Ho Hum

I got to the Lilly Pad at 10:45 PM last (Saturday) night.

It wasn't 95 degrees, like Friday night was, but had cooled off to about 80.

I probably only made ten bucks in the hour and a half that I played, all one dollar bills.

I bought a can of cat food and a coffee, which I put cream and sugar in, and had taken a few sips off of before I remembered that I was on a juice only fast, and dumped the rest out.

I bought a 2 pack of cigars at the Unique Grocery, just in case I had an urge for tobacco on the upcoming third day of the fast (today) and then rode home; do not pass Walgreen's; do not buy food.

I went to the Goodwill Store, before coming here to the Uxi Duxi, never a good idea if I'm trying to save money because there is almost always something in that store that incredibly tempting to buy and that will most likely not be there the next day.

The store didn't disappoint.

The CD rack had an Allman Brothers "greatest hits" disc, as well as a classical music disc by Sibelius. I didn't buy them, but made a mental note to download music by those guys off of mp3juices.cc.

Then, there was a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, which was very high quality. The pieces were 3 times as thick as the ones on the puzzle that I have had laid out on a table for months, but haven't really worked on. Even the box was textured cardboard with a grainy quality to it. A 24 dollar product, if I ever saw one.

My enjoyment of putting puzzles together increases when the puzzle is high quality. When the pieces snap together definitively, leaving no doubt that you have found the right piece. But, there was no price on it. I probably should have brought it to the front, where the cashier might have said: "There's no price on it...I don't know...is 3 dollars too much?"

The image was of chocolate -assorted pieces of chocolate, all in different shades of brown and caramel, not a bad picture. I didn't buy it, mostly because I haven't been working on the one that I already started; that one has flimsy, thin pieces, though.

Then, there was a chin-up bar kind of thing, which goes in a door frame.

I have wanted exactly that for a couple years now. That was 4 dollars.

But, being on the third day of a juice fast had me feeling so weak that the thought of doing a chin-up was daunting. The thought of even toting the thing home in my backpack was daunting.

And, they had a couple sets of dumbbells, each with 20 pounds already on them, and there were other weight discs for sale at what would be 25 cents per pound. But, again, in my fasting state, they just looked too heavy.

A stack of 45 RPM records had me flipping through them for about 5 minutes, even though I don't have a turntable. Every one of them was a hit song from the past. All from the early eighties. Billy Joel's "Only The Good Die Young," with "Get It Right The First Time," on the other side, being an example.

I wanted to buy a few, just to look at the grooves and have around the apartment, but didn't.

I did buy the one thing that I had gone there for, a 2 dollar extension cord that I am going to finally hook up my woofer with.

I found a box in the dumpster at Sacred Heart that had a burned out amplifier in it, but a very good speaker. I am going to run the cord from the good amplifier that I have in the box that Harold the cat tore the foam out, from around the speaker, to the other box, and have good sounding bass for a change...

And, at fifty cents each, I grabbed a Pat Conroy book, a James A. Michener one -on the history of the Nebraska area-, a Java programming guide, and a William Faulkner book of 3 short stories. This will the third time I have possessed the same book. I lost one copy in Virginia when I was arrested when living on the land by the reservoir, and I originally had one for a class I was taking in college called "Nobel Prize Winning Literature (101?).

I continue to get more and more out of books that I have already read. I really feel like I had my head up my ass so far that it has been a 40 year ordeal, pulling it out. That was my complaint about the curriculum that I was taught in private high school. Sure, it was good to expose us to everything from Gilgamesh to the Latin language, but there was no way they could put any of it in perspective. I would get a lot more out of high school were I to go back and do it again now.

It's strange how reading John Grisham changes my attitude towards the whole world.

He writes about lawyers who leave the rat race of working for Big Law, and wind up finding meaning and purpose representing real people with real problems -the underdogs.

These -lawyers making big bucks- are the kind of people who throw me good tips and admire me for having pursued a meaningful life, rather than chasing after money. "It's cool that you play just for the love of it and aren't concerned with how much you make -so cool that, here, here's 200 bucks." type of thing.

I am hoping to really enjoy the Faulkner, now that I have lived in the deep south where he sets his stories. I might understand stuff that went over my head as a Massachusetts boy, who was reading it just because the guy won the Nobel Prize for Literature.