of fish. He has skin in the game and on the matter of Israel he is a MAGA sympathizer. How feckless. I hope none of his far left radical progressive Marxist neighbors attack him when they see him coming out of a synagogue. He might be bludgeoned to death while yelling "I'm with you, I think George Floyd should replace Washington on the dollar bill!" 

He's not a very useful idiot, his blog having no followers that I know of, for example...

I think Jesus warned believers about not being "lukewarm."

Anyways; I've resolved not to be a useful idiot myself, and I just pray for the will to never again click on another: "Watch Host Go Silent After Guest Say's The Quiet Part Out Loud!" type of video...

And I guess Woodruff wouldn't be bare ass lying if there weren't the gullible Alex Carter's out there.

Hopefully he has lost the link to this blog and I can start writing here without his snarky comments appearing as "anonymous" any more....

The Elusive Daily Blog

Posting in mid-decision between posting something here, or going right to the Audacity music studio..
This particular song has been in the works for like 2 months now. This is a complete departure from my previous method that involved more "catching lightning in a bottle." Hoping to play something in alignment with the moon and stars and my biorhythms, not to mention the tide.

Sometimes things got played that I thought I could never replicate. 

But, even such phrases, as the transcriptions of Frank Zappa solos by Steve Vai prove, can be expressed in "mathematical" terms. 

I think of it in mechanical terms.

So, even stuff that might have been "accidentally" produced by a string getting caught in a fingernail, or something can still be notated and then played again. 

But, I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Vai could transcribe any of it.
So, I'm now writing parts that are only intended to be played one way.

 
Just as two different concert violinists will sound pretty much the same, playing a Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, whatever I compose should be able to be rendered in polka dots on a page of "staves." 

Keeping the same "symphony" in my head for weeks on end, instead of changing it nightly, to something that can't be remembered the next morning is, I believe optimal; and perhaps even a stroke of genius type of thing.

It might take a couple weeks of mulling over a tune before the thought of a choir of Maria Callas samples singing in harmony comes to mind. I think you have to really live with a song; take it out for walks, have it in your head off and on every day; maybe even incessantly and nervously hum it to yourself every waking hour...
Maria Callas was very amazing, both for her vocal chord gymnastics, and for the fact that she smoked cigarettes.

Artist's Date 1

In the Artist's Way book by Julia Cameron she wasn't kidding about the "artist date" being something that you will I not always be in the mood for,  when the time comes...

But it is "non-negotiable."

It's literally taking the artist within out to do something -just the two of you.

My first one is to Bayou St. John.

I/we are going to sit under a tree and play the guitar that has four strings.

I'm leaving only 4 strings on it and approaching it like it was a banjo or a cello, to try to gain a new perspective on music through not having the bottom four strings to have to either do something with, or avoid.

The tree I have sat under before is already being sat under by three people with little chairs and a cooler.

I'll just go down a couple more trees. This does feel like a waste of time, as Julia said it sometimes would. I could probably do the very same thing in the quarter and make a few bucks.

The next tree was a fire ant fest, with hills around the trees and swarms of them all over a Popeye's Chicken box.

This tree has no ants, just a ferret or possum hole...