Potato Days

• Days Sober: 12
• Friday Night Off From Busking
• Algiers Trip Planned

I sit here, early Saturday morning, with a bag by my feet containing freshly pulled beets, olives, a can of cat food, and bananas, and an energy drink.
The beets are to go with the potato diet that I am about to extend to a second day. Yesterday, I started the day around noon with a lot of boiled potatoes with sauerkraut on the side, and doctored up with salt and black pepper and cayenne pepper and mustard and a dash of olive oil and minced garlic; all mashed together.
This power meal helped me to work on music all afternoon. I however, tired towards the evening, and chose to stay in and take a hot bath and work on more music, and watch a movie, perhaps.
I had some popcorn later on in the evening, before getting to sleep at the "normal" time of about 11 PM.
A Running Program
That is why I was up with the sun, and have already taken my 450 yard run, on my way to the store for the above. I run from the corner of the fence out front, to the awning over the sidewalk leading to a certain business. I picked that distance because it is the distance at which I had felt sufficiently winded upon my first foray into jogging a few days ago, to have stopped running there, and resumed walking.
By pacing it off, feeling silly and walking like a referee stepping off a penalty, I have come up with 450 as being the distance of what I am going to make my "daily" run, beginning with these first couple of them. I figure that I can reduce my time from about 2:20 to about 1:45.
What bugs me is that, based upon the distance, which is within feet of being a quarter mile; my velocity, I have calculated at 9:20 per mile. I ran the fastest mile of my life at about the age of 20; at 5:03
I ran the course in 2:24.32 today, which is 3 and a quarter seconds slower than yesterday.
Could the potatoes be slowing me down? Probably not; probably the potatoes minus some kind of protein to go with them.
Eating Solid Food
I have only been eating solid food for the past couple days, after a 10 day juice/water fast. This kept me sober, once again, and I am working on my13th day "dry," as the AA people would refer to it.
They don't consider one "sober" until he overwrites the whole thought process that resulted in his drinking; and no longer even desires a drink.
I don't desire a drink. That might change if, at some point, I add certain foods to my diet, which might make me crave wine; like baked sole with a green salad on the side...
The Patriots are playing a playoff game today, and I will schedule around that, in order to place me in front of a TV somewhere; preferably where I can even hear the audio, the Royal Sonesta on Bourbon Street comes to mind. It used to be one of the first "nightclubs" in the nation, back in the 20's.
I go back to the room now to cook some potatoes, perhaps make headway on a song, and then to hit the quarter early enough to busk a little bit before the game starts. I will probably stay there throughout the course of both games today, and then play at the Lilly Pad from the time that the second game ends, until maybe 2 AM. The weather is pretty nice for January 16th, at about 60 degrees and partly cloudy. The coldest night of the year should occur during the next 30 days or so, and then it should be busking weather from then on until fall.
Algiers Trip
I really want to fish for catfish; the type of catfish that I have seen in the hands of people who had just caught them out of the Mississippi River, over by the spot where Howard used to live in a tent in a stand of trees.
I just need to get some high-test fishing line, and tie it to an empty milk jug with the cap on it, and then put a sinker and a hook with some chicken liver on it, on the other end, toss it out there and then wait, I suppose, for the milk jug to begin an erratic dance on top of the water, bobbing and whirling and trying to go under.
Those fish were over 2 feet long and weighed over 10 pounds.
I want to bring a cooler with some ice in it and come back here with enough catfish to fill my freezer and save me at least 20 bucks per month...yup...
And I want to locate Howard.
Starting at his former camp spot, it will be easy to trace a path to the nearest McDonalds, and of course the library. If he is living over in Algiers, either in a house that he has already bought out of the inheritance that he recently acquired, or with the friends that he had made over there, he would still probably be going to the library, probably every single morning, like he used to do.
He would complain about having read every book in the library that he is interested in reading. He used to read 2 or 3 per day, so it is easy to imagine him exhausting the supply of a small library like the one in Algiers, especially in his preferred genres.