Thursday, May 29, 2014

1 Day Without Alcohol: Round 2 (added to Thursday p.m)

20 Days Of Drinking Enough
I Could Handle It Better, Back In The Day...
I don't have to hit rock bottom in order to push towards the surface...
I have zero dollars and zero cents in my pocket; and have terminated my latest experiment with drinking alcohol, on the 21st day.
The effects have been global. For starters:
  • I have drank and smoked weed and spent hours on this computer; often until it was too late to, and I had no fuel in the tank for, busking.
  • I had a 60 dollar and a 70 dollar night, before the diminishing returns of from drunkenness began to drag me down to the bottom and spin me around, like a crocodile to its prey.
  • I could have hit it off better with Rick, from Austin, who had been 8 months sober, and who wasn't amused by and had to tolerate my disposition; and we could have started a band.
  • I could have lost my guitar one night when I leaned it against the wall behind the Rouses Market trash cans, foraged for food; walked off with the food, but not the guitar, and only realized my mistake (I feel lighter for some reason) a block down the street and around the corner.
  • I cut short several busking sessions after I started slurring my vocals; and was visited by negative thoughts like: "These people are cheap; I''m not playing for them!" when the very next group to come along might have been the 50 dollar tip group.
  • I became rude and cantankerous with rude and cantankerous drunken skeezers; which could have lead to a physical confrontation in which my guitar would have become their target (as that represents to them what makes me think that I am better than them).
  • I have walked the Quarter "one last time" looking for abandoned drinks, telling myself (out loud even) "Why am I doing this; I'm already drunk!" at hours when the only skeezers that aren't already passed out drunk are wide awake on crack and in the mood to follow someone to find out where he sleeps; desperate for more crack.
  • I didn't read a page of Charles Dickens the whole time, nor improve upon any of my original songs.
  • The few initial recordings that I have made speak for themselves; broken by pauses when I forgot what song I was doing.
  • I found myself under the dock without candles, water, or a means to cook food that I had wasted time gathering. The crabs at the bottom of the river: "It wasn't a waste of time at all, Daniel!"
  • I have woken up too late to make it to the food stamp office to hound them about turning my card back on.
  •  I have started days off with a pint of vodka mixed with my energy drink, after having concluded that that hadn't been a good idea the day before.
  • It has taken me longer to tune my guitar.
  • The money spent on booze has not been a substitute for, but has rather increased the money spent upon other things; more cigarettes, more weed
  • Mostly, though, I haven't been able to improvise anything to the delight of any tourists; and have "ended" a lot of songs with: "Ooops, sorry. I'm still working on that one..."
Demoted To Non Drinker

Mood Is What Matters
It seems premature to say that I feel better already; but, by the time I was sober at 3a.m. this morning, reading Dickens by candlelight; after taking a couple bites off of some "liver cheese" (which tastes like the food that billionaires might feed their cats; but I think I needed the iron) I felt great. In my mood, especially.
Even the rats seemed in a good mood, as if they had gotten the sober Daniel back, who would sit up reading and drinking coffee; and who left them a generous pad of liver cheese along with bananas for the mice. The biggest one came to sniff my hand, as I read, which I think is a universal sign in the animal kingdom which means: "Can we have some more liver cheese?"
I had found about 5 pounds of bananas, a couple apples, a couple bags of salad mix; a tin of some other kind of expensive cheese, and had water and a jar of yogurt salad dressing; in a canola oil base; no soy) after having sat out of the rain at the Lilly spot and not made a penny; not even off of someone who could see that I was out of business.

"Some weather we're having!" said Lilly, when she arrived, chaperoning Chantilly, before snapping her umbrella shut and slipping through the gate.
It is raining again now, at 8 p.m. Wednesday. I could think that God is completing my withdrawals so that, when I do make my first dollar, it won't be going into the cash register at The Unique Boutique.
Some History (and now, for something completely different)
    One of my old playing spots, St. Augustine, Florida circa 2009


    Feature: My "All Time" Most Read Posts
    18 Oct 2012
    6144
    10 Oct 2012, 3 comments
    809
    451
    397
    11 May 2012, 2 comments
    395
    The one that makes the most "sense" above, would be the one about the coldest night of the year, as I can imagine people wondering if they should pack a heavy sweater for their trip to see Mardi Gras...
    The other ones were gotten to through people clicking upon pictures that they Googled, the same way that I acquired them, such as the one of Jack Johnson, which is linked directly to the post (I could have saved it to my hard drive and then loaded it from there, and it would become free standing as part of the blog and wouldn't be gotten to by people who Google Jack, specifically.
    The Troll Under The Bridge
    The latter method is, I believe a device of what is called "trolling," and is the reason that I had my whole blog deleted in 2009, losing me almost 3 years of "work," [if that is what you want to call what I do here LOL!]).
    That time, I had written a piece about all of the artists whom I cover with my music, posting stock photos linked directly to Google which got millions of hits per year -and mentioning Brittany Spears and a wax likeness of her in a museum window in front of which I played "Hit Me Baby, One More Time," in Saint Augustine, Florida, as a gimmick.
    The mention of the "Queen Of Internet Searches" and all the potential traffic she was drawing to my blog (even though my blog wasn't a vehicle for inundating people with pop-up adds or planting spyware on their systems) was just too much for some watchdog group at Blogger.
    Add to that my reference to John Lennon with the 20th anniversary of his death on the horizon; and my whole blog was removed.
    Ooops, I've Done It Again...

    When I tried to contact the group (under the "If you feel your blog was removed unjustly..." head) desperately trying to restore the blog; they thought I was trolling them! trolling the troll watchdog group!!-they even had a name for me "he used to go by 'Nite Cruzer (it was more Middle Eastern sounding than that, but it escapes my memory)' but now he is 'Daniel McKenna,' and an inveterate troll!!" he posted words to the effect of in their forum; and cautioned the other group members with "he is after us, that is what he is after) and threatened to scour the web for any other place that I had posted, and shut me down there, too.
    I really didn't know enough about trolls then, and still don't; but my messages to them saying "Please -I don't even know what a troll is!" seemed to insult their intelligence and make them think that a troll was mocking them.
    I started a new "thread" on their forum, which struck them as something, either odd, unconventional, amateur; or maybe trollish.*

    It's very possible that he got his trolls mixed up; or that the real troll used the computer at the homeless place as his weapon (..I don't know, if any one of them not-referred-to-by-me-as-skeezers-yet who sat around that place thrice daily were intelligent enough to run a web based scam off of that computer next to the bookshelves of paperbacks -some of them not bad.
    Unless she was very theatrical and could play "the brain-dead moron."
    Although, there was one guy named Worley, who was from West Rutland, Vermont, which is the very same town of 2,000 people where my grandparents on my mothers side, along with just about all their resultant cousins, aunts and uncles etc. lived.
    This was seemingly a great coincidence, finding someone from a town of 2,000 people that was about 1,000 miles away.
    Since it was a  town that our family had made the 120 mile trip to periodically, as I was growing up; as well as a town where each one of the 2,000 knew the other 1,999; I decided to quiz Mr. W. on the topic of West Rutland, and he was able to nail the name of the swimming hole, right down to the the Polish pronunciation Sabatkas, I believe it is spelled -pretty impressive, along with the name of the convenience store, and then the most Dickensian thing: he was in my cousin Sue's class (of 11) in high school.
    I could have called my long estranged kissing cousin and gotten the scoop on Mr. Worley, maybe asked her if she thought he had the potential to become a troll.
    He didn't seem to share my same astonishment over the magnitude of the coincidence, maybe because he was overtaken by the thought of: Oh, my, I've come 1,000 miles to Florida to get as far away from my hometown, where everybody knows everyone elses business (but in a good way , if you're a salt of the earth good Catholic) and here I was standing next to him; one phone call away from hearing his biography told...must have given him the willies.
    But, he spoke intelligently enough on other topics; and he had an interestingly shaped head; to make you think he is driven by some kind of passion -it was a Stephen King/Neil Young/Jack Nicholson (sp?) shape of cranium and, I'm not ruling out that he wasn't an Internet troll.

    *The spell check didn't flag it; so I guess it is a word.
     
    Free Computer Blues
    It all started when I blogged from an unprotected publicly available computer at the Saint Francis House homeless shelter in Saint Augustine. No password was required to log on -just wait for the people ahead of you to use up their half hours and turn it over- and for plenty of homeless people, the machine was their prime means of applying for food stamps and disability etc. and they were entering their names, social security numbers, dates of birth etc. and some hacker was having a field day -the already poor and already downtrodden huddled masses were getting letters purporting that they had already gotten and cashed their benefit checks...in Somalia, Africa, as a matter of fact; how could they have forgotten that?

    1 comment:

    1. So, becoming a drunken stumblebum again hasn't helped?

      I, too, am finding that alcohol is not worth the price of buying it because not only is that money gone, but it makes other things worse, more impulse buys etc.

      ReplyDelete

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