Where Yellow Borneo Kratom Comes From

• A Goose Egg Busking
• Bike Not Stolen
• Plasma Trip Has Usual Glitches

I went out to play last (Tuesday) night, arriving early enough so that the possibility of my seeing Lilly was there, should she have walked past chaperoning one, or both, of her daughter's at a little past 11 PM. She didn't.

I am getting the feeling that I should have flirted more with her the last time we swam and then went to Starbucks together.

Sure she had cried: "Don't do that!" the time I had attempted to lift her out of the water and, I guess, throw her up in the air and catch her, but had also texted me a few times in the ensuing days wanting to swim again.

The second time, I had been brooding over my bike having been stolen and am afraid that I wasn't as much fun at all, a bump on a log. Then, when I was unable to use the wi-fi at the Starbucks, had hastily taken my leave of her so I could run down to use the one at the casino.

I guess if we ever swim again, I will be sure to try to throw her up out of the water and catch her.

I played for a little while, and didn't make anything, as rain was threatening with flashes of lightning in a corner of the sky and then the thunder lagging behind them.

It did start to rain, and I packed up and moved to across the street where sat a transgender type guy under the protection of an overhang. The direction of the rainfall made it so we were not getting a drop on us.
He asked me if I had any rolling papers, to which I said I didn't, but offered him my little pipe that looks like a cigarette, assuring him that I didn't want to smoke any of his weed in exchange for letting him use it.
The piano guy was playing "Only The Good Die Young," by Billy Joel, and I was able to pick up the chords and play along with him, realizing that I had found a spot that I could play at when it is raining, as long as I jam along with the piano guy when I do so. My potential tippers would be people stuck under the same overhang, waiting out the rain.

Bike Left Unlocked

When I went to my bike, after having returned to the Lilly Pad after the rain stopped, to play another half hour or so for nothing, I found that my bike had been unlocked, but not stolen.
It was just sitting there next to the pole with the lock coiled around the seat pole, but not locked to the lamp post like I had left it.
I was pretty sure this was done by one particular street person who is a very large athletic ex military street person, who often wears camouflaged clothing and army boots, whom I have spoken with a few times, and who has only asked me for money twice in the seven years that I have been seeing him walk past at least once a night.
Both times, he had truthfully told me that he "never" asked me for money, even though he saw me all the time, and both times he never paid me back, even though he saw me all the time. It had been 75 cents the first time, then 2 dollars about 4 years later.
One of the things that he has been adamant about the times that I have spoken to him, usually when our trips to the Quartermaster coincided, was that I needed "to get a better lock," for whatever bike I had been riding at the time.
He has told me how easy it would be for someone to defeat each of the locks I have had in the past; had until someone defeated them, that is...

I recalled a demonstration given by a Latino guy I ran into once, when the subject of securing bikes had come up. He walked me over to a nearby bike rack that had at least a dozen bikes locked to it.
"Watch," he had said.
He went to the first bike and was unable to free it within about ten seconds, so he went to the second one and did the same thing to its combination lock that he had done to the first, and voila! he had the combination lock open and could have stolen the bike, but chose to leave it the way mine was last night; still there, but unlocked.
His "trick," of course relied upon what might fall under the aegis of "social engineering," in a sense. Most people don't randomly scramble their combination number when they lock their bike. This would require them returning each of the four numbers to the correct one to unlock it, taking up valuable time. It's bad enough to have to take a half minute to lock a bike when you are only running into a store for a half a minute, without adding the further inconvenience of having to unscramble all four tumblers on the thing, not to mention have the four digits memorized, leaving you vulnerable to have "brain farts," as some people call them, whereby you might turn the lock to your ATM card pin number and pull really hard on cable before realizing that that isn't "it."

So, to make a long story short, despite the excellent demonstration given by my Latino friend, I apparently learned nothing from it, because I had just turned the last tumbler a couple digits off, leaving three quarters of the combination still intact.

My friend, if it had been him last night (and who I'm calling "friend" because he didn't ride off on the Trek Calypso Cruiser, easily a $150 value at half the price of a new one) most likely did the same thing.

Oddly, there had been no vehicle parked in the spot which would block my view of the bike as I played -one of the few times in the seven years that I have busked there that there hasn't been anything parked in that spot right across the street from the bar and in a neighborhood where several residents own vehicles. Lilly would pounce upon that spot, for example, should she be returning from somewhere and circling the blocks around her house looking for a place to park.

But, there had been a rather starkness about the way my yellow bike was sitting "right out in the open," seeming to be extra yellow because of that fact.

Some thief, who knows the combination lock trick, might have gotten cold feet and decided to leave it there, fearing that it was a bait bike, left there by the cops and equipped with GPS gear. A bright, shiny, yellow bike, right out in the open, inviting as ever could be, illuminated by the lamp above it. They might have had an attack of paranoia...why is there not even a car parked in front of it when it's right across the street from a popular night spot and in a neighborhood where several residents own vehicles, the potential thief might have thought...

I guess that, since the bike was given to me, it is fitting that my G.I. Joe friend have it available to him, should he ever really need it in some emergency. (the dude with all the coke just totally passed out, you'd better get over here quickly if you want to snort up some of his stuff before it's all gone #skeezer, type of thing...)
Unlike the 75 cents, maybe he would bring the thing back.
So, add to the uncertainty which comes with the territory I inhabit, the fact that someone out there now knows my combination and might not always be in whatever generous mood he was in last night.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to ask G.I. Joe the next time I see him: "Hey, you didn't happen to unlock my bike the other night, to teach me a lesson about the folly of just dislocating the last digit of a combination, did you?!?"

I went to the plasma place in Gretna.

I got on the bus a couple stops before the one where there are often one or two people with bikes, waiting and hoping that one or two of the bike rack slots would be empty.

One of the slots would not be, the times I go to sell plasma.
I would have hoisted the yellow cruiser into it a couple stops before it got there.

I have often seen a couple fellows standing there there with bikes, and one of them (the one that got there second, I assume) shaking his head and cussing at the sight of a yellow bike already on the rack when we pull up. Stuff like: "Ain't that some shit, that's the way my whole day been going!" if my lip-reading skills serve me.

This time, there was nobody with a bike. My yellow cruiser stood propped by itself as the bus pulled away.
But, about 20 people had gotten on and filled the vacant seats with the one next to the (one) white guy being the last one to be grabbed by a middle aged black lady.
It has come to my attention that the Octapharma plasma place has another location, and it is in Metarie, a "white" part of greater New Orleans.
It's about the same distance away from my house as the Gretna one, but in the other direction...as in, blacks go south, whites go north. Or as in one table at the Rebuild Center having a dozen all black people eating off it, while a nearby identical table has a dozen whites.

Where Yellow Borneo kratom comes from...

It is probable that the staff at the Gretna location wonder aloud as soon as I leave: "Why he don't go to the Metarie one?" (instead of my being one of no more than 3 white guys, at any given time, out of forty donors, at the one across the river, with the other white guys just happening to live under the bridge nearby the place).
I could probably save myself the aggravation of being the only white guy on the Gretna bus, and having to endure cashiers that you can't hand $1.03 to for a 53 cent purchase and expect to get two quarters back from, and experiencing the other glitches that make the city seem like it was built over the mass grave of a tribe that was massacred and are still pissed off about it. More about glitches later.

After all 20 or so passengers had boarded, with last available seat having been taken beside me, and the bus had gone on to the next stop, about another half dozen people got on and began standing in the aisle.

This is the time when I always look to see if there are any ladies that I can offer my seat to.
There was one young lady who looked to be perturbed at the prospect of standing up for the whole ride to Gretna. It is about a 25 minute ride, and goes through some neighborhoods where there are potholes big enough to have the standers hanging on to the leather straps for life.

I hesitated to ask the young lady if she would like to sit, partly because she had taken a spot towards the front, and I would have had to yell to her from about six seats back to get her attention; and partly because I had the window seat and would be imposing upon the middle aged woman in the aisle seat to allow me to hop over her to get out and then vice versa to let the young lady into the seat.

I wavered upon this until the bus had gotten to the next stop where a few more people had boarded, one of which being yet another lady. A very pretty Latina lady. She had a made-over looking face, with sculpted eyebrows and an Oil of Olay type sheen to her skin. She was poking at a fancy looking cell phone of the kind that a lot of Latinas seem to have, probably because their husbands work 14 hour shifts doing heavy labor and can afford to give their wives 800 dollar phones, with all the tax free cash they make under the table, but I digress.

The arrival onboard of the pretty lady and the couple random men caused the first young black lady to have to move back some to accomodate them. This placed her within shoulder tapping distance of me, and so, standing up and leaning over the lady in the aisle seat, being careful not to offend her by breathing over her or something, I found a spot on her shoulder, being careful not to touch her hair extensions, and tapped on her black shirt (that might have been the uniform of some place where she worked, despite perhaps being unable to subtract fifty cents from a dollar).
"Would you like to sit?" I asked.
She liked to sit. The lady in the aisle seat had already rotated her legs to let me out and her in.
Just then, I caught the eye of the pretty Latina, and thought that I saw some hurt in her face.
I wondered if she thought that I had offered the black lady a seat, but not the Latina.
Visions of children separated from their Mexican parents at the border flashed through my mind. Did she think that I was trying to make a statement: "I'll give my seat to a nigger before I will to a damned Mexican!?!"
But then, I realized that there was a large black man sitting in a seat right by the Latina, who appeared physically able to stand up and hold on to a rail for dear life, but who had not followed my example of letting a lady sit, and had not budged at all.

So, the Gretna bus limped along -they always seem to relegate the worst of their fleet to the routes through the black neighborhoods where the worst of the potholes also happen to be- and myself and the pretty Latina held on for life. At one point, I caught her eye and smiled, then flicked them towards the big lug in the seat right next to her, and got a smile back from her for my effort, and a bit of a self-conscious twitch from the big guy, who seemed, at least, not too dim witted to have gleaned the meaning of my non verbal communique.

I thought that, should I have gotten her attention and offered her the seat, rather than the young black lady, It could have been surmised that I had given it to her just because she was pretty; prettier than the young black lady.
That could have led to a cat fight, where it wouldn't have surprised me to see the Latina gain the upper hand and tear the hair extensions off the other, defrocking her, to reveal that, under all of her "beauty" was a nappy headed ho from the projects.
I had to choose the lesser of the two race riots which might break out in Gretna, based upon who I gave the seat to, so I rested upon the tenet that the black girl had gotten on the bus first.

Glitches, Continued:

Then, I sold my plasma, but my phones battery was dead, so I couldn't check to see if the money had been put on it.
I had to just wait "a while" before going into the Family Dollar to try to buy a can of food for Harold and get cash off it so I could take the bus home. Yeah, I had waited, once again, until I was so broke I couldn't afford a round trip bus ride, before dragging myself over to Gretna.
This was a moot point, because the Family Dollar wasn't giving cash back at that time.
At the Wal-Mart, I saw one of the other white guys whom I had seen at the plasma place. I asked him if he was able to get cash back off the plasma card.
"Yeah, you just have to hit 'debit,'" he said.

So, I got about 4 dollars and change worth of bananas, an energy drink, a grapefruit and a can of Fancy Feast food for Harold, and then took them to the register, where I explained to the cashier what I was trying to do.
I was reasonably sure there was 25 bucks on the card. I should be able to buy the stuff, plus get 20 dollars cash back, right?
No, the screen momentarily displayed a button that said "choose alternate payment" or something but it disappeared a couple seconds later and the transaction went through, buying me the stuff but having given me not chance to opt for "cash back."
"Now I don't have enough left on it to get cash back from any place that charges for it, I probably have like twenty dollars and twenty cents on it now..." I lamented to the cashier.

I wound up going to customer service, returning the energy drink for $1.50 in cash so I would have my bus fare, then going back and grabbing another energy drink, paying for it off the card, then leaving the store with my head spinning.

What I learned, though, is that you can get cash back at Wal-Mart, but you must be quick enough to hit the "choose alternate payment method" button within a couple seconds before it disappears. 

So now I am in on a Wednesday night. But at least I have cigarettes and some food and have had a shot of kratom.
The strings I ordered might arrive tomorrow, and pretty soon the Urinary Incontinence study people will be calling me for another fifty dollar appointment. Harold has a can of Fancy Feast, and things could be worse.
At least there was no race riot in Gretna, Louisiana today.