A Dry Spell

Amazing how reluctant I am to blog now that it isn’t part of the routine of going to the Uxi Duxi.

Come to think of it, the places that I have done my blog posts from had become at least half of the attraction of writing a blog.

Of course, back in the public library using days, the novelty of the blog itself, aided by all the free time that homeless people seem to be blessed with and the shelter from the elements the library provided was enough to keep me blogging.

I was afraid that my moving into an apartment would sound a death knell of a blog about the “adventures” of living off the land, busking for survival, etc.
But I had still averaged about 23 posts per month for years.

The thought of coming to the Sacred Heart computer "lab" and having to deal with one of the other residents who lives here, who is a light skinned black guy who never say's a word to me even if we are both sitting in the computer room for hours, but who will cast me an evil glance every once in a while, as if his life and whatever he might have on his laptop screen might matter to me enough that I would care one bit.

I will say that I had a brush with him one time about 3 years ago now, after I had just moved in and had sat down at one of the computers that were once in here before a combination of residents downloading free no strings attached porn, and staffers at Sacred Heart having given up on trying to regulate them led to their demise.

Having them all stolen, as my bike recently was, I guess solved the virus problem.

This guy has a rather tall and large frame, though he has the appearance of someone who might have once been a formidable athlete, but who then might have been a formidable crackhead for an equal length of time -the same appearance that people who come out of hospitals after extended stays have- his muscles look atrophied and hang too loosely on his frame. He probably has it in his psyche that he is physically imposing despite what he sees in the mirror these days.

But, I was unable to explain to him that I had not interrupted his download but only had minimized the window that it was in, in case whomsoever it was that was on it came back. In that lab, computers were left auto playing all night by people who just got up and walked away from them. These same people probably open their hamburgers the throw the wrapper on the ground; let someone else worry about it, type of thing.

But this light skinned black lug had walked over and yanked my thumb drive out of the computer, definitely messing up what I was doing before I could explain to him that I hadn't messed up what he was doing.

He was functioning at the "ignorant African American" level of "you touched my stuff, I'm gonna touch yours!"

But, as I sit here ready to report that we haven't spoken to each other since, I realize that half of the fault  that is mine.
I'm pretty sure that I would dislike the guy just as much as I do now, even if I got to know him; I have seen his breed before.

He is probably "the mulatto who was raised by the white side of the family but who identified with his black side because it became cool to be black during his impressionable years and who wound up being a total outcast because each race could smell the other on him."

I think he is probably that guy.

But, on more than one occasion I blew off doing a blog post out of not wanting to see his petulant face.

Lately, I haven’t seen much that was interesting enough to make a post about, outside of flashes of insight that might come to me spuriously, that I might think about and even start to formulate an essay in my head about, but that become overshadowed by other things.

The biggest problem now is that I have too much catching up to do and not enough time to reconstruct the whole past week.
I guess the theme of it was that I took a lot of time off from busking to work on music. Some of it will be posted here hopefully within a week.

Am dealing with the consequences of having put a lot of my eggs in the one basket of thinking that Jacob and I were on the verge of creating something in the studio which would justify my having taken time off so much time from busking.

While it is true that I could have made it out there to play by 1:30 AM Saturday morning, after having recorded music Friday night, there were already plans in place to do additional tracks later that day. I had only gotten the minimal amount of sleep by the time Jacob arrived back at the place to whisk me off to the studio.

I have just listened to one of our most recent sessions. After we recorded that particular gem, we wound up hitting the supermarket, where I had no money to spend on anything to eat.

I had basically lived off of the 54 bucks I made the previous weekend, spending money only on cat supplies and cigarettes. Jacob brought over kratom and cat food a few times.

Hold The Phone

The LG Aristo 3 phone that Bobby in building C bought for me, so it would be easier for him to stay in touch with me is now telling me to pay 52 dollars by March 1st, to avoid interruption of service.

He gave the thing to me as a "gift" but then told me that I was on my own as far as the monthly fees.

I want to just throw it in the river, but I wouldn't doubt that there is something in the fine print that would make me liable for the balance of a one or two year contract, if I did. Pay the $800 or we will report you to the credit people, type of thing.

That is a good example of why I have used multiple ID's in the past and why the new phone is under a name that isn't quite mine.

The weekdays except for Wednesdays are good days for Jacob and I to record.

On Wednesday, he is tied up with school and church activities.

I can remember the Baptist church where I went when in my mid twenties wanting our Wednesday nights as well as our Sunday mornings.

The Wednesday nights were for the choir to practice up for Sunday.
But it seems fitting for the Baptists to also see it as some kind of middle of the week sustenance, to help get them through to Sunday, all the serious Baptists were there, even if they could hardly carry a tune.
A week is an awful long time to stay in Christ, and so a dose of accountability mid week is a good antidote.

After I started going to that church kind of regularly but then missed one Sunday morning, I was visited that afternoon by my fellow choir member and deacon of the church, Richard, an affable and well meaning gentleman in his seventies who probed me upon the meaning of my absence, telling me that sometimes people would “backslide” in some way and would then avoid the church and all the guilt and shame associated with it.

He feared that that was what might have happened to me, and so he was bringing the guilt and shame to my door.

Because deeply spiritual souls live a very austere life, the Baptists might have thought that they were following in their footsteps.

What I always thought were that these were people who were pre-disposed to clean living anyways and who weren’t resisting any great temptation to smoke or drink or swear.

Richard showed up and was let in by my roommate, so he suddenly appeared in the doorway of my room.

I was sitting there with a girl I had met who had come over in the morning but who had not slept with me in the unmade bed in the center of the room.
He was holding, I believe, a copy of the missile (sp?) which had been used at the service that I had missed.

But, he never handed them to me. Acting as if he had walking in on us in the middle of sex, he uttered a quick apology and then retreated.

I guess that was too much sin for him to handle. I’m sure he had planned upon filling me in on the highlights of the service, reading the particular scripture verses from the missile to me, assuring me that I never should feel reluctant to go to church for any reason, etc.