Let's Speed It Up Some

One of my dreams is to go way up into the Yukon, hiking for days and finding spots where I could pan for gold, like this guy. He doesn't look too happy, but that might just be his "Get away from here, I found all this gold first!" expression.

The water fast has ended, but has only been replaced by lemon juice and cayenne pepper, a grapefruit in the afternoon with a zero calorie energy drink, so far.

I'm having my first half shot of kratom in a few days, now.

I just read on the Facebook water fasting group page that "deep healing" only begins on about the tenth day of fasting. I feel like a failure.

I figure that I can come up with a minimalist diet, maybe a salad with some brown rice, to fuel my busking over the next few nights, which will keep some money coming in, and will be better than the pancakes with butter and syrup diet that I had, by degrees, fallen into. A compromise.

How can a guy who hasn't eaten in ten days contemplate a cross country journey?

As far as everything else -coffee, kratom, tobacco, pot...I'll just have to accept the fact that I am an addict, embrace it, and hope it goes away on its own some day, I guess. 

Bobby, my friend in building C, opened his refrigerator last night when I was at his place, and, saying: "Here," held out to me a chunk of goat's cheese, some hummus, and some pastrami type of meat, as well as a hunk of some other kind of cheese that looked like a white gob tightly wrapped in plastic. The dollar value of those foods didn't escape me, probably about 30 bucks worth, and a part of me wanted to take them on that head alone. "I ain't gonna eat this shit," said Bobby. It crossed my mind that the stuff -all easily concealable, and all from the same one spot in the market- had been shoplifted by one of his weed customers, who might have been cash strapped. How else would Bobby wind up with expensive items that he never would have bought himself. I can remember drug dealers that I have known in the past, who always had all kinds of interesting stuff that they had taken in trade for drugs. Why not give someone a hundred dollars worth of drugs that cost him a third of that for a thousand dollar Martin guitar that they stole from somewhere?

We Have A Winner
With 240mg caffeine, 200mg guarana, 500% B12, 400% B6, 600% of B vitamins 2, 3, and 5, and 2000mg of taurine, and at a dollar a can, I could probably haved saved myself a thousand bucks each of the past few years, had I discovered this drink sooner.

And I found it only because I decided to depart from convention and go to the Winn Dixie across the street from the Rouses Market.
I had always just unthinkingly gone to Rouses, probably because they have a branch in the French Quarter that I became familiar with.

The message is clear: There are rewards waiting along new trails, so blaze away!

Goat Cheese Story, Continued...

That is kind of what happened to my friend, Brian Hudson.

His Martin guitar went missing, but then he got a call from someone who someone else had tried to sell it to. The guy bought it for a couple hundred bucks, knowing that it was Brian's, and then re-sold it to Brian for the same amount. I guess it was a guy Brian trusted, but, the point is that drug dealers can often run such a side business; as goat cheese brokers, maybe.

I told Bobby that, even when I go back to eating, I was going to try to stick close to the healthiest possible diet, and that it might only be in a moment of weakness that I would eat cheese and pastrami.

Sure, a couple months from now, I might be making my own pizzas, using whole flour, goat's cheese and organic tomato salsa, olive oil instead of partially hydrogenated soybean, etc. but, why rush into it -except that he was offering the stuff for free? There are advisable ways to break long fasts, and the above wouldn't be too bad, but, with myself having had dairy allergies my whole life, I had to decline his offer.

Then, I mused out loud how good a Greek salad, with goat's cheese instead of feta, pepperoncini or banana peppers, black olives, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and crisp lettuce, would be.

My metabolism had pretty much shut down at that point, and it was hard to imagine even secreting the acids to break down rich, heavy, decadent cheeses..

I went back to my apartment, thinking of nothing but goat's cheese and hummus, and reconsidered knocking on his door to take the stuff from him.

Bobby seems to play the role of the tempter, at times, having given me a cup of his methadone once, to try, for example. "Here, drink this and you'll be joyfully playing for the next six hours!"

That could have led me down the road to becoming a full blown heroin addict. But, in his defense, he was high on methadone at the time and only wanting to share the love. The goat cheese and hummus is the culinary equivalent of methadone, in that regard.

It is Friday night, and my goal is to go out and play, even if that means grabbing a salad and maybe knocking on Bobby's door for the hummus, nothing else.

Music

The McCartney to my Lennon?

Jacob Scardino, a guy who quit working at the Uxi Duxi during his third day of training, wants to jam with me.

He plays keyboards and has a drum kit, as well as the Audacity sound editor, and we are tentatively planning to jam next week. This could be a boon for me, as I know how expedient it is to jam with another person as far as the flexibility of it.

I could say: "Let's try a reggae beat here," and we could try it. If it sounded good, we could hit the record button and proceed.

Working by myself, I would have to stop and program a reggae beat into my machine, and then if it didn't sound good when I played guitar along with it, I would have wasted about twenty minutes.

"Let's speed it up some," is another example.

It bears mentioning that he likes the music of mine that he has heard, too.