I Mostly Just Listen To Kenny Rogers And Meatloaf

I am in the Sacred Heart Apartment computer room, using the plug into the wall connection, which goes through

the office, and which is "administered" (read: neglected) by someone in there, who has attempted to put controls on the thing, perhaps, with the end result being that there are all kinds of problems with cookies, and such.

The computers originally plugged in were stolen by residents, probably so that they could take their downloaded porn videos back to their rooms, and because someone turned their back on the room.

I guess what I'm saying is make sure your worm repellent and anti-virus program is running, because this post is coming straight out of Sacred Heart, LOL

Computer technology makes me feel like I did when I first started driving, and had bought a fancy turbo-charged sports car (which mostly sat in the parking lot of Wang Labs, while I was inside working 65 hours per week, you know, to pay for the car, so I would have it to get to work in so I could pay for it, type of thing) and when the car eventually stalled, I popped the hood, and looked at the motor, and had the epiphany that I had no idea what I was looking for.

In that instance, I took up a study of the gas motor, asking many questions of many mechanics, until, I could eventually tell, just by listening, if it was time for me to replace the cam shaft pulley on my Mazda.

My computer studies are largely aimed towards a similar goal.

How come I can circumvent the little exercise of proving I'm not a robot, sparing me from having to denote which pictures in a grid of them are food items or street signs, and post my comments? I'm the guy standing in front of a car with the hood open, wiggling wires and squeezing hoses, on that front, people...

And, does this mean robots can comment on this blog without having to prove that they aren't?

And, perhaps most disturbingly, has Alex in California been a robot all this time, being run by Chuck Croll in Menendez, California, the guy who once had this blog removed from Blogger; and who called me a troll, online?

By the way; I haven't read the comment(s) on yesterdays post, so as to not bias this one in any way...

An Amazing Discovery?
Recent years have seen me doing some things, in this, my middle age, for the first time in my life.

For example, while I have still never purchased a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk (for my own use, anyway) in my life, I have, within the past couple years purchased my first dozen eggs, first stick of butter, and about a year ago now, I made the outrageous acquisition of a 3 pound bag of sugar.

I felt like I was putting a Playboy magazine down on the counter when I did that, feeling compelled to apologize to the Walgreen's cashier: "Enough of this will make anything I bake delicious, I guess, ha ha..."

If the stuff hadn't been so darned cheap, $1.67 for 3 pounds, I may have just stuck with honey, excuse the pun. But, they say that is what helped foment the crack cocaine epidemic -that it was so darned cheap and available, but, I digress.

Sucrose proved to be disastrous to me as, within a couple of weeks, I was putting it in my coffee, sprinkling it on cereal which was already sweetened, like Raisin Bran and, of course, creating another bane to my existence with the introduction of the giant pancake.

Those behemoths began as a foray into the "art" of baking, after I looked at the oven that I had in my apartment, and it came to me as almost like a revelation that that is one of the things that people use ovens for. Wasn't that what my sister was doing with her Quick Bake when she was 6, and I was 5?

Baking! Why not? It had been placed right there in front of me at such an early age. But, then I had relegated it to something that only mothers know how to do.

I started to ponder all those barrels in the Whole Foods store, full of wholesome and healthy grains -quinoa, amaranth, millet, barley, rice flour, garbanzo bean flour...

I started to think of this as a great way to add these life giving, and vegetarian! fuels to my diet. But then...there were the recipes.

Most of them called for, along with the eggs and butter, which had never been part of the I Thought You Were In Your Late 20's Diet, sugar -sometimes brown, sometimes white, it made the cupcakes better. So would nine dollar per quart honey, but, sometimes it was slow out there at the Lilly Pad, and I was on a sugar budget.

The sucrose insinuated its way into my cakes, and my life, and before long, I found myself pedaling determinedly home a lot of nights with an imaginary cartoon cloud floating over my head with a stack of pancakes on a plate, slathered in butter, topped with jam and with syrup running down their sides, in it.

Wasn't it the diet of fish, lightly fried and smoked over a red oak wood fire in olive oil, with sauteed garlic and mushrooms and steamed broccoli or kale; with three quarters of a bottle of red wine almost every night for about 33 years what I always mentioned to anyone who had ever said anything to me along the way like: "You don't look 50, I thought you were in your late 20's"?

Sure it was.

And didn't any stint of more than a couple weeks in any jail, eating what they served in there have those same people saying: "You don't look 50, I thought your were about 65" in the weeks after you came out?

Yes it did.

I rationalized (though it was the sugar talking) that it was in my genes, the youthful appearance; it's "hereditary."And that baking is an art form and I was being even more of an artist.

But, this is what lead to my embarking upon the last water-only fast.

That was generally an unsuccessful attempt to rid myself of a laundry list of items: caffeine, nicotine, kratom and marijuana, with heavily sugared pancakes made with bleached white flour heading the list. I might be able to live a jailhouse lifestyle of sitting up all night reading and drinking coffee, but subsisting on a jailhouse diet and expecting the results to be different is insanity...

This is why I hate to have to resort to going to the food bank when I run out of money, because the food that they give you, bless their hearts, is the reason we have so many doctors and hospitals and why it is just assumed that elderly people are going to need "their medications."

But, that being said, it is now about 18 hours before my food stamp card will be loaded with $136. I have a Betty Crocker cake mix sitting in my cabinet right now -the last remnant of the box of food that I got from the St. Jude Community Center "Second Harvest" food bank a couple weeks ago.

I have the 3 large eggs and the half cup of vegetable oil required to make it, too.

The last few hundred words I have written have stemmed from an internal debate concerning the fact that the cake mix is calling my name.

But, where was I? Oh, yeah.

An Amazing Discovery?

I went to the dollar store Sunday night, after having witnessed Dom locking the door to the Uxi Duxi, which had been darkened inside well before its normal closing time, and hearing him tell me that it will be closed until further notice.

I almost felt bad for all its other patrons, as I suspected that God himself had taken that drastic action that I could not bring myself to, by physically removing kratom from my life. It was a weird coincidence that Dom was turning the key right as I rode up.

"Um, we're closed," he said.

It could possibly be related to the fact that June 30th is the last day of the fiscal quarter for most businesses, and I suppose that if the Uxi Duxi had failed to meet some obligation that they had until the end of said quarter to do, then that would be the day that the rug would be pulled out from under them. That, and the fact that God wanted to help Daniel to go a while without his daily shot of kratom, so he could experience what that would be like, you other customers, sorry.

If Dom couldn't help suppressing a smug expression the previous time I was there, when he was refusing to let me get a half shot of kratom since I was 9 cents short of the amount for one, then I could certainly understand the grin on his face as he informed me: "We're closed." Maybe that was some consolation for his being out of a job until further notice. He always has the gay pole dancing to fall back on.

But, having the 4 bucks at my disposal that I would have spent on a shot, I bent my path towards the Family Dollar, where I picked up a can of cat food, a Monster Zero drink, and then went into the household cleaners aisle.

I had run out of the chlorine based cleaner that I had been using to clean things at home.

I noticed that many of the products almost boasted that they were "ammonia free." This was probably due to the stupidity of people who disregard warning labels and kill themselves by mixing ammonia with bleach in a non-ventilated environment. Better to just produce ammonia free cleansers and avoid any potential litigation, they probably think.

But, there they were, one gallon bottles of pure ammonium hydroxide. At only one dollar per gallon, they seemed as cheap as crack cocaine or sugar.
Why not? I thought.

I had just that day been thinking about chlorine,  and about how red and swollen my eyes always get after swimming in chlorinated pools.

Something (probably in the James A. Michener book that I'm reading) had evoked a memory.

It was of when I was in sixth grade and one of the girls in our class invited the whole class to a pool party, to be thrown at her house, right around the end of the year, when the early June temperatures facilitated it.

This had been great, as us boys were starting to become girl crazy and the thought of seeing all the girls in our class in bathing suits made her party a must attend" event.

Wayne Rameau, Peter Capute and I were the most popular boys in our class of 30, in no small part due to us singing the best when the record player came out for an hour after lunch each day, and 45 RPM records would spin out songs like "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," by Elton John, and "Spiders and Snakes," by Jim Stafford.

We would take turns selecting the next record to be played, which us boys would sing. It became a competition of sorts. None of the girls sang, now that I think of it; perhaps because the only female vocalist we had in stock was Marie Osmond singing "Paper Roses." B-sides became popular after I, already showing signs of being a deviant, surprised everyone who was primed to hear "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," upon seeing the familiar MCA rainbow on the label, by flipping it over and playing "Harmony" instead. Boy, could I sing that one...but so could Peter Capute.

The record player would sit on a table, made by positioning the desks of us three most popular boys to abut those of the three most popular girls, who were Debbie Richard, Christine David, and Patty Donolin.

It was evident to us all that Christine was the cutest girl, and Wayne the cutest boy and so it just happened by natural order that they would "like" each other, while I was content with liking Debbie Richard, and she seemed to feel the same; given that we were each second cutest, and not wanting to disturb the balance of nature.
Peter Capute and Robert Cormier would kind of crowd their desks in to share potato sticks with Patty Donolin, but there weren't many sparks flying between them. They were more into being around the popular kids, I suspect. note: Robert had a big honker of a nose, and sounded like it when he sang.

There is one overriding memory, which I only yesterday came to appreciate as having been a Life Lesson, that I took away from that sixth grade pool party.

We were all too naive at the time to see it as an attempt by the father of Brenda Basillio, the girl who hosted it, to show off her family's wealth -their house was bigger than any of ours, and had a built-in swimming pool in the back yard- so as to raise the stock of the girl, him being worldly enough to know that there are other ways, in life, to gain a spot at the table with the record player and the potato sticks, other than by being cute and singing well. That was a secondary Life Lesson -my introduction to "class-based society."

But, I got to the party and was greeted by a bikini clad Debbie Richard, while Wayne Rameau was showing off for Christine David.

It was wonderful to have the attention of Debbie. She was a little more brown skinned than the average girl and, little did I know at the time was my first foray into a lifelong infatuation with Latina girls, as that was what her brown-eyed self was.

But, after we had all splashed about in the pool, I noticed a definite cooling off towards me from Debbie, who soon joined Christine in giving more attention to Wayne than to me. It was unsettling, and only when I went to use the bathroom and looked in the mirror did I figure it out.

My eyes had become bloodshot as all hell and almost swollen shut. Like they continued to do every time I swam in a chlorinated pool after that.

Fast forward the the Family Dollar in New Orleans 44 years later.

I think I'm going to try ammonia instead of chlorine bleach as a household cleaner this time... 

I was especially encouraged to do this after reading the back of the bottle to discover the many applications for ammonium hydroxide.
Refrigerators, counter tops, and bathrooms could be cleaned by mixing it with just hot water.

Add dishes and laundry, plus, if you set a bowl of it in the oven overnight at full concentration, your baked-on mess will wipe clean in the morning!
Where has ammonia been all my life (besides in the clouds of Jupiter), I wondered.

The deal was sealed, prompting me to venture a $1.05, when I read that for "special woodwork" one could mix ammonia, vinegar and baking soda into a concoction. How cool is that?!? I couldn't wait to try it; I had those other ingredients at home, right next to the eggs and oil and cake mix.

I was cautious when I opened the bottle, my last experience with the stuff having been through the "smelling salts" that my high school track coach had held under my nose after I had bounced off the high jump mat and thumped my head 
on the ground.

He had probably had the stuff in the first aid kit forever and might have been wondering if he would ever get a chance to employ it, and so, jumped at the chance, excuse the pun.

The fall hadn't really fazed me, I was only a bit groggy. I'm sure I suffered more brain damage from my head jerking back reflexively away from the smelling salts.

After turning on the kitchen fan, I opened the bottle. A bit of the fumes hit my nose...oh yeah, it's ammonia...but, I was soon wiping down my counter with it. Then, my refrigerator, then the walls, then underneath the refrigerator...I couldn't stop.

It was like a wake up call from beyond the veil.
My apartment is now sparkling clean, from the bathroom mirrors to the shelves in my kitchen cabinets, and especially the wooden floors.

The vinegar and baking soda trick has my floors looking cleaner than they ever did using pine solvent or chlorine bleach based stuff.

I felt like I was cleaning a house as if getting ready to sell it, and to show it to prospective buyers.

I wondered if I intuit that I'm going to make a trip to Massachusetts and want to be able to know that I have a sparkling clean place waiting for me when I got back.

I wondered if having a bit of ammonia in the air is something that I have always lacked but had never been keen enough to realize.

Or if Debbie Richard, who is my age, had just recently passed away, and was trying teach me, from the Great Beyond, that poignant lesson that she had been commissioned to while on the physical plane, using everything then at her disposal, to wit: a cute Latina in a bikini, a lesson that I had failed to grasp..

I wondered if her soul is back on Jupiter, waiting for me to join her...

One irony is that most Latina women that I've met swear by chlorine bleach. You can tell by looking on the shelves of the Ideal Market that it is a big seller.
Karrie used to buy it in quantities surpassed only by the amounts of liquor she bought, and would use it everywhere: full strength around the campsite in a circle to keep snakes away, to wash all kinds of things, and yes, even to whiten clothes.

The bowl of ammonia sat in my oven a whole day. Half of it evaporated, but, as advertised, none of the baked on crud was proof against a pad of steel wool and a wet sponge. It is as clean as new, ready to bake a Betty Crocker pineapple cake.

Or not.

I felt great when I woke up today. I didn't want a cigarette, and was not in the mood for the dopey feeling from smoking pot. It is as if breathing very low amounts of ammonia vapor is therapeutic. I almost want to tell Wayne, my neighbor who has emphysema, and who often opens his door leading to the hall to let in fresh air, to try some ammonia.

I guess I should first rule out being 4 days off of kratom as the reason I feel good. 

Walking over the wooden floors, that I had cleaned using the foaming concoction as directed, wearing only stockings, has seemed to cure a corn that was threatening to develop into a Plantar wart on one of my feet. My feet even seem to grip the floor better. I could go on and on...
Harold the cat is still alive too, so no problem there...

Boy, would I love to take a rocket trip to Jupiter just to see those breathtakingly immense clouds of frozen....OK, I suppose you readers get the picture.

Lilly Puts Brakes On New England Trip

Lilly texted me on the last day of June, with a terse: "Don't go to Boston, I'll talk to you tomorrow." I had told her that July 1st was my tentative departure date.

So, as it stands, I am staying put.

If I disappear for any length of time, she will know that I disobeyed her, and I'm afraid of what might await me when I get back; she might give my spot away.

Given all that she has done for me, both seen and unseen -all the protection that I have gotten just through being seen associating with her etc., my response just has to be "Yes, Ma'am, I won't go to Boston."

Not that I won't beg her to please let me go.

What I'm really hoping is that she is planning to go to Martha's Vineyard to look at property that she has been talking about buying there, for the past 3 years and will offer to give me a ride to Boston. I tend to think that it is something like that, or that she wants me to stay here and do her some kind of favor. She is very pro "go see your family" and most of her concerns are with pitfalls and dangers. She might just want to ascertain that I really am not planning to hop freight trains to get there.

"Tomorrow" came and I didn't talk to her, but there is always today.

Ammonia vapors sure haven't made me write less. LOL
 
I have been refraining from busking in order to safeguard my current sobriety against having money in my pocket; to protect myself from myself. I want to have a good money night, to get funds for a possible trip, but not so I can run to another kratom bar that I've heard talked about which is in the Bywater, stopping for a pack of cigarettes on my way there, type of thing.

My food stamp money comes in 14 hours. A small bottle of prune juice and a gallon of Simply Apple juice is at the top of my shopping list right now.

I am thinking of going to sell plasma; haven't done that since last summer's dead season.