Harold And I's Ears

My ears are still stuffed up and ringing.

Third Visit To Hospital For Ears

I am going on a juice fast and have stopped taking Kratom.
I am also going to eat one more time, before the fast, the meal which was my go-to meal for years, during which I was so healthy that it was a pleasure just to lay back and enjoy being in my own body.


That would be sea bass fried/smoked over a red oak fire in olive oil with garlic and basil, and steamed broccoli and, for like 12 straight years, a bottle of red wine. Actually, 7/8ths of a bottle -I drank down to about the bottom of the label, re-corked it, and that was it for the night. The last couple gulps, below the label, would be used for comparison against whatever different kind of cheap red wine I got the next night, in my never ending search for the best value in red wines.


I would have put the fish on tin foil that was curled up at the edges, and then doused it in olive oil and apple cider vinegar, to marinate it while I was building the fire, which be subsequently allowed to flame up and then die down to a bed of embers, whereupon small pieces of wood would be added so when they caught on fire it would only flare up about 6 inches. This was the perfect cooking/smoking fire, and the fish would get to marinate for almost a half hour while waiting for it to come about.


I would put a grill cover over it so that it would cook just as much from the hot air and smoke that it was trapped in as from the heat from the embers below.

Something like this...

I used my ear to adjust the cooking temperature. I would try to let it go for about 20 minutes with the sputtering of the olive oil sounding like a babbling brook. If it sounded more like a white water river, I would pull some wood off the fire below it. I cooked at night, most of the time and so, learned to cook by sound.


I'm going to skip the red wine. If I had enough cash to get a bottle of non alcoholic stuff (about $12) I would, just to more accurately reconstruct the meal that I ate almost every night for 12 years when I was very healthy and went out each day to do landscaping work in the Florida summer sun.  And I might have to skip the red oak fire, but am not giving up on that idea just yet. I might walk around the neighborhood in the Latino section and find someone who is already grilling, whom I could ask if I can put my fish (pescado) on their grill (parilla) for about 20 minutes (minutos).


I believe that if I get a small grill of my own, I can use it in the lot adjacent to the Sacred Heart parking lot, where grilling is proscribed. The lot is where the closed down Sacred Heart church sits, and is kind of roped off.


I think that the buildings where we live, which used to be the Sacred Heart school (my building) and a convent (Lancaster, my weed guy's building) were the ones that were bought in order to be used to house homeless veterans and their ilk. The church and another building (a rectory) were not part of the deal, although the former might have made a nice recreation center for us -take out the pews; put in a basketball court; hang a backboard over the crucified Jesus- and I'm not sure if it is incumbent upon the security detail which work here as "courtesy" officers to enforce any trespassing issues surrounding the empty, boarded up church and rectory.


I'm going to try to get into the rectory building, in order to use it for recording music. There, I would be able to warm up like Pavarotti without being besotted with a "fuck you, in advance" mindset towards anyone who might bang on a floor or wall with a broomstick.

It isn't as tightly secured on the side that faces us, as it is on the side that faces Lopez Street. This stands to reason, as our parking lot is fenced in, acting as a front-line defense.


There is one door on the former rectory which is covered in plywood, probably three quarters of an inch thick. I plan to cut through the wood down one side of it, close to the edge, and then to screw in a few hinges, so that the plywood could be closed back up like a door, leaving the appearance that it is still boarded up tightly and hasn't been breached, so that nobody would suspect anyone of using the place as a recording studio.


I would be bringing my own "juice" in the form of my laptop battery, and maybe an led flashlight to use at night, away from any windows, of course.


I'll make it so I can close and lock the plywood behind me, so as to not be unpleasantly surprised by skeezers coming in behind me.


Now, I have stiffness in my neck; and have gone through a period of about 12 hours, where I felt quite lousy.


My ears are in a constantly ringing and half hearing state. They just feel warm and fuzzy and puffed up with fluid, like I just came out of a loud rock concert and am back in my quiet room. It's kind of comfortable, ironically, since I might be losing my hearing.


I am starting to have a strong suspicion that Kratom might compromise the body's defenses against certain things. Or that it might, more directly, cause a fluid build up behind the eardrums of some "patients."


The question would be: "Do the benefits of Kratom outweigh the drawbacks?"


Obviously, hearing loss in a musician might be considered a no-brainer for discontinuing its use.


The fact that I can sit down and type away at however many words per minute for 11 hours straight, pumping out a 14,000 word story with hardly a revision on the stuff, pausing only to refill my coffee cup, doesn't necessarily recommend it; at least not until a re-reading of the story from the distance of a few days later reveals it to be a pretty good one.


Tonight, I will have gone 3 days without any kratom.


I still sit here typing away, and shooing away like flies, any distracting thoughts or impulses to stop writing and do something else.


If I were working on a song, it would be the same discipline. It might not be evident from listening to the last song I posted, with the video of my drawings; but that represented about 9 hours of "solid" work. And when the sun came up, and the computer room opened, and it was time for me to upload the thing and put it on this blog, I was still chomping at the bit to re-do several parts of it, tweaking each measure; that could have gone on until sundown.


So, I wonder if I am still under the influence of the stuff.


I felt so dead tired the past couple days, after having busked Friday and Saturday nights with maybe 3 hours of sleep in between; but having taken a couple grams each night before leaving out on my bike.

I reminded myself of a guy I once knew who would lay on his bed moaning and groaning, and not eating, for 2 or 3 days every so often, withdrawing from heroin. He was the type of guy who could get pretty strung out on the stuff and then put himself through the ringer of withdrawal, take a shower, put on clean clothes and then go back into society for a few weeks or even months, until the next time; if there is such a type of guy.


I'm sure the "pros" like my friend Lancaster would tell you: "You can do that for a while, but it'll get you in the end; and you'll wind up stealing heavy equipment off construction sites in broad daylight and trying to sell it on the street."


Such is life.

I was hooked on the peanut flavored marshmallow candy called "Circus Peanuts," when I was about 10 years old. I found them so delicious that I begged my mom to get me some when she went grocery shopping. She didn't disappoint, and in fact, delivered big time, as the market only had the candy by the big "party size" bag.


And, so there I was, with a whole bag of my favorite candy at the time.


I ate about 3 quarters of the bag; became sick of the things; never finished the bag; and haven't eaten another Circus Peanut since.


Maybe that is how this Kratom story will end.

I wound up feeling pretty good by about noon, after I had gone to the Family Dollar and had gotten a Monster Energy drink, which I consumed, shortly before starting to feel better.


I'm wondering if there is any kind of withdrawal from it. It stands to reason that one is always robbing Peter to pay Paul when dealing with any kind of thing that one puts in the body.


With persistent alcohol consumption there develops a situation where the person wakes up as an inversion of who he was before passing out drunk the night before.


He might have been caught up in the euphoric state of drunkenness and "resolved" to be up bright and early and to go see about a job, or something; and then woke up feeling like his brain had coagulated like Jello into a slow thinking, slow moving, barely jiggling mass; his extroverted personality had gone into a deep sleep, and his body ached, because his threshold of pain had come down commensurate with his blood/alcohol level and now he was feeling pain and recalling things like: "Oh, yeah; I punched that wall, didn't I; when the bouncer wouldn't let me in the club 'cause he said I was too 'intoxicated.'"


And so, he blows off the job search and goes back to sleep, only to awaken in the early afternoon, ridden by guilt over having gotten drunk again, and messed up another opportunity

And then finds that after a couple drinks he feels better.


The difference with Kratom is waking up and seeing a pile of money in front of you because you played like a machine for 5 or 6 straight hours, rather than seeing no money but bruises on your body that you can't account for.


And there is the wondering why your ears have been stuffed up and ringing throughout the entire month since you first started messing with Kratom...


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