You Ever Hear The Intro To Fly Like An Eagle?

Four Years Behind

It is a Monday, and one which is falling right after a weekend of Jazzfest.

In the past, I have found that a lot of businesses were running skeleton crews and places were closing early on these Mondays and Tuesdays, because their employees had just “pulled doubles,” and other painful sounding things, through the weekend, and I have found that the tourists, seemingly take a cue from this phenomenon and decide to perhaps, stay in the hotel, making for some pretty desolated street views.

Brandy

Sunday night, I was visited by a heavy set black lady, whom I initially tried to guess the name of, thinking (out loud) that she was named after some place.

After guessing “Georgia,” “Cheyenne,” and maybe “Trinidad,” I was informed that I had been “close” in that she was actually named after a drink. That’s about as close to a place as it gets.
It wasn’t the joke guess of “Mai Tai,” nor was it “Sambuca,” which she wishes it was, but rather; Brandy.

Brandy presented an interesting challenge, after she had sat down on Lilly’s stoop.
I had been playing well enough to have gotten her to sit down.
She was definitely a well traveled looking heavyset black lady who had kind of a dred locked and tattooed appearance.

I got the sense that she would be able to see through any fake bullshit type of music, and was able to play alright after I had reminded myself that, I would have to continue playing after she left, for at least another hour, and I chose music that I could sustain for that length of time, rather than try to hit some kind of crescendo, in order to draw a tip from her.

She did a good job, I thought, of remaining ambiguous as to whether or not she even had a dime on her, or if she was someone who would drop a hundred dollar bill -provided it didn't seem like I was just trying to get a tip out of her.

She did drop what wound up being two ten dollar bills in the basket. "Harold will eat tonight," I said out loud to nobody.

This -the tip- was good because it was generally a loud night at the Lilly Pad, with at least four or five visitations by the traveling boom box guys who ride around until they see a group of more than a dozen people convened, conveniently for them, somewhere, and then stop by them and begin to play "DJ" -instant party type of thing...

One of them stayed for what seemed like 45 minutes and then rode off only after I had had enough of him and was ready to take a break; 25 bucks to the good.

Even so, I came up with a really killer riff in the key of F minor, not your typical guitar key, by playing along as best I could with his portable music.

I have put money on my American Express Serve card and will now proceed to the computer room to post this, and to possibly buy a gigabyte or two of data for my government phone while I’m online, so I can start to experiment with conserving data.

I found out through the guy in India whom I talked the Assurance Wireless team that it was my laptop, and not the phone that it was tethered to that was consuming the data.

I need to Google: “How do I keep my laptop from consuming extraneous data through a hotspot?”

And, while I’m at it, I would really like to find forums on Cecilia, the “ear bending sonics” application that I have used to get the lobe twisting sounds heard on the recent videos I’ve embedded here, as well as on Audacity.

It is an impressive application, but it is bedecked with all kinds of menus and functions that I know almost nothing about, but which give me the impression that I could do even cooler stuff with Cecilia.

Somewhere on the web there must be some explanation of what the “random delay amp” setting does in the multiband harmonizer “module” in Cecilia.
I think it could be broken down to a layman.

What is confusing is that you could feed a sound file that runs for an hour into Cecilia and process it any one of a million ways and save the output file.
But, there are also modules which work upon very short samples of less than a quarter second.

These are used to take the shortest possible sample of, say, the human voice and then create a musical instrument that has all the usual notes but which have the timbre of that particular human voice holding that particular note for a tenth of a second with no vibrato.

Feeding an hour long sound file into a module such as that seems to be pointless, but none of them are equipped with pop up boxes that would say something like: “The pelletizer is designed for working on audio of very brief duration, are you sure you want to load this file. Only the first .03 seconds will actually be utilized...” type of thing.

I’m not complaining, I mean there is another employment opportunity for someone to contact all the developers of each individual module and obtain a brief description, in as layman’s terms as possible, what the module is good for.
Things like “You ever hear the beginning of ‘Fly Like An Eagle,’ off The Steve Miller Band’s ‘Book of Dreams’ album, well they were using a legacy synthesizer that this module is intended to mimick...” would be gems in the hands of a person who is starving at the creative banquet of life, due to not knowing what anything on that menu that pops up when you hover the mouse over a certain spot is useful for.

Forums on Audacity would be cool to find also.

Alex in California, I would guess, might be a good resource, given that he seems to understand how Reddit even works, for example.

I found a video on Youtube that had the audacity, excuse the pun, to be entitled “Cecelia Tutorial,” and yet, well.

The guy loaded a sound file into the “pelletizer module,” at which point I thought: “Good, I wondered what that one does...”

He then proceeded to play around with the parameters, saying basically that, only through experimenting and playing around with the parameters can you figure out what the pelletizer can do, and saying the ear and mind bending, “OK, that didn’t seem to do anything,” after having slid one of the handles to an extreme position, maxing its setting out, or something.

First of all, why the hell didn’t he play around with it and get some cool stuff happening, which he could replicate the steps towards once he started recording himself making a jackass of himself.

Again, I’m not complaining, this means there are further employment opportunities in taking an application that is used by thousands of people and posting up some ostensible “tutorial” on it, and just fudging your way through it “Again, you have to just play around...” while garnering enough hits on the topic to have positioned your page near the very top of Google results, and then sell some kind of ad-space, or allow some third party company to cull the IPS addresses of all who visit the page, in exchange for a fee...

Again, I’m not complaining. You have to just play around.

Well, that didn’t do anything...

Pitbull Higher On Bill Than Santana And Doobie Brothers

I am smack dab in the middle of Jazzfest.

It is a mystery, beyond The Dave Matthews Band being the biggest concert draw in the world, how they rank these acts, and how a Pitbull is higher on the bill than Santana, go figure.. The top ten acts listed contain two I have never heard of, ahead of Herbie Hancock, nonetheless..

It spans two consecutive weekends, and, checking the archives of this blog has revealed an 85 dollar night or two during this festival, made at the Lily Pad.
I played a 3 hour set last night, and made 40 bucks.

I was hindered for the most part by having a dim light.

Bobby in building C has given me a light which plugs into a USB charger and casts a bright beam, cohesive enough so that it makes about a 2 foot in diameter circle around the tip basket, and covers the “The Tiposaurus Rarely Bites” sign.
I had forgotten to run through my checklist of necessary busking items before leaving the apartment at 11:10 PM. I guess I haven’t learned my lesson about doing that religiously.

The first item on the list should be A: Run through this list.

Almost every aspect of the busking experience has been in flux, lately.

I keep being hearkened back to the biblical verse of: The Son of Man has no place to lay his head. As if the ultimate spiritual goal becomes clouded by security and creature comfort types of things.

The lesson that I learned from having been barred from the Uxi Duxi was that I had fallen into a certain complacency which was watering down my creativity.
When I was homeless, I had to improvise every minute of every day, since nowhere was the impermanence of things spotlighted more than through that type of existence.

If the river was rising while I was busking, then I might have returned to the wharf to find my bed under water, or I might have to wade through knee deep muddy water in order to get to it.

This was a favorable thing for me, for, it was about equal to the 5 foot alligator that hung out under there in its deterrence to skeezers trying to camp out under there. That was my spot; my wharf, my alligator, my rats, and my spiders that had the whole area spangled with their tautly stretched webs, everywhere except along the route that my path took from the edge of the wharf to where my bed of thick cardboard had been made.

It only takes spiders a couple instances of having their work destroyed before they start to avoid that spot when fashioning the next web.

My path crisscrossed a bit utilizing stepping stones that I had stabilized to keep them from lolling around when stepped on by a typically drunken me, with an absence of spider webs the whole way. So, my path was clear, and the rest of the webbing kept me from ever having to buy a fly swatter.

Any intruder would have no knowledge of my path and would have to venture over the chunks of granite, slick with slime from the river, and poised to rock in one direction or another as soon as weight was transferred to them, twisting the ankle of, and often felling any tipsy hapless skeezer who might land on the irregular stones in such a way as to fracture an elbow or a hip, where they would lie crippled with a face full of spider webs, and probably vow to never set foot under the wharf again.

The icing on the cake would have been if the alligator would then come and eat the incapacitated skeezer, preying upon the weak -the sign fliers- in keeping with its predatory instincts.

Taking away this daily struggle between life and death, I soon found myself, well, somewhat less inspired, and basically just hoping that I was on the right path.
There must have been a reason that I inexplicably made the comment: “We need to build that wall,” to the Uxi Duxi staffer who then found a way to bar me from going there.

I then made the comment of something like: Gee, I’d better stop shoplifting! as the tedious warning recording played at the Family Dollar where I had been a daily fixture, which caused a certain cashier to bar me from going there.

So, I find myself invigorated by having to think on my feet instead of being on autopilot.

I read the story “A Rocking Horse Winner,” by D.H. Lawrence last night, after returning at around 4 AM. to the apartment, to find that it was still there -the apartment, not the story- not underwater, no rats had eaten my bag of kratom, and there was no skeezer asleep on my couch.

The part of the story that made me think the most was when the boy in the story had arranged, through the help of his uncle and a lawyer, to give his mother 5,000 pounds (out of his secret “rocking horse” winnings) and it was decided to pay her 1,000 pounds a year on her birthday over the coming 5 years.

The uncle made the comment: “I hope it won’t make it all the harder for her later.”

That kind of resonated with me; how even a blessing can be seen as a curse in disguise.

But some sense of security and confidence is in order, and running through my checklist to make sure I am not forgetting the spotlight or the guitar tuner or the sign is a good idea.

I am pretty sure I would have made more like 58 dollars instead of 40 had I been brightly illuminated, a reflection of the bright neon found further up Bourbon Street, as it stretches, like a tedious argument, towards Canal Street.

HorseHead Slaughter, And How I Think About Human Beings In General

As it is time to go out to busk because it is a Friday night during Jazzfest, and Phil Lesh and the remaining members of the Grateful Dead are in town, playing as "Phil Lesh And The Friends Of Terapin" or something similar.

The video, I put together with a song that I made using the horse head as a rhythm.

As usual, I ran out of creative steam well before it was time to put the icing on the cake and feature vocals, perhaps with clever lyrics, and instrumental solos, played on guitar, harmonica, an electric guitar borrowed from Bobby in building C, that would become the actual song that I would play and sing over the beat, but...

By the time I had this "techno beat" finished, I think the sound of my door swinging open and closed for hours on end through the studio monitors, and the fact that, even 12 hours into the project, I would catch myself flinching and ready to yell, "Go away, skeezer!" at the sound of the knocking on the door (it's a chill down the spine inducing sound) were getting to me.

I supposed that might say something about how I think of human beings in general.

Quality Over Quantity

• Easter Sunday Night Off
• A Miracle In My Mailbox
• The Rent Violation Notice Saga cont.
• Advice On Choosing The Ideal Busking Spot

Post written on Easter Sunday, beginning right after I decided to not go out and busk (probably a mistake of biblical proportions) and to stay in, focusing upon quality over quantity.

What I mean is that, to go out to busk when you have great material and are chomping at the bit to perform it, after having learned and run through it at home and gotten it sounding good is something which is good and will pay dividends regardless of the time and season. This should be the horse which is placed in front of the cart.

The cart is everything else -your clothes and equipment, the spot that you hand-picked to play at, etc.

Their order of importance, in my opinion after busking for 11 years is...
A: Acoustics
I played in the entrance of a clothing store in Mobile, Alabama. It was a large, window-lined affair, tailored for displaying half of the store's merchandise to anyone who is on their way into the place, type of thing.

While people were on their way in, though, were one of them to say to another something like: "Oh, that tie would look great with your gray suit," it would reverberate and carry out onto the sidewalk with just the right amount of delay added, and with the bass boosted, due to the 25 foot corridor leading to the recessed doorway being able to reinforce sound waves of that length.

I would have to pore over perhaps the GRE book that I got for 50 cents at the Goodwill Store on Tulane Street, to perhaps locate the applicable mathematical formula to corroborate this, but I would estimate, after thousands of hours of working with digital audio, that the spot in front of that store afforded something close to a 40 millisecond slap-back echo with the "regeneration" set to about 3, along with about a 280 millisecond in decay of reverberation with the "damper" set to 0 or 1.

The damper setting on DAWs often has its settings labelled "soft" and "hard."
It dampens the high frequencies so that a cozy living room which has plush drapes along a wall and plush carpeting with plenty of furniture and other sound absorbing things, to include the bodies that might be populating it would "soften" the sound. This would correspond to a "damp" setting of 10.

A glass case along with a marble floor can be reminisced about by setting it close to zero. Or by turning the knob towards "hard," as hard as the marble the busker is sitting on.

I found the spot after using the day of my arrival in Mobile to walk around the downtown area snapping my fingers, clapping and hooting into various stairwells and other natural auditoriums. The goal is to find the nearest one to where the hubbub will be in say, the middle of a Friday evening.

I could have moved closer to the action in Mobile, but would have sacrificed the acoustics. I think people are more likely to appreciate the acoustics and not mind walking over to where it is also quiet enough for them to think in order to listen. These people are the "high odds of tipping" ones. Even if you are so far away that they just barely become aware that there is a musician, what they do hear faintly will sound good.

B: Bustle. Where there will be the most traffic.
This is B, and certainly not A because a ton of people can all become overwhelmed by the very crowd that they are part of, can be thus "in a rush," and can have a herd mentality and not tip because nobody else is...they must know something...
  
C: Your Clothes.

I have seen a couple, in Mobile I saw them, who were dressed like hobos. They were probably around 20 years old. The guy played a resonator guitar and the girl played the saw, and they both sang in very good harmony.


And they wore hobo outfits, but they were like hobo costumes that might be sewn together for use in a Broadway production that called for hobos in a certain scene. The girl even smeared black make-up on her face to simulate coal soot, like that emitted by steam locomotives that haven't run in a hundred years.
Their overalls had come "ripped and worn" right out of the costume shop, it appeared.

But, they played hobo songs like "A Hobo's Life Is A Hobo's Wife," and they probably made just shy of 100 dollars per hour, by picking their spots, like a grassy area right across a quiet street from a cafe which was hugely popular on, say, a Sunday morning.


People seemed to really want to help support them in "their travels," and almost wouldn't want to hear that the couple stayed in pretty decent hotels and would often arrange rides in cars with people they met.
Other than in special cases like theirs, it is generally best to wear what you always wear, as that will probably project the right idea of what music you are probably about to play.

note: The guy performs as "Stinky Pete," solo and as "Big Joe Puddin'" with the girl as seen and heard in the video above (sitting in front of the same tree where I saw them). This (their entertainment value ) is all you need to be to make just short of 100 dollars an hour if you are in the right place at the right time and have the right costumes.

Though, by showing up at the Lily Pad with a backpack, I have probably unwittingly become the beneficiary of people who may have tipped me thinking that they were helping out The Homeless. I guess they would prefer not to know that I have an apartment. Or, do I?

Sacred Heart Apartments

It's funny how, when I think back to when I first moved in to Sacred Heart Apartments, and was greeted by a resident named Darren, who congratulated me on having gotten in "You've got a place for the rest of your natural life!" I wasn't totally convinced of that, and had kind of tentatively shaken his extended hand.
(He then skeezed me for a cigarette, and wanted another one before we parted).

Last week, the pest control guy came in, carrying his scuba tank looking spray cannister, and did all of splashing the wall behind the kitchen sink and in the bathroom.

The Two Legged Kind

I told him that I hadn't seen many pests at all.

I then joked that the only ones had been the two legged kind, carrying spray canisters.
He was just entering the kitchen when I said this, and was perhaps trying to think of a comeback when he snapped on the light, looked at the picture of President Trump hanging over my stove (a chicken in every pot) and was staring at it when his reply became: "Oh, that's not very nice..."

Whether or not such a picture is hung as a joke or not is immaterial because closed minded Trump haters have no sense of humor, so it would be lost on them anyways...

The next morning, there was a notice on my door informing me that I was in violation of the lease because: "During a routine pest control visit..." my apartment was found to have "unsanitary conditions" that could "reduce the effectiveness" of the pest control treatment.

My kitchen, I have been keeping clean, lately. I leave it spotlessly wiped down, trash removed, before leaving every night. There was no more than a pizza box on the stove with the hardened crusts from the night before in it, and some oatmeal and maybe other crumbs on the counter.

Darren: "Welcome home, do you have a cigarette?"

There was no foul odor from garbage having sat for more than a day. Even Harold had helped by only knocking a minimal amount of food out of his dish and onto the floor the last time he had eaten.

But, that was enough, apparently.

Of course, I had to surmise that a lot of other residents must have gotten a similar write-up. I have walked by enough places when their doors were open, and have heard enough stories from other residents "I don't think he's swept his floor since he moved in 4 years ago, I'm serious!" types of things to figure that, if my place was unsanitary, what about the ones that the one roach that I did see left due to overcrowding, and urban problems?

So, I went to the office and was informed that, indeed, a lot of people did get the notices.

There is an inspection coming up, and before that a pre-inspection. If I cleaned up my "mess" by the time of the pre-inspection then the violation would be ripped up, said Missy Epperson, the property manager. She is white.

A couple days later, the maintenance guys knocked at my door to do that very pre-inspection.

They had caught me by surprise at 11 AM and I sleepily told them that if they just gave me ten minutes (my place was in no worse condition than usual and was ten minutes from being spotless) I would....

"Oh, no. Don't worry about it. It's cool," said the maintenance guys.
The big one, Terry, held his palm up, as if to tell me I needed say no more. They played it off like they didn't feel like doing the extra work anyways, and well, that everything was cool.

The next day came a notice entitled "Remedy or quit," which gave me 10 days to either remedy "the situation" or turn in my key.
What was "cool" was probably that they were told that if the place wasn't clean for any reason then to come back and they could start trying to get me out and put one of their black friends in my place. No, don't take ten minutes to clean up quickly; we don't want you to do that, type of thing...

The next day was Good Friday, offices closed. Then came the weekend. The ten days ticking down...

There is a noticeable racist attitude among the maintenance workers.
There is a sense that this building should be for black people, and that whites have enough in this world.
I have complained about my heating and air unit several times, which lead to the same guys kicking and shaking it until it came on, and then telling me "There, it's working, just don't touch it," while a steady flow of brand new units, still in the packing materials made their way to other apartments and, in the meantime, I had to "touch" mine after it got to be freezing cold in the place. Then it was back to being broken.

I remember one of the black security ladies a couple years ago, when I had gone to the lobby to pick up a turkey that I had won in the annual raffle (which I had been too lazy to even walk down to sign my name on the sheet for this year) giving me a hard stare.

I had also had my name drawn, that year, for one of the other food give aways beating odds of 120 residents to 32 baskets. The odds against winning a turkey were similar.

She stared at me, with her jaw clenched.

"Everything alright?"

She managed to stammer that she just didn't think it was right, (or fair, or whatever) that a resident could win a food basket AND a turkey (when some other residents win nothing, she might have been thinking.

To see a white guy do it must have just smacked of rigging, corruption and racism at the institutional level. They shouldn't even get to live here, for crying out loud, what with all they've got....

So, as it stands today, I have a few days left to remedy the situation.

I told Missy that the pest control guy should allow the resident to snap a picture of exactly what he is talking about and let her decided how "unsanitary" it is.
The problem is the two-faced nature of it. He smiled in my face, despite my joke having bombed, and gave me no indication that it would help matters if I made sure to clean up after Harold immediately after he eats, or something.

The fact that I told him first off that I actually had only seen a couple of roaches the entire 90 days or whatever since he had last come was information that he apparently failed to consider.

The maintenance guys "putting my mind to rest" by telling me not to worry about giving my place a once over, and then running to the manager to draft up the latest paperwork...

There has got to be a name for that. "Two-faced" will have to do for now.

I think I am going to have take advantage of their ignorance and maybe visit the  H.I.R. ("Elevating the urban experience") website and find some name that I can drop.

Me: "Do you know Ed Collins?"

Missy: "Um, I don't know him, I've met him a couple times at our Christmas party. Why?"

"I was wondering. He's in my yoga class.* We wound up talking and he said he works for H.I.R., I was wondering if it's a huge company or if you would know him, that's all....I might be giving his kid guitar lessons.*

*all having been researched through social media, etc... 

Maybe they are just as afraid of me as I am of them...

OK, Now Sunday Night's Post That I Was Too Lazy To
 
I am trying to restore a sense of normalcy to my perception of time.
Last (Saturday), I got to the Lily Pad at about 11:30.

The dearth of milk crates at the Quartermaster continues to be a problem, as there were no crates of any kind.

Across the street, I saw one of the boxes that the candles come in, which are the sole source of illumination in Lafit’s Blacksmith Shop Tavern, if you don’t count the glow from the Slushy machine and the couple sets of flat screen TVs over the bar -a couple of 20th century touches at the oldest bar in America.

The candle boxes are only about 4 inches high, but are very sturdy, having a dozen reinforced cubbyholes that cradle the dozen glasses full of wax and wicks inside. I guess they are designed so that a UPS worker could inadvertently (in her haste to unload x amount of units from a truck in order to keep her job) step right on top of the box and not break any of the glasses.

Look before you leap!!

This means that they make excellent boosters for buskers, but that, due to their height, 3 of them must be stacked up to the height that I have become used to through sitting on milk crates.
I found one more in the trash outside Lafit’s and grabbed a couple pieces of cardboard to supplement them and put me at almost the right height.

As I was fishing for the stuff, I was aware of being stared at by some of the patrons of the bar as they sat in the outside seats and around the outside tables.

If they had been sitting there for at least a half hour, then they had doubtless seen at least one alcoholic skeezer “Bourbon surfing” the same trash cans for things like Hurricane drinks that, after being sampled by somebody and found to be either too strong or too sweet or both, had been tossed into the can and had landed upright enough to have retained their contents.
They aren’t too strong, nor too sweet, for skeezers.

Many skeezers carry one large “fishbowl” container that once held a red colored drink of the same name but into which is now pooled an amalgamation of their surfing discoveries. That way, if any one drink had been used as an improvised ashtray or had been urinated into, it will become diluted by the rest and, once they start sipping it, urine, ashes etc. will all start to taste the same.
There are so few public restrooms in The Quarter (read: none) that even I had, at times, resorted to the trick of peeing into an empty Hand Grenade or Jester container, both of which are equipped with penis sized openings at the top, and long stems which can extend that opening upward behind a loose shirt tail, and which also act as a conduit which the urine will cling to on its journey to the bowl at the bottom of the thing, precluding the chance of anything splashing back, like acid reflux, and getting on the pee-er.
They both -especially the Hand Grenade one- funnel the urine in such a way that it sticks to the inside of the stem and is deposited quietly into the bowl.
Anyone who has ever built a speaker box with a “tuned port” will understand how, due to the foot long length of the tube, it will resonate at a frequency much lower than the sibilant sound of liquid hitting liquid, and will muffle those tell-tale higher frequencies, which might otherwise draw attention to a guy standing in a crowd in a trench coat with a nervous smile on his face.*
(Hey, this is, by some estimates, a “New Orleans Lifestyle” blog, and so I am just kind of trying to get to the meat and potatoes of that here).
*This is not applicable to females, whom perhaps the fishbowl itself was designed for.
So, I endured the stares and the disgusted looks for a few seconds until I found the second candle box, which I removed, before walking over to Lilly’s stoop.
It occurred to me then, that I often feel like I can have a lifetime’s worth of experiences, all within just a few seconds isolated out of a typical day.
Or that any given span of a few seconds can be viewed as part of a holographic, through which my whole life story could be elucidated.
There was a skinny, older black guy at the stoop, whom I knew I would have to treat with kid gloves and not give the sense to that I was encroaching upon his turf, or trying to move off of “my” block.
I was prepared to greet him with news that I had found a couple of candle boxes, and then maybe tell him that I planned to do songs by the band called “Candlebox” all night. And maybe even fabricate something like: “You know that’s how they got their name; they started out playing on the street and used to sit on these same type of boxes, because they’re so sturdy...and they wound up naming the band Candlebox.”
None of that became necessary.
The black guy asked me if I did cocaine, to which I replied that I could do without it.
He wanted to trade some in exchange for me smoking a joint with him.
I lied and told him I didn’t have any.
He was disappointed and added: “Damn, I wanted to get high; this coke is bullshit, it ain’t doin’ anything for me.”
Nice. So he had been trying to trade “bullshit” for any weed I might have had. Typical.
Given this news, he was soon on his way, and I rolled up the last bit of bud that I had and smoked it while tuning up. But not after having had the thought of how much it would have sucked had I not had any bud at that particular time, and how hard it might have been to motivate myself, and how this is not really a good thing, in the grand scheme of things.
For, even though I played pretty hard for about 80 minutes and made 26 bucks, I, once again, hit a wall at that point, and felt that I had given all I had to give, and knocked off at that point.
I got two cans of food for Harold the cat, a Bang energy drink along with a couple refill cartridges for my VUSE nicotine vaporizer, then hit Walgreen’s for a dozen eggs and a gallon of distilled water before riding home while wondering what the gallon of water in the bag might be doing to the dozen eggs in the bag.

Kratom Relief

In the morning, I had almost exactly the amount for an ounce of kratom on my coffee table, and so I figured I would just go and buy one, then return home with only a little bit of change, but with nicotine and cat food, and kratom enough. What more could I want? I thought.
Oh, yeah, weed.
I didn’t leave myself any money for weed and Bobby didn’t answer his door when I went to ask him if I could buy him a box of his favorite Popsicle’s in exchange for some, and so I am ready to go out very soon now to busk without any and already dealing with the thought that is is going to really suck playing straight.
The truth is probably that I am going to have to get over using weed as a crutch to get started playing, or I will be perpetually up against “the 80 minute wall” after the joint wears off.
I suppose the only way to do that will be to suffer through the initial reticence to play, force myself to start, and hope that I get into it so much that pot never crosses my mind...is that a pun?...and that I substitute the high of making good money after playing for much longer each night for it.

I would love to run to the computer lab and post this up, but it is already 10:38 PM and I could be plucking my first note by 11:15 and just maybe catch Lilly on her way back from chaperoning one or both of her daughters home at about that time...

Fully Alive, Fully Human

Is Vaping Safe Yet?

These people were nice enough, about 2 months ago already, to compliment me upon this blog and to gently and lovingly tell me that the article that I had linked to from a "John Hopkins" medical page about vaping was outdated and/or biased information.
They sent me the link at the top, pointing to the article which I have finally read a lot of.
It is pretty much comprehensive and presents "both sides" of every argument (although I've thought that there are as many sides to any argument as there are people on the earth).

I am still trying to figure out how to get the links on this blog to show up with all the "click bait" intact -the attention grabbing headline, along with a photo or cartoon of some kind and then maybe with the actual site that clicking will take a reader to, in small print under it.



 

That's About It

• A Sunday Afternoon Visit With Howard
• A Comment Addressed

Hey have you checked into your social security account? The minimum that you could start collecting at age 62 is about $750 a month. That would be a ton of money compared to what you're getting now.

I think the both of us are just marking time until we're social security age. -Alex In California

It's funny how, being 56 years old and thinking that I will live to be maybe 92, it won't be long before I won't be able to help counting down the months before I reach the magic age, which was determined back when the life expectancy was 72, when I will be able to draw social security.

At some point in the future, the retirement age is probably going to be pushed back at least 5 years, once it becomes evident that "70 is the new 50," and the life expectancy has to be adjusted.
Right now, it is based upon the average age of the people that are dying now.
But maybe people 20 years younger are going to live an average of 30 years more.

The person who is 72 today was born in 1947. His likelihood of dying today is based upon his having lived through the dark ages of the 1950's, when things like McDonald's restaurants flourished, and when Americans were force-fed the "4 food groups," in which meat and cheese were actually separate groups.
It's almost like the Food and Drug people saw the pitfall of putting red meat and milk in the same group out of fear that people might have one or the other, but not both, and that it would divide the profits between the beef cartel and the dairy producers.
So they made them separate groups and disseminated the hogwash that one had to have all four, and every day, too, in order to have a complete diet; and live to be 72.

It's not that I am "riding things out" and waiting until I am able to get social security, but that I feel like I will have a lot of youthfulness left in me at such a time that I am eligible for the thing.

I do fear though, the age being increased in the near future. Maybe the very near future if Trump gets a second term. I have a nagging feeling that I am going to be 61 years and 11 months old when they put the age up to 67.

And how would they do that. Would they tell the people who are turning 62 the next day that they have to wait 5 years, while their friends, who happened to be born one day earlier got their benefits?

They will probably tell people at some point that the age has been raised but then tell them to look on the bright side in that they will all be getting the higher amount that people used to have to defer for 5 years in order to get.

I remember when the drinking age in Massachusetts went from 18 up to 21. I was 18 at the time. I had been using a fake ID which made me 2 years older since I was 16, but I would still have to wait a year before I could use that. I wonder if that was a premonition...
 
But, that makes me feel even better about the fact that I have kind of quit smoking over the past 3 weeks, even though I have been vaping. I suppose a long healthy retirement might be a worthwhile goal. Being hit by lightning while hiking in Nepal at the age of 93 would be the end all end.

Six years is way too far ahead to be thinking, in my opinion. I'm thinking about this afternoon, that's about it...
 

A Quarter Turn, Or So

And, a very happy Friday, the 12th of April to all.

Oh, the data I spend on you readers...

I woke up at the regular time of around 1:30 PM, when the sun reaches its zenith here. I am pretty much convinced that, after living outdoors for 12 years, I am woken by the dimming of light that begins at that point, and the approaching nightfall that it portends.

When I used to drink, the darkening sky became like a siren song, luring me towards the bottle. I had to have x amount of alcohol in my bloodstream before nightfall, or suffer the consequences, I thought.

Last night, I got to the Lilly Pad at around 11 PM.

The problem of finding a milk crate to sit on persisted for a second straight night as there were no crates, milk or other, sitting outside the Quartermaster.

This meant that I had to find a box, and then stuff that box full of random pieces of cardboard, so that when I flipped it over and sat on it, I only sank in a few inches and it lasted until the middle of some song when I leaned forward to hit a certain harmonica note and...

"Sorry, my shit collapsed!," I said after stopping in the middle of that song, to a couple who had sat on Lilly's stoop and were listening, after glancing at them to gauge whether or not that particular language would be appreciated by them.
They were hip hop enough looking so I uttered it.

"Ya gotta get yourself a good box; it's crucial!," said the guy.

I was able to reconstruct the box so that it would buoy me high enough off the ground to be effective -the whole purpose of the thing is to keep my legs from cramping up like they started to do when I sat Indian style, giving me soreness in the muscles right behind the areas where my jeans pockets are on each leg.
This is a hard habit to break, sitting too low to the ground.

After years of expecting the neck of the guitar to be in the same relative position, a height increase of only a couple inches is something I become conscious of.

Another problem is the brace that holds the harmonica bumping against the top of the guitar body. I have to sit more upright than I am used to in order to prevent that.

This is a "neuro-physiological" conundrum, to use a term that hasn't found its way from the lips of motivational speakers like Tony Robbins into the database of Blogger's spell checker ( hence the annoying red squiggly line under it in front of me). It has to do with the attitude that comes with different postures.

For example, the maidens at a wedding who are poised to try to catch the thrown bouquet of flowers, will be standing with their feet slightly splayed, knees slightly bent, on the balls of their feet, eyes alert and ready to respond to the slightest nuances in the trajectory of the object of their desire, one that's procurement will signify that its possessor will be then next one of the group in line for a wedding gown, ring and a bouquet of her own to toss.

How this relates to me is that, when I do sit more upright so that the harmonica brace does not thump against the guitar body, it makes me feel like I am dying to be noticed, like I was on a bus in a seat three quarters of the way back and I see my traveling companion getting on, and so I would sit as upright as possible, and maybe wave a hand. "I got us a seat!"

Just stretching myself upwards a few inches puts me in that frame of mind, as if I am trying to say "Hey, look at me," or that I am trying to convey that I am a morally upright man of rectitude who has a great deal of pride and sits like that to show it.

I mean,  I smoke a lot of pot, work less than 3 hours a day and my farts smell like peanut butter in the morning a lot, so that is a travesty, and makes me feel like a fraud. The tourists, for the most part, won't realize that I am trying to keep the harmonica from thumping; they will just think: "Who does he think he is, the queen of England?"

There is a whole school of thought perpetuated by the "standing up" buskers, that expounds that standing up will put the busker at eye level with the tourists making it easier to make eye contact and easier to bring body movement into play, right up to the degree of dancing and swaying while she plays. This posture has been recommended by such artists as Craig Nelson, blog reader, and others, and is still subject to debate.

If I was doing songs like "Sweet Caroline," or "Louie, Louie (We've gotta go now)" then sitting down might be counterproductive -how are we going to go, when we haven't even stood up yet, type of thing- but, I believe a do a lot of sitting down material. Certainly "Sitting At The Dock Of The Bay," lends itself to sitting. But not Indian style, because of the cramped muscles.

So, the solution might be to eventually get some kind of light, portable, folding seat made out of aluminum tubing and canvas, which would fix me at a consistent height, and might be easy to tote by throwing it over one shoulder, and would give me an additional element of bullet deflecting protection in the tubing along with the paintball stopping capacity of the canvas.

The seat, I could also adorn with "New Orleans," appurtenances (read: anything shiny) so that I would score style points wherever I went with it. I might even leave it at the Lilly Pad if and when I go off to take a 15 minute break between sets, to kind of hold the spot for me.

The dawn of the era of amplification is about to arrive for me, and the seat could certainly be toted in whatever little trailer I wind up using to pull the amplifier, the rechargeable battery, etc. behind my bike.

Even the dog skeezers have taken it up a notch!

It has just become louder in general at the Lilly Pad over the past few years. A lot of this is due to the pedicab drivers trending towards equipping their rickshaws with mobile stereo systems, to "advertise" their services.

I have known that I could follow the example of other buskers who have pretty much consistently reported a 4-fold increase in busking proceeds after they became twice as loud, through amplification.

That is a topic for a whole other blog post, one which is probably already in my archives, consuming its share of the 24 megabytes.

My plan would be to get a small amplifier that I could conceal in my backpack, with maybe just the speaker plate exposed, to go with a microphone that I could clip onto the harmonica harness -maybe even a Bluetooth one, to eliminate one more wire.

Then, by setting the amp at a low volume with the reverb and echo effects maxed out, I could use it to not so much to make me louder than the level at which I have been tolerated by the residents of the block the past 7 years, but to add effects to it, making me sound better, and maybe just a bit louder, when the pedicabs park by Lafitt's Blacksmith Shop Tavern, and I reach over and rotate a knob a quarter turn or so... 

Home Sweet Home

[Using government phone as hotspot, so; no photo right now...]
I got home from busking at about midnight, which is the time that I had been going out the past few weeks.
I was up at my usual time of about 1:30 PM, and I did not smoke any weed, but rather sipped coffee and took puffs off my VUSE nicotine vaporizer.
Still, I felt the same sense of "stuck-ness" as I sat in the same spot on the couch. Even without the "wake and bake" of a morning joint, I felt like I was allowing myself to fall into a routine, the same one that had me showing up after midnight at the Lilly Pad.
So, I decided to take massive action and just pack up my busking gear to ostensibly just ride by the Lilly Pad to see what would be going on on a Wednesday afternoon which was about 72 degrees under pretty clear skies.

It was strange, riding the length of Royal Street and noticing all of the daytime buskers, who were already warmed up and had crowds around them, spurring them on. I didn't feel like I could match the energy level and planned upon just supplying light background music and seeing what fell into the tip jar.

But, once I started playing, I couldn't restrain myself from putting all my effort into it, and I was soon down to a tank top and made what turned out to be 18 bucks, playing from around 6:30 until 8:45, and then again from about 9:00 until ten.
That works out to exactly 8 dollars an hour.
I heard that the minimum wage here in Louisiana is $7.25, so I came out ahead of the hamburger flipper, but wasn't able to eat a hamburger on the sly, like she probably felt entitled to do, given her wage...

Well, I am doing this in my room, using the government phone as a hotspot. I am going to cut this short so I can check to see how much of my 2 gigabytes of mobile data I used just to do this, so I can gauge how to go about getting a whole month of Internet out of the thing.

I certainly shouldn't type all my stuff into the Blogger editor, which autosaves every so often, because I believe that uses data...

Go To Computer Lab

A Deep Foreboding

Yesterday afternoon, I was ready to come here to blog in the computer lab, and then thought I would go to the Goodwill Store later, but I put the Goodwill trip first, and never made it here, and a third day went by without a post.

I guess the good news is that I will tomorrow get more "data" on my government phone and, if I use it wisely, should be able to post from my room a lot more frequently. Maybe for the whole month, if I avoid sitting and watching streaming videos on Youtube. I believe that might be what really chews up the 2 gigabytes of data that I get free every month.

I had somehow gotten about 40 dollars ahead through this past weekend, out of which Friday night had been rained out.

Right: Charlottesville, a great busking location that I lived in for two years before I ever considered busking...

That pretty much means that I made about 55 bucks. I think I only spent ten bucks on cartridges for my VUSE nicotine vaporizer and the rest on Harold the cat's food and a bag of litter.

Perhaps the biggest thing in the grand scope of this blog might be the fact that, since getting the vaporizer, about two weeks ago now, I have pretty much switched over to it, and have stopped smoking tobacco.

At first, I would still crave a puff of real tobacco and would walk up to the corner bar, vaporizer in hand, and try to buy a single cigarette off someone.
I brought the vaporizer to make it look like what it was, and not like I was a bum who didn't even have a cigarette as a reflection of how little I actually contribute to society.

So, maybe the more life-changing process of me quitting smoking is underway and overshadows the fact that, otherwise, things are moving much too slowly.

Lilly texted me yesterday, wondering where I have been. I have been getting there progressively later with each passing week, it seems, and now I might even be playing my first notes after Lilly has fallen asleep.

It is going to be in the high sixties, temperature-wise tonight, and there is no excuse for me not to be out there.
I am getting that same kind of feeling I had the last time I decided to play in the afternoon after not doing so for years, and went there to discover that Lilly now has a daytime busker that she has taken under her wing -the horn player from Paris, named Santo.

I think that, on such a beautiful night, Lilly is going to come out to sit, and it would be really nice, and make me feel like her and I are on solid ground, if I were there playing.

I need to quit smoking weed in the daytime. It saps my ambition, makes me feel insecure, focuses me in upon what is right around me, causing me to lose sight of "the big picture" and long term goals and causes me to forget about things like getting a new key card for the Sacred Heart building, so I don't have to knock on the door at 2 AM and make whomever is behind the security desk get up and let me in.
It is typical for me to smoke some of Bobby's weed and then not be able to decide between getting the key card, or going to get a power cable for the new computer I got, as I sit there with "couch paralysis" until it's too late to do either. It is a general feeling of being overwhelmed.

Then, that evening, I might come home and feel bad about having to knock on the door to disturb the guard, and then might have to unplug one thing to move the cord over to the new computer, and then might smoke some more weed and voila! oh shit -there is now a third thing that comes to my attention that needs to be done, along with the key card and the power cord, etc...

And it is all tied in with the medicinal grade bud that I unwittingly smoked while at Bobby's, earlier this afternoon.

What ensued was pretty much predictable.

I went back to my apartment, where I sat for about 45 minutes on the couch.
Should I turn on the radio? Should I listen back to the music that I recorded last night? I felt a deep sadness, as if, if I didn't go out to busk on such a beautiful evening, I would be disappointing Lilly, and losing some of her support.
I am also just a few bucks short of being able to get an ounce of kratom.

But, then I remembered the fact that I have not been doing a good job of posting to this blog "at least something" every day, as there has been another lapse of 4 days, this time.

So, I guess I go back to the apartment and maybe do one of the self help dialogue things, and basically wait to come down off of the bud that I smoked enough, so that I can make the concrete decision to get out to the Lilly Pad, early enough so that if Lilly wants to sit by me for a while, it would still be close enough to dinner hour to frame the experience in a different light than if she was hanging out with me at midnight.

I haven't had such a strong, almost psychic, pull towards the Lilly Pad in a while.
It's as if Lilly is standing there right now, in the company of another busker whom she has made the acquaintance of, telling he or she that she had texted me about why she hasn't seen me there much at all, and that, if I didn't show up by sundown, in response to her, than that other busker can go ahead and play and have the spot and, if I were to show up, to tell me that she gave the spot to them because I am never there....

It is 6:30 PM right now. I guess it couldn't hurt to pack up my gear and at least ride by the spot -it's just a 14 minute bike ride- just to see if my premonition is right.

I think at some point in the near future, if I get a gig inside a bar somewhere, I might tell Lilly to go ahead and let someone else play there, as it wouldn't be fair for my to tie it up when I am hardly ever there.

The Zen Of Skeezing

Thursday, The Fourth

I am home from busking.

A guy who hung out, named Blake, who was from Georgia gave me a 20 dollar tip on an otherwise 3 dollar Wednesday late night.

It was after midnight when I got there, having hung around the apartment, slowly waking up and getting ready to go out there.

I still have an internal clock that wakes me up right around the time that I used to hop on the street car each night.

Wednesday, I had slept from some time in the afternoon until I woke up when it was time to busk.

But, having a cup of coffee, letting Harold the cat in and feeding him, finding my stuff and packing up my backpack all conspired to have me at the Lilly Pad around midnight.

Friday, The Fifth

I am so busy with things that I can't even afford to stuff my face with a bunch of junk food and then just sleep it off for half the next day before crapping it out.

I have to wake up in the morning and not smoke weed, as it will scatter my energies in every direction but no direction in particular.

Just now, I was sitting on my couch, realizing that if I had enough energy to sit there and read a John Grisham novel entitled: The Confession, then I could divert that inertia into coming here to the computer room to do this blog post. I can go back and fall asleep with the book in my lap afterwards.

But, not for long. I need to keep pace with Jacob and his "Energizer Bunny" level of activity; such as I had when I was 34 years old.

Actually, when I was Jacob's age, I was still a sickly young man with pasty colored skin and prone to outbreaks of eczema, who just went to a store and bought food that looked good and ate it, unaware that it takes my body a long time to break down soybean oil and that eating it every day was taxing my detoxification system, leading to a sickly young man with pasty skin.

Back then, I thought the only way I was going to get a girl to fall in love with such a guy was for me to have material things to offer.

What a long strange trip it's been. After forsaking all that and living as a homeless troubadour for years, I suddenly find myself getting computers and TV's and DJ turntable systems, and more laptops, and bikes and more TV's and a new smartphone, and a guy in building C wanting to buy me an electric guitar.

The zen of skeezing.

"It's Far"

Monday, the first of April was a

I'm sure it still gives him nightmares.

sunny and cool day, cool enough to offset the heat worked up through pedaling a bike, and so, at just a bit after noon, after weighing all my options for enjoying the sunlight, I set off on my bike in order to see just how long a ride it would be to Jacob's house in Kenner.

The first person who seemed likely to know where Kenner was, told me that it was "far" from where I asked him, a few blocks from the apartment, how I could get there on my bike.
I figured that there had to be basically just one road that would take me all the way there, and there basically was.
There was Metarie Road, which took me through the city that Kenner is on the other side of, and then there was Airline Road, which took me to the vicinity of the airport which unleashed the planes that fly about 500 feet over Jacob's back yard.
I had discounted the information that Kenner was far away as coming from a typically wussy millenial. I figured that his screen staring self probably thought anything that took more than five minutes to get to in a car would be far.

But, it turned out to be an hour and fifteen minutes of averaging only about 12 miles per hour because of bumpy sidewalks and the like.

Then, the question of whether I was going to reverse the process to get home became mute after Bob offered me a TV which he had acquired and was getting rid of, along with taking Jacob and I to the Salvage Store, where I just about tapped out my food card with the purchase of about 40 bucks worth of food, all at unheard of discounted prices, and then we went to pick up a computer which someone was giving to Bob, I guess to give to someone like me, or maybe me specifically.
So, I returned with Jacob to the apartment where we unloaded from Bob's SUV, all of the groceries, the computer, the TV, and my bike.
Forgetting only the antenna that went with the TV, and a piece of paper upon which was written the password to get into the computer.

I was so tired that I didn't go out to busk.

The computer is going to be dedicated to perhaps music alone, where I could conceivably fill it with about a month's worth of music before a song repeats.

Or I could put a version of Audacity on it and use it for the dedicated recording studio.
For being one of the least materialistic people I know, I sure seem to be acquiring a lot of stuff, lately. It's that zen kind of thing: As soon as I have learned to be content in a room with just four walls and a ceiling, it becomes full of cool stuff.
This afternoon, Bobby (who fell off his bike and broke his collarbone and can't play it right now) let me use his electric guitar, which I plugged into Jacob's amplifier that he left at my place after that last time we jammed, and I wish I could have seen myself from the perspective of a year ago, when I would be sitting in an empty place with a laptop and a guitar and not much else.
"Where did all that stuff come from?" I would wonder.

5 Pictures Worth Of Words At Least, Lost

ↇ There was supposed to be a post [here] that I spent about 4 hours working on, Tuesday morning, and into the afternoon.

It was a pretty good one, I thought. I had had a rough 24 hours, but had finally caught a normal "early to bed; early to rise" night of sleep.

Right: Harold is faced with the classic dilemma of fight or flee.

I was up with the sun, well rested, and with a pot of coffee.

The next 5 hours or so were spent embellishing the themes that I had laid out which could be divided into:

A: The South Korean guy who came by the Lilly Pad.

B: I Am Cruel To Harold the cat (ancillary to unleashing the stuffed horse head on a stick against him).

C: An essay on war, with the question posed of: Is the human race a kinder and gentler race because all the conscientious objectors from the Vietnam Era have reproduced a half million times over, while the war mongers who signed up for war fighting and killing, for whatever reasons, took their militant mind-sets to the shallow graves with them.

D: The 5 dollar night, despite the South Korean guy hanging out and shooting video for about 45 minutes (he tipped me first a dollar, and then another one after he felt compelled to after shooting video of about 3 songs and about 3 "interviews" in between) while I played my ass off (to a large degree because I was "on TV").

E: How much I have piled upon my plate with the undertaking of the study of 2 new computer disciplines, the renewal of my learning of the Ethiopian language, which I can hone at The Unique Grocery on Royal Street.

F: I bought another 2-pack of cartridges for my electronic cigarette, for just under 10 bucks, and the first one has lasted me for going on 3 days. The math works out to me probably saving about 18 bucks on each purchase of a 2-pack of them; they come in about a half dozen flavors, with me sticking to the "original" one for now, as I circle my wagons and try to regroup and seek some modicum of stability in my life, and it not being a good time to gamble on some flavor of cartridge that might have me scrambling back to American Spirit cigarettes at 8 bucks a pack...

And, sure, a couple days have gone by while I wondered if I could re-write the 5,000 words, maybe even make them better, while potential new material piles up around me with each experience I live through.
I decided that the most important things, I will remember.

Crash!

I learned a valuable lesson about the FocusWriter application that is a free open-source one available through Ubuntu Linux. The lesson was that it has no autosave function.

After I had taken a well needed rest from typing for 5 hours, I went to do something "completely different," which was to work on Audacity on some music files that are also on the pile of things to do which, when taken together might have me spending the next 12 years on their completion.

Audacity crashed. It crashed so hard that the whole laptop rebooted.

When it came back up, the blog post was no longer in FocusWriter, the free open source application.

I like FocusWriter because of a few features.

Mainly it is the one that produces the sound of an old fashioned typewriter, complete with the zip-thwack!! of the carriage returning to the virtual far left whenever the "enter" key is pressed at the end of a paragraph. I love that, as the tic-tic-tic is very soothing and encourages the "automatic" writing that makes me feel like I am tapped in to some consciousness of a greater scope of my own.

It also allows one to set daily goals as far as how many words one wants to write.

Stephen King puts in something like 9 hours a day "set in concrete," according to his memoir "On Writing." From 9 AM until 6 PM, right after his morning jog and swim, or whatever. Everyone in his life has their own life set in concrete around this schedule, too. I guess when you are the golden goose, then people take very seriously whatever considerations and accommodations they must make to insure a steady production of eggs...

So, I have taken the suggestion of Alex In California about posting something every day, even if it is short. Soon, another 2 gigabytes of data will be added to my government phone (April 10th) and, I think that if I use it a lot more wisely than I did last month, downloading videos of Evel Kneivel jumping over buses on a motorcycle, for example.

I need to let go of the dream. I'm 56 years old, don't own a motorcycle, even, and with each passing year the doubts seem to gain momentum, whispering: What if you just keep putting it off and never wind up breaking the record of 168 feet for a ramp to ramp motorcycle jump? You can do anything you set your mind to, but
you need to take practical steps like trying to get a motorcycle then construct ramps and find a place to practice; some lot nearby a hospital, perhaps...

Twice Bitten

...or flee

I think I was in denial of the fact that it was the 3 gabapentin pills that Bobby gave to me that led to me being in the mood to be cruel to Harold the cat.

I was smart enough to not take all 3 like I did the last time, but, there is no more likely explanation for why I got mad at Harold and chased him and tried to kick him.

I had been up for 24 hours, had only made about 5 bucks busking the night before; had taken a half of a gabapentin on successive nights, which made my playing more fluid the first 2 nights, but then seemed to ramp me up just a tad too much on the third night so that I was able to play at 190 miles per hour, but was still trying to go 210 mph...type of thing.

Then, I came home and stayed up until well into the day.

Gabapentin Crash

Jacob called about coming over later that day and I had to admit that I wouldn't be in any shape to do much except fall asleep and any kratom shot I might have done would be ineffective and any music I played, like-wise.

But, then Harold the cat went to use his litter box and wound up pooping on the hardwood floor. No big deal because I have plenty of ammonia.
But, how it happened was, he squatted in the box and did his business, but he didn't pinch the "loaf" off and it didn't fall into the box, but was still protruding out of his rectum as he spun around and began to search for the poop with his eyes and nose that he could swear he just eliminated.

This could, and should, have been funny to me. But, in my frame of mind, it made me think that he was more stupid than I might otherwise have thought.
After it fell on the floor, he started to rake non-existent litter towards it, another display of stupidity, and I kind of lost patience with him and, as he was walking away from the poop, as if he was just going to leave it there, I told him to "clean yourself!" which is language that I thought he understood.

He had been pissing me off by seeking attention the whole time he is indoors, crawling on top of any book I might be reading, etc.

He does not ever step on the open and running laptop on the certain table I place it on, though. This was after the one and only time that I had gone ballistic on him after finding him laying on the keyboard with the computer going haywire with the screen doing all kinds of herky-jerky motions, due to the combination of keys he was laying on.

That time, I yelled at him and he ran under the bed. I pulled him out from there and brought him over to the computer and whacked his nose, whereupon he ran back under the bed. He was a kitten and I had just gotten him and so he was extra scared. He was trapped in an apartment with someone who was whacking his nose. He has never again even touched the laptop. One time when I was holding him by the window to show him a thunderstorm outside, in order to change his mind about scratching at the door to go out, and there was a loud clap of thunder, it frightened him enough to cause him to bolt from my arms, jumping in any direction away from the window, but not before taking a quick panic stricken look at the computer table, then recalculating and jumping to the hardwood floor, another 3 feet of free-fall, instead of to that table.

Even startled by a clap of thunder he was more afraid of the computer table than Mother Nature..

So, this time, as he seemed to be walking away from the poop after having raked nothing at all for a minute onto it, I smacked my snare drum and yelled "Harold, clean yourself!!" which has had the intended effect when said in a coaxing tone, while I was dumping a small pile of litter next to his business, so that he could do it himself, so as to not put him out of balance with his instincts, type of thing.

But, the snare shot sent him like an arrow under the bed in the bedroom, where he failed to respond to repeated requests that he clean himself.

So, I lost my cool and went and threw the bed up so hard that it smacked the wall, knocking things over and breaking things. Then I grabbed him by the scuff of his neck and brought him back to the poop.

He was just to frightened to think straight, and I was too addled because of everything to think straight, and it was a bad thing that I wish I could take back. I can understand why some people kill themselves after abusing a person who they love when they really can't understand what had gotten into them and why they did it, and will it ever happen again? Not if they blow their brains out, it won't, type of thing....

I just have been trying to be extra nice to him and have settled the matter on whether I can eat a half tablet of gabapentin to reduce my anxiety and make things flow smoothly, instead of eating 3 at a time like I had done the first time Bobby handed me a handful of the things.

Maybe a guy has to show his cat "who is boss" every once in a while, but I really felt like shit after that.

Harold counts on me as like an oasis of security in a sea of crack-head derelict blacks who don't give a shit about anyone or any thing, and I let him down.

Being white comes with certain responsibilities like showing the rest of the species (and I know that we actually are the same species because the Ethiopians who came from there are fully alive and fully human beautiful people, from whom a lot of what wound up in the Christian dogma had its origins, which proves that the potential exists, and that African Americans are damaged people and maybe beyond hope of redemption.

Warning; the next few paragraphs might be offensive to some.

The following may sound racist, but it is actually "culture-ist."

We had a weapon of mass destruction back in 1945. We could have pressed our hand and brought to world under our order, but we didn't.
We took the high road.

If the shoe had been on the other foot and the Africans had taken whites as slaves; do you think there would have come a black Abraham Lincoln, who would have freed us?

Look around at the boxer short clad asses and the flip flop clad feet being dragged across the ground and see the lines of hatred that have become etched into the faces and peer into the soul-less animal eyes of the black man on the street before you answer...just saying.

And, by the way, I know that Lincoln was under enormous pressure and wasn't acting out of pure magnanimity.

Come to think of it, I think the chosen people of God needed to part the Red Sea in order to get away from those beautiful, fully human people...

Many of the colored people at Sacred Heart sit and watch Huey P. Newton and his ilk on video and they are truly waiting for some kind of race war to start. "We are at war with the United States," I have overheard one preaching to a group of them as they drank alcohol together.

That kind of puts the fact that black ladies will reproduce with any number of baby daddy's -the more the merrier- and the fact that black men are taking advantage of white girls who may have been brainwashed by a culture which just wants to market to black folk music, cellphones, cars, jewelry, etc and that erroneously glorifies their materialistic culture, into perspective. They are going to have to build up their numbers before the street fighting starts...

I guess we whites need to apply ourselves to studying sickle-cell anemia and reverse-engineersome sort of deadly virus that will only attack blacks. Just to keep it in a vault somewhere, out of Trump's hands, of course....Maybe we should fight fair, though, and only bring baseball bats to the front lines...to even the playing field...

Be careful what you ask for, Aksin' Jackson, I say.

So, there is the last of my hostility, I hope. Redirected away from Harold the cat
and towards those that should perhaps know better.

I had not slept since returning from busking at about 3 AM, Monday morning, nor during the 24 or so hours before that.

I had only made 5 dollars, but had had the priceless experience of meeting and interesting young man from South Korea, who shot a lot of video of me on his phone, after asking my permission to do so.

I had told about that in about 800 words.

S.P.C.A. -Hole

Right: Utter dejection over having been supplanted by a new pet on a stick...


Then I wrote about my having been cruel to Harold the cat, for something that really wasn’t his fault, because, how can you place blame with a creature that has no will?

As I started to get upset, about losing the post, I remembered one of the more recent mantras that I have fashioned, which goes something like: “Everything is repeatable.”

This is pertinent to music and represented a certain milestone where I stopped believing in any kind of magic in the music making process.

A guitar solo is not a panic stricken flailing of the fingers, done in the hope that the player will stumble upon a great solo; a classic even; and one more precious given that the guitarist can safely say that he could never play that solo again in a million years.

The guy from the band Foreigner once said in a Guitar Player Magazine interview that the solo he played on one of their flagship songs, “Hot Blooded,” he could never play again, because he was just going for it and it had come out like it did.

I read that as the guy does not know what he is doing. As that solo ends, you can actually hear the guy run out of talent, and the last few feeble notes are a desperate attempt to preserve the really cool sounding double-stopped notes that that are the bread and butter of that solo. The last notes contain that are arguably, mistakes. Did he intend to let that string go, or did he fumble it? If he fumbled it on the beat, then it was a happy coincidence for a guy who had run out of ideas.

The point is that, perhaps the whole lesson that I was drawn to New Orleans to learn came from the most accomplished musicians that I met, and was something that, at first annoyed me.

I had always thought of music as a way that a person might rise above his incarnation and channel something from the anti-world or from heaven, or something.

After hearing Tanya Huang play something that might have given me goosebumps, for example, I asked her something pertaining to the song, like: “When you closed your eyes in the middle of your solo, were you being transported through time and space to another dimension; you know, where there were mirrors on the ceilings and pink champagne on ice, or something?

After she had replied in the flattest of emotional tones “I was just trying to play something that would sound good,” my initial thought was that she was perhaps “starving at the banquet of life,” and I felt sorry for her in the sense that it made it sound like she was just a music machine, cranking out phrases acquired through rote learning.

I eventually learned that if you practice enough, then you can crank out musical phrases in the same manner Tanya was talking about. For, if you practice enough, then your practice sessions will actually start sounding good, just due to speed and accuracy.

A lot of the amazing violin runs that Paganini did in his “24 Caprices For Violin,” when seen on paper are just major or minor scales that run through 2 or 3 octaves.

But run they do, at a presto tempo, and when played evenly and fluidly, they sound like the guy is really flying.

It’s impressive. But Paganini, I’m sure, didn’t have to be in just the right mood for tearing through some notes. He could probably wake up in the morning grumpy and having no coffee and, after warming up some, deliver of himself that same crescendo that might put some people in the mind of doing the downhill slalom at 65 miles per hour.

And it is tempting to think a person is religious or close to God in some way if they can play “so beautifully.”

Surely they have seen the Kingdom of God and are bearing witness to it through music.

Not true again.

25 Dollar Thursday “You’re good at what you do.”

This creepy feeling existed, surely back in the time of Paganini, who was accused by some of being either possessed by, or in cahoots with, the devil, because no mortal man could otherwise ever play the violin “like that.” This was back in a time when most composers would make “sacred” music by setting bible verses to their music, in order to play it safe.

It would be interesting to do a study upon the history of them to see if there were any who professed atheism at some point in their lives, and then to see what kind of “sacred” music they actually penned.

There was one time, back in 1988, when I endeavored to change the lyrics to “Terrapin Station,” by the Grateful Dead, and present it to the Bethany Baptist Church choir that I sang with most Sunday mornings.That was because I questioned my ability, at the time, to compose an original song which had a chord progression as beautiful as that song.

When the Grateful Dead sang “Terapin!,” the Bethany choir would sing “Kingdom come!,” or something. The rest of it was going to be a patchwork of biblical stuff that rhymed.

But, again, the Paganini and Chopin sheet music shows, in many places, just a lot of regular scales that start low and zoom up into the stratosphere, where a held and vibrated note out of a violin becomes awe inspiring.

They just play them so fast that they become slight of hand artists, in the sense that the hand is quicker than the ear, type of thing...

So, as I continue to improve upon the guitar, my speed has not increased since my twenties, but my ability to know what I had just played and be able to do it again, has.

This is helpful on nights when I am not in the mood to play and my guitar seems to mock me as it leans against a wall in my apartment, a “good time” instrument for a guy who only wants to write a dirge at the time.

Coming Next: Jacob, my friend, is prescribed Prozac by a mental health care professional. Will it sap his desire to be a musician, or will it work like it's supposed to, and just drain his money into the coffers of the mental health care industry? Stay tuned....