Seasoned Lentils During The Lental Season

• Fast For Lent
• 3 Days Sober*

* Early Monday morning when I was returning from busking and was having the chills, as if I was coming down with something, there was a half pint bottle of Crown Royal whiskey, sitting on the sidewalk near, but not in, a trash receptacle. It was half full.

I'm not sure if I had already started aspirin therapy at that point, or if fever was starting to disorient me. But, I grabbed the whiskey, and wound up slugging it down, thinking of those old Western movies where they would always give a guy plenty of whiskey before removing a bullet from him without the help of anesthesia.

I think the comparison is valid, I was fighting the cold, and, don't drinking and fighting go hand in hand?

I will say that, like one other time when I broke a 20 something day stretch of sobriety after finding an unopened bottle of Chivas Regal, the logic here was the same. I guess I just love a bargain; even more than sobriety.

It's hard to resist something that you normally can't afford; it feels like it's a rare opportunity.

But, maybe I did need the alcohol as a cough suppressant, sleep aid, and to give me bravado in my fight against the flu, because the whiskey didn't trigger any cravings for any more; it just went by like water under a bridge...

So, technically, the 14 days sober has been reset to 3...  

Lent Comes Fast

Having come down with that 24 hour flu that kind of overlapped Monday into Fat Tuesday, it seemed almost ordained that I begin a fast.

It is possible that, having laid down in my fevered state with nothing but apple juice, spring water and aspirin by my bedside, I was able to recover so quickly from the thing.

The detoxifying process went hand and hand with the flushing of mucous out of my system, of which there wasn't much and the whitening of the tongue, ditto and other symptoms of the detoxification process.

After 2 days of fasting thus, I can already feel some of the "chronic" tension going out of my neck. And it's hard to hold negative thoughts in my head; I can let them go before I "feel" any emotions pursuant to them.

For another thing, I ran out of food.

Except for lentils.

Somehow, we get plenty of lentils here, with bags of them being placed on a table in the lobby which is kind of the "help yourself" table.
I usually grab the lentils after they have sat there a couple days with no bites on them.

Those panhandlers who live here and who work the nearby corners with their "hungry, please help" signs will walk right past the lentils and rice and such which gets thrown on that table. You alms makers will have to do better than that for them. When they say "hungry" they mean at least a double bacon and cheese combo from Wendy's, not no beans and rice or Ramen noodles; they are entitled to more than that, I suppose they think.
New Orleans, where the bums are spoiled.

 
But, after making 43 bucks on Sunday night, and spending it on wi-fi data, kratom, a tube for the bike, and food for Harold the cat, I woke up Monday feeling like I was coming down with something.

The aspirin and apple juice and spring water just about wiped me out of money by the time I found myself unable to "answer the bell" to go out and play more.

But, as I spent the next couple days on that juice cleanse, I became content to busy myself with nothing more than the fast.

I, as usual, began to clean the apartment. By the third day of a fast, the sense of smell becomes acute (most likely a "survival" mechanism, to help the body smell out food, I guess).

And, maybe the person wants his outer environment to be a reflection of his inner cleanliness. Whatever the reason, I began to clean the kitchen, to include sliding the refrigerator and the range out in order to sweep and mop underneath them, before disassembling each enough to clean between the cracks, to include soaking then scrubbing the stainless steel burner plates, etc.

I also made a trip to the Sacred Heart bookshelf, where I deposited about a half dozen books that I have read.
I had been keeping them in an attempt to clutter up my place, in order to muffle some of the reverberation that is detrimental to the recording of music.

Now, I prefer putting the sensitivity of the microphone very low, so that the reverberation doesn't even cross the threshold of the noise gate, and then to put the microphone inches from the guitar amplifier or from my mouth, if I'm singing. That pushes background noise further into the background, and is probably better than trying to accomplish the same thing by cramming the place so full of sound dampening materials that I can hardly get around without tripping over things...I mean, what, am I going to start a stuffed animal collection?!