It is Friday, and 90 degrees out.
I will probably go out and busk. I've got about 11 bucks left over from the money I got for my plasma yesterday.
I was up at 6:30 AM; in response to ? alerts by the alarm on my phone, which was set for 6 AM, sharp.
I have always avoided setting alarms exactly on the hour, feeling that this is done by people who are following a "convention," and doing things such as leaving "an hour before you have to be 'there'" when they have to be anywhere.
A lot of people who fly will leave their house 2 hours before their flight is scheduled to leave in order to allow for any contingencies, etc, even if they already have thier flight booked and are 20 minutes from the airport during normal traffic conditions.
This is the first time perhaps in my life that I set an alarm right on the hour.
When I was in high school, I had to leave the house at 6:54 AM or so, in order to catch the bus at 7 at a corner 2 tenths of a mile away.
I think I started the school year setting my clock radio for 6:07 AM. This gave me 23 minutes to pick matching shirt, tie, slacks and "sports" jacket from my closet, don them, grab my books and be at the breakfast table.
My dad had given me an assortment of least 40 ties from his closet which were draped over the pole in my closet in a bunch so that it was nearly impossible to pull one out without knocking at least a couple others falling to the floor. They were ones that he had probably accumulated over a lifetime of birthdays and other occasions where a tie was "the perfect gift (for under 20 bucks)" and they were all "conservative." He wouldn't send me off to Catholic school with a martini glass and olive depicted on my tie, or dollar signs or any such gimmick.
He retained those on his own tie rack, along with some more expensive ones made from silk and such. The idea was that a $120 tie would not match the standard cotton shirt and "student" jacket etc. that I was wearing; I would need the whole package -single thread hand sewn silk shirt ($100) to tie with it, etc.
I, along with most of my contemporaries needed room to "grow," also. The silk ties were for after we had graduated from good colleges and were making the big bucks, then they would wrap everything up and put an exclamation point on it.
Still, my dad was usually all for me wanting to wear one of the ties off his rack "Sure, be very carefull, though, this is a very expensive tie..."
He was probably pleased that I seemed to be chomping at the bit to dress for success, assuaging his fear that I might end up a homeless street musician.
Little did he know that I was trying to make an artistic statement through the way that particular tie would match my outfit.
But, by sophomore year, I had started to pick out the outfit that I would wear the night before, and lay it over the back of a chair. This allowed me to push my advance my alarm due to the time this saved me, which was quite considerable. I eventually had it set at 6:21 AM, but then backed it off to 6:19 after realizing that the former left me no time to even stare out the window and daydream for even a couple minutes.
WBZ fm was one of only 4 or 5 fm stations on the dial in 1977, before people realized that stereo music with "no static at all" was preferable to AM with its monophonic low fidelity signal and its interference. The trade off was that you couldn't pick up a station 700 miles away, but who want's to be able to hear a report about the traffic in Washington D.C. when sitting in Massachusetts?
But, WBZ FM was just getting off the ground and was only manned by a live DJ during business hours. The rest of the time, though, they didn't go off the air, but just played pre-recorded music. It was the same music for at least my entire sophmore year.
When my clock radio alarm was set for 6:07, it popped on during the intro to "Wheel In The Sky," by Journey, then came a few pre-recorded commercials to pay for it all, before "Blue Bayou," by Linda Ronstadt would begin to play at 6:17 every morning. My mom grew to like that song from hearing it emanating from my room every morning, and eventually asked me what it was.
So, yesterday morning was the first time that I had ever set an alarm to go off on the hour. And it is almost ironic that it didn't work, as I first stirred at 6:30 after the phone had been trying to wake me up periodicallly for a half hour.
This was because I wanted to be on the 7 AM bus to go over the river to the plasma donation place, having suffered through 2 days of arriving there too late to be taken in as a new donor.
I now understand why they had turned me away at 2 PM, even though they are open for another 5 hours.
I signed in at 8:41 AM and was there about 6 hours before I was finally drained of 690 millileters of plasma and had 30 dollars credited to an Octoplasma Visa debit card, which I walked about a mile through the 95 degree heat with, back to the Wal-Mart where the bus stop was located.
I had gambled. If, for some reason, they had refused me as a donor, I would have been stranded across the Mississipi River with nothing but an expired all day bus pass to my name.
This would have occurred if I answered one out of their battery of questions "wrong."
It was easy for me to be honest about the fact that I hadn't had sex with another man in the past 12 months, hadn't been in The Sudan in the same period, nor shared a needle with anyone who had, but, I lied about ever having had C.O.P.D., or having visited an emergency room in the past year. The respiratory problem was the result of having breathed in the feather dust of a black caped night heron under a wharf, but I couldn't imagine them saying: "Oh, in that case it doesn't count."
I still felt a little bit disingenuous.
My whole body was checked for needle "tracks" by a nice lady, who had inspirational religious messages hanging in her cubicle. I found it easy to talk to her, and was very glad that I had washed me feet and put on clean socks before embarking upon my trek. It seems like a long journey, but, with a day pass, I really only have to walk 200 feet to the trolley and then another 200 yards from where it lets me off to the 115 "Tullis" bus, and then about a half mile to the plasma place; it just feels like going to another country due to my perception of it.
While I sat there, It dawned upon me that, if they refused me, I could walk about 4 miles to where Howard lives, and he would probably give me the bus fare to get back home. We had shared a blanket underneath a holly bush waiting for a train to hop out of Mobile, Alabama to come to New Orleans and had been through an awful lot. If there is one guy in all of Gretna, Louisianna that I might humbly try to skeeze a couple bucks off of, it would be him.
I still decided to drop in on ol' Howard, who was pleasantly surprised to see me.
He is a rich man now, having realized a 300% appreciation of the stocks that he has held since he worked at a prison as a chaplain for about 12 years.
"I never thought I'd be saying this but, thanks to...that nut in the White House..., I've made a ton of money this past year," he said.
He is about to embark upon a trip to see the Yukon and Alaska, traveling by rail; something he has always wanted to do. "If I don't do it now, I might never have another chance," he commented.
As I sat there, filling him in on the financial struggles which precipitated my trip to the plasma place, it crossed my mind that he might think was was there trying to skeeze him, who is probably worth about 100 grand now, and I had to guard my words, so as not to taint the purity of my motives in having dropped by.
"Money makes everything different," I overheard one guy at the plasma place telling another guy in reference to something.
Howard wanted my advice on the matter of his daughter, who is in California, and who has moved and won't give him her new address. He has been sending her 100 bucks for her birthday and for Christmas for years, and sent her $10,000 a while ago, and never got a "thank you" from her.
She seems to be hiding from him, and he suspects that it might be because she is a lesbian and is ashamed to tell him and possibly afraid that her partner might answer the phone and tell him. Howard is from that kind of family.
He told me that, when he was a conscientios objector during the Vietnam war, it caused a rift between he and his father, "but even though I don't agree with him, I still love him," he said, perhaps projecting onto the situation between his daughter and he.
I told him that, I too have been guilty of not showing gratitude towards my mother after she has sent money to bail me out of situations in the past. "I wound up thanking God that she sent the money, but never got around to phoning her," I told him. "I could imagine her thinking: 'I sent the money on Monday, he should have at least gotten it by now' and worrying that she may have misspelled the address or that someone stole it out of my mailbox or any other concern that I could have layed to rest with a simple phone call, but it's so easy to becomed consumed by the spending of the money '...I'm gonna run to the store and get a Starbucks Mocha energy drink, and quarters so I can finally do my laundry, and then to the dollar store, and...' before you realize it a few days have gone by and you haven't made the call and then you might just forget about it. It's probably an age-old phenomenon; where kids can't appreciate how important those two words are to parents..."
Howard agreed.
He told me about the time that he had encouraged her to go out for volleyball "Because some of these colleges want to see that you have some extra-curricular experiences" and she had retorted: "You're trying to make a jock out of me, dad!" and he still feels bad about that and a thousand other things that he is sifting through in his mind to explain why she seems to be hiding from him.
"I really never wanted a child; now that I think of it. If it was a son, I would never want him to have to go through something like I did with Vietnam, and..."
"Have you tried to find her on Facebook?"
"I'm completely lost when it comes to stuff like that..."
"I'll try to find her, and tell her it's OK if she's a lesbian, and that her dad wants to send her money for her birthday..."
"Ok. Leave out the lesbian part though, 'cause that's just one thing I thought of, I'm not sure..."
"Yeah, I was just kidding about the lesbian part."
He extended an invitation for me to go over there any Sunday, and especially if the Patriots are playing on TV, and I came back home, after I had gotten Harold the cat an expensive bag of Fancy Feast dry cat food and a couple cans in exotic flavors that he has never had at Wal-Mart. I don't imagine he will thank me with even a meow.
You've just read: 2,100 words. POWERED BY ↁ DANIEL-SOFT TEXT SOLUTIONS ↁ"
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| Howard And I Have Been Through A Lot |
I will probably go out and busk. I've got about 11 bucks left over from the money I got for my plasma yesterday.
I was up at 6:30 AM; in response to ? alerts by the alarm on my phone, which was set for 6 AM, sharp.
I have always avoided setting alarms exactly on the hour, feeling that this is done by people who are following a "convention," and doing things such as leaving "an hour before you have to be 'there'" when they have to be anywhere.
A lot of people who fly will leave their house 2 hours before their flight is scheduled to leave in order to allow for any contingencies, etc, even if they already have thier flight booked and are 20 minutes from the airport during normal traffic conditions.
This is the first time perhaps in my life that I set an alarm right on the hour.
When I was in high school, I had to leave the house at 6:54 AM or so, in order to catch the bus at 7 at a corner 2 tenths of a mile away.
I think I started the school year setting my clock radio for 6:07 AM. This gave me 23 minutes to pick matching shirt, tie, slacks and "sports" jacket from my closet, don them, grab my books and be at the breakfast table.
My dad had given me an assortment of least 40 ties from his closet which were draped over the pole in my closet in a bunch so that it was nearly impossible to pull one out without knocking at least a couple others falling to the floor. They were ones that he had probably accumulated over a lifetime of birthdays and other occasions where a tie was "the perfect gift (for under 20 bucks)" and they were all "conservative." He wouldn't send me off to Catholic school with a martini glass and olive depicted on my tie, or dollar signs or any such gimmick.
He retained those on his own tie rack, along with some more expensive ones made from silk and such. The idea was that a $120 tie would not match the standard cotton shirt and "student" jacket etc. that I was wearing; I would need the whole package -single thread hand sewn silk shirt ($100) to tie with it, etc.
I, along with most of my contemporaries needed room to "grow," also. The silk ties were for after we had graduated from good colleges and were making the big bucks, then they would wrap everything up and put an exclamation point on it.
Still, my dad was usually all for me wanting to wear one of the ties off his rack "Sure, be very carefull, though, this is a very expensive tie..."
He was probably pleased that I seemed to be chomping at the bit to dress for success, assuaging his fear that I might end up a homeless street musician.
Little did he know that I was trying to make an artistic statement through the way that particular tie would match my outfit.
But, by sophomore year, I had started to pick out the outfit that I would wear the night before, and lay it over the back of a chair. This allowed me to push my advance my alarm due to the time this saved me, which was quite considerable. I eventually had it set at 6:21 AM, but then backed it off to 6:19 after realizing that the former left me no time to even stare out the window and daydream for even a couple minutes.
WBZ fm was one of only 4 or 5 fm stations on the dial in 1977, before people realized that stereo music with "no static at all" was preferable to AM with its monophonic low fidelity signal and its interference. The trade off was that you couldn't pick up a station 700 miles away, but who want's to be able to hear a report about the traffic in Washington D.C. when sitting in Massachusetts?
But, WBZ FM was just getting off the ground and was only manned by a live DJ during business hours. The rest of the time, though, they didn't go off the air, but just played pre-recorded music. It was the same music for at least my entire sophmore year.
When my clock radio alarm was set for 6:07, it popped on during the intro to "Wheel In The Sky," by Journey, then came a few pre-recorded commercials to pay for it all, before "Blue Bayou," by Linda Ronstadt would begin to play at 6:17 every morning. My mom grew to like that song from hearing it emanating from my room every morning, and eventually asked me what it was.
So, yesterday morning was the first time that I had ever set an alarm to go off on the hour. And it is almost ironic that it didn't work, as I first stirred at 6:30 after the phone had been trying to wake me up periodicallly for a half hour.
This was because I wanted to be on the 7 AM bus to go over the river to the plasma donation place, having suffered through 2 days of arriving there too late to be taken in as a new donor.
I now understand why they had turned me away at 2 PM, even though they are open for another 5 hours.
I signed in at 8:41 AM and was there about 6 hours before I was finally drained of 690 millileters of plasma and had 30 dollars credited to an Octoplasma Visa debit card, which I walked about a mile through the 95 degree heat with, back to the Wal-Mart where the bus stop was located.
I had gambled. If, for some reason, they had refused me as a donor, I would have been stranded across the Mississipi River with nothing but an expired all day bus pass to my name.
This would have occurred if I answered one out of their battery of questions "wrong."
It was easy for me to be honest about the fact that I hadn't had sex with another man in the past 12 months, hadn't been in The Sudan in the same period, nor shared a needle with anyone who had, but, I lied about ever having had C.O.P.D., or having visited an emergency room in the past year. The respiratory problem was the result of having breathed in the feather dust of a black caped night heron under a wharf, but I couldn't imagine them saying: "Oh, in that case it doesn't count."
I still felt a little bit disingenuous.
My whole body was checked for needle "tracks" by a nice lady, who had inspirational religious messages hanging in her cubicle. I found it easy to talk to her, and was very glad that I had washed me feet and put on clean socks before embarking upon my trek. It seems like a long journey, but, with a day pass, I really only have to walk 200 feet to the trolley and then another 200 yards from where it lets me off to the 115 "Tullis" bus, and then about a half mile to the plasma place; it just feels like going to another country due to my perception of it.
While I sat there, It dawned upon me that, if they refused me, I could walk about 4 miles to where Howard lives, and he would probably give me the bus fare to get back home. We had shared a blanket underneath a holly bush waiting for a train to hop out of Mobile, Alabama to come to New Orleans and had been through an awful lot. If there is one guy in all of Gretna, Louisianna that I might humbly try to skeeze a couple bucks off of, it would be him.
I still decided to drop in on ol' Howard, who was pleasantly surprised to see me.
He is a rich man now, having realized a 300% appreciation of the stocks that he has held since he worked at a prison as a chaplain for about 12 years.
"I never thought I'd be saying this but, thanks to...that nut in the White House..., I've made a ton of money this past year," he said.
He is about to embark upon a trip to see the Yukon and Alaska, traveling by rail; something he has always wanted to do. "If I don't do it now, I might never have another chance," he commented.
As I sat there, filling him in on the financial struggles which precipitated my trip to the plasma place, it crossed my mind that he might think was was there trying to skeeze him, who is probably worth about 100 grand now, and I had to guard my words, so as not to taint the purity of my motives in having dropped by.
"Money makes everything different," I overheard one guy at the plasma place telling another guy in reference to something.
Howard wanted my advice on the matter of his daughter, who is in California, and who has moved and won't give him her new address. He has been sending her 100 bucks for her birthday and for Christmas for years, and sent her $10,000 a while ago, and never got a "thank you" from her.
She seems to be hiding from him, and he suspects that it might be because she is a lesbian and is ashamed to tell him and possibly afraid that her partner might answer the phone and tell him. Howard is from that kind of family.
He told me that, when he was a conscientios objector during the Vietnam war, it caused a rift between he and his father, "but even though I don't agree with him, I still love him," he said, perhaps projecting onto the situation between his daughter and he.
I told him that, I too have been guilty of not showing gratitude towards my mother after she has sent money to bail me out of situations in the past. "I wound up thanking God that she sent the money, but never got around to phoning her," I told him. "I could imagine her thinking: 'I sent the money on Monday, he should have at least gotten it by now' and worrying that she may have misspelled the address or that someone stole it out of my mailbox or any other concern that I could have layed to rest with a simple phone call, but it's so easy to becomed consumed by the spending of the money '...I'm gonna run to the store and get a Starbucks Mocha energy drink, and quarters so I can finally do my laundry, and then to the dollar store, and...' before you realize it a few days have gone by and you haven't made the call and then you might just forget about it. It's probably an age-old phenomenon; where kids can't appreciate how important those two words are to parents..."
Howard agreed.
He told me about the time that he had encouraged her to go out for volleyball "Because some of these colleges want to see that you have some extra-curricular experiences" and she had retorted: "You're trying to make a jock out of me, dad!" and he still feels bad about that and a thousand other things that he is sifting through in his mind to explain why she seems to be hiding from him.
"I really never wanted a child; now that I think of it. If it was a son, I would never want him to have to go through something like I did with Vietnam, and..."
"Have you tried to find her on Facebook?"
"I'm completely lost when it comes to stuff like that..."
"I'll try to find her, and tell her it's OK if she's a lesbian, and that her dad wants to send her money for her birthday..."
"Ok. Leave out the lesbian part though, 'cause that's just one thing I thought of, I'm not sure..."
"Yeah, I was just kidding about the lesbian part."
He extended an invitation for me to go over there any Sunday, and especially if the Patriots are playing on TV, and I came back home, after I had gotten Harold the cat an expensive bag of Fancy Feast dry cat food and a couple cans in exotic flavors that he has never had at Wal-Mart. I don't imagine he will thank me with even a meow.
You've just read: 2,100 words. POWERED BY ↁ DANIEL-SOFT TEXT SOLUTIONS ↁ"
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