The Eighty Minute Wall

9 Quick Dollars On A Tuesday Night

Howard's Chinese art, left center...

I still have seven of the nine bucks I made last night.

I also have proven to myself beyond the shadow of a doubt that smoking weed before I start to play is going to ultimately lead me to knock off about an hour and twenty minutes later.


I had gotten there early and the CBD oil that I smoked at Bobby's apartment around 7:30 PM, wore off at -it think it was 10:08 PM when I looked at the time after having run out of gas, in a way that musicians such as Tanya Huang and Dorise Blackman would consider wimpish.


Sure, it was very hot and humid and I had just played pretty hard for a good part of an hour, enjoying every second of it. Until I lost interest, that is. That was at about the time that I might be just starting on a given night, if I had hopes of having a decent Tuesday night, but...

I just wanted to sit and stare at the stars in the sky and be totally in that moment, or close my eyes sitting somewhere (with my guitar and pack tied to part of my body lest the heroin addicts try to tip-toe up and make off with them) and let the only thought in my mind be: "I wonder if Bobby's CBD oil has some kind of opiate in it?"

What had also happened was that I had started to cough, a body-racking type of cough in the middle of trying to sing.

I am not totally over the flu that struck me last week, and am in fact in that dangerous phase when the body feels much, much better, but there is still a lingering cough or the point of fatigue is reached a bit sooner than normal, when working out with weights. It is now that I might negate the cleansing effect of having lay there with a fever for 24 hours, by immediately resuming old habits.


That first night that I felt better, I had gotten up and cleaned the whole apartment, beginning with throwing the sweat dampened clothing I was in in the hamper then taking a hot shower. I then mounted an ammonia attack against the kitchen and the bathroom and the hard wood floors.


Harold the cat had annexed the immediate area of the litter box to do his business, so that even as I lay shivering and sweating, he was actively messing up the apartment.


I completed my cleaning with the rearranging of the furniture. One clue that this might have been the right idea presented itself in the matter that the Chinese work of art, which Howard Westra had given me, fit perfectly over the side of the couch.


Then, I found that, setting the little laptop table at the foot of my couch made me feel like I was more in an office rather than a bedroom, and my productivity was helped.

Create Your Perfect Office

This correlates to the self-help hypnosis tapes that I'm using. One of them involves creating a space in your world of imagination and making it a "classroom," in the example from the genius book, but of imagining having there, everything you need to create your masterpiece.

It isn't surprising then, that I felt the urge to rearrange my furniture and place the laptop table right where all I have to do is sit up, upon waking from a dream for example, and then type away, recording as many details as I can before waking consciousness obliterates the memory.

Also, though, in my world of pure imagination, I would envision myself working non stop on some creative project, staying in my creative environment and working away. This hasn't involved going out to make money, lately, as, true to the promises of the voice on the self help dialogue, "everything you need, will magically come into your life," type of thing.

Everything Will Come To You Unbidden

So, Jacob called on Monday and we spent the afternoon recording tracks at his house, and then on Tuesday, a similar scenario materialized whereby, he invited me to the Uxi Duxi, when I might otherwise have gone and sold my plasma. This left me filled with ideas, rather than drained of vitatality.

I still went out and made the nine dollars in a little over an hour, but then was faced with the reality that, if I want to be extra productive, I need to cut out the tuning up joint that I have fallen into the habit of smoking.

The Genius Who Awakened The Genius In The "Awaken The Genius" Genius

The last time I used a similar book, it was the one called "Unlimited Power," by Tony Robbins. That was in 1990.

One of the exercises in that book, right around chapter three was to take out a pen and piece of paper and to imagine what you would have if you could have anything you wanted, with no limits, as if you were guaranteed success at whatever you endeavored for.

That time, I had been working at a job which paid well, for 1990. The wage was "only" $8.55 per hour, but we were required to work at least sixty hours per week, more, if we could. The company had a backlog of orders and needed to crank the products out as fast we could solder the components onto the printed circuit boards.


It would have been a great opportunity for someone to go hog wild and work ninety hour weeks, while sleeping for free somewhere, stock-piling checks every week equivalent to 130 hours of straight time, for as many months as the demand persisted. Someone like I would become twenty years later..

But, in my case, I had no such great financial vision, though I had determined  that I needed, somehow, more "power."

When sitting for at least 12 hours a day in a room with other people, tethered to your work, conversations flourish.

I soon found out that another guy, a skinny one with long-ish blond hair who was probably in his late thirties, was also into things like juice fasting. I had mentioned out loud that I felt like I needed more "power," and the guy, who's name I forget brought the Unlimited Power book to work the next day and handed it to me..

I had recently found relief, through my new discovery of juice fasting, from a lifetime of consuming foods that gave me eczema, after having done a three day juice fast, followed by three more days of spring water. These foods, I had built up a tolerance of, by being force-fed them my whole life, foods such as the carton of milk that comes on every kid's cafeteria tray along with the partially hydrogenated soybean oil that is ubiquitous.

There was was another guy who worked there whose body was ravaged by eczema. His skin was the reddish color it gets when a person is scratching it all the time. And he was obviously suffering, being 22 years old or so, and having to stop every once in a while to rake at his face or neck, like a chicken looking for grubs.

He was most likely buying into whatever his doctors were telling him about eczema and was probably even taking the antihistamines and applying the lotions, both of which treat the symptoms and not the cause of eczema.

It could also have been that "nerves" had been blamed upon his flare-ups. This determination comes from the fact that the eczema sufferer might draw a correlation between his itching and the normal stresses of daily life.
A lot of people will scratch their head when pondering something vexing, or might "nervously" scratch their nose or something when some troubling thought occurs to them.

It would be easy for doctors to conclude that the person with eczema just has a hyperactive mechanism and is itching like crazy due to stress.

I tried to help the young man as much as I could. He sat by himself, away from the rest of us, probably so he wouldn't bother anybody with his scratching, or with the flakes of skin that would fall like dandruff, from his face, neck, arms, you name it.

I pointed out to him that my skin had once been as bad as his, hoping that would get his attention, and even made him aware if he wasn't already that, in order to get any satisfaction out of scratching -the feeling that you are getting right at the itch- you must tighten the underlying muscles. Leaving the muscles slack and then scratching the skin above would produce no sensation of relief. It is as if the flexed muscles are holding the skin taut and still so that it can be scratched.

I told him about this and also about the fact that, if he were to probe around the area of his neck, he would find nerves that he could press on which would produce a sensation in his toes or arms or wherever else he might itch. Therefore, the irritation is caused at the spot where the nerves enter and leave the spinal column and not in the extremities where the itching is felt. I have always thought it was at the spot where the brain meets the nerves at the back of the head.

But, alas, this poor guy was very much averse to even attempting a 3 day juice fast and cleanse and mucous free diet..

He feared doctors the way some feared priests...poor guy.

There are always people who say that fasting is stupid and that, if nothing else, your body needs its 2,000 calories every day. They would say that you need energy from food in order to help you "fight" the eczema, the chronic eczema. 

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, I thought.

Unlimited Power

For my own part, I did the exercise in chapter 3 and wrote down that, if I could have anything I wanted -the sky's the limit- I would want to be able to stay home and practice on the guitar for 12 hours a day, and get paid for it.

Through a series of events and applying the principles in the book, I had just that situation less than a month later.

That stemmed from my having bought a box of chocolates for a girl who worked at the same place, on Valentine's Day.

She was a Jehovah's Witness, and so, she returned the thing to me, informing me as she did that she didn't "believe in," that holiday and treating me as if I had brought a t-bone steak with mashed potatoes as a gift to someone who's religion worships the cow.

So, I was brought into the office of the president, or whatever, of the company who presented me with a piece of paper which outlined the company's policy on "sexual harassment," and how it referenced the giving of "unwanted" gifts, to go along with other "advances."

The president didn't seem upset and told me that it was a mere formality that he was required to give me the information, along with another more specific text which began something like: "On the morning of February 14th..." and then mentioned the box of chocolates and Melissa, as that was her name, and then the fact that Melissa, as that was her name was of a religious group that spurned the giving of gifts, etc. And, I guess I was affirming with my signature at the bottom, as just a formality, that I would no longer give Melissa gifts on holidays that she didn't believe in, etc.

Well, I had a song that I wrote which was called "Melissa," and which repeated her name three times in the chorus, and so I thought it kind of a neat coincidence when I noticed that the three references to her name on my "disciplinary write-up" fell in kind of a diagonal line on the page, and so I highlighted them with yellow marker, before hanging the "warning" in my cubicle.

I wound up being fired for doing that after another higher-up noticed the thing and commented, "This is the exact thing we're talking about!" and told me that the whole point of the matter was that I had given Melissa unwanted attention in the first place, and that, by hanging the warning about it in my cubicle, and especially by highlighting her name, I was doing more of the same -now everyone in our department was going to know that I had given a box of chocolate to Melissa and that she had refused it.

The labor board did not agree with the action taken by the company, nor that I had been terminated "for cause," and they awarded me an unemployment benefit check which ran for the next half a year, I believe it was.

So, I was then home, practicing on the guitar for 12 hours a day, and getting paid for it, less than a month after having cracked open the Tony Robbins book and filled in the worksheet after imagining what my ideal situation would be.

I put that book down when came the chapter telling me that I would need to refrain from all alcohol, tobacco and pot use before continuing with the program. That was 28 years ago.

I have figured out that pot is holding me back in certain capacities. But, as it is Wednesday night, and I am on my way out to busk up anything possible, I still have some of Bobby's bud. My only hope is to take a break after I feel I don't want to play any more and to maybe drink a whole Rock Star Energy "zero" drink, maybe take another small toke and see if I can break through the eighty minute wall.