That is what my indoor thermometer is reading now, as I am waking up on this Friday afternoon
My pillow was soaked with sweat, telling me that 89 degrees is a tad too warm to try to sleep in.
My air conditioner/heater unit has been broken for about a year now, and I have been too lazy* to walk to the front desk and put in a repair order for it.
*It is due to the, perhaps certifiable, "procrastination" which has haunted me for my entire life, in one guise or other.
This is something that I might be able to overcome through therapy,
I went through the winter by turning the burners of my stove on, and finding the point (all 4 burners on 3 and a half) where it would within a quarter turn of each burner knob, keep the apartment in the comfort range.
I have always liked 81 degrees. But, I like to be shirtless in that environment. It is the reptile in me that likes to consume one huge meal per day and then eliminate it first thing in the morning. I used to like it when my pet kingsnake would crap out what you could still tell (by the de-calcified skeleton) was a mouse or a rat or (maybe on Christmas morning or on the snake's birthday) a bird.
And so, from turds, we turn to last night.
Peace And Brotherhood And Togetherness
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of seeing a bitter response to a Facebook "status" that I posted.
It was a bizarre circumstance. I mentioned that this person used to post a dozen times a day. And it was like she had access to this huge feed of Trump haters, and maybe thought it was her job to compile it into a one stop site for ignorance and hatred.
And, not to imply that I am superior to her, but, I will say that I am superior to even "myself" when I can manage to rise above the level of thought.
This term should be becoming more and more familiar to people.
I even just tuned into a video by
Tony Robbins on Youtube.
At one point in my life his books really had an impact upon me (1989).
He is all about "success," though, and I became very sarcastic internally while watching it, because Tony (and his wife, who was there, sitting in a yoga like posture with a head so almost perfectly round that it looked like her pony tail was supernaturally tight that it was actually making her head round) along with this other guy named
Michael A. Singer were immediately upon the subject of how "immaterial" money is, to the spiritually minded.
Tony's whole deal will be to tell you that, by applying certain principles, he has gone from living in a dingy apartment and washing dishes in the bathtub, to now living in the mansion of his dreams with the wife of his dreams, and I suppose collaborating with the
Micheal A. Singer of his dreams, and how that kind of transformation is possible for any and everyone.
It's just that, is it possible for everyone to live the life of their dreams. Sure it is.
But what about tearing down all the small dingy houses and rebuilding mansions on combined lots; and then, how do you politely get rid of all the ugly girls and then distribute the beautiful girls of dreams evenly?
Mean Jean Broughey Dean
Well, I was
unfriended by a facebook friend. And it had all the classic signs of being just because I disagreed with her.
And it is funny that there are people that way. Only because it has to be seen as being funny or it might bother you otherwise.
They are lost in an existence of what
Eckhart Tolle calls "thought constructs."
And, it is easy to see them in other people but equally hard to see them in yourself.
But, then I went on my status to complain about it, and basically stopped short of mentioning that I think that (name withheld for security purposes) has, in her timeline on facebook, a platform for spewing hatred and ignorance.
And, it is comical because she will levy assertions like one that I saw in which she said something about the "hatred and ignorance" of certain Republicans.
And, she said it with clenched fists, through clenched teeth, as if she really wanted to kill these individuals whom she has never met and so, whose information about comes solely through third parties. Other people.
And for every one of her posts, you could find the exact opposite opinion espoused somewhere else. You would have to highlight her page and then click on "invert" in the webmaster toolbar, and bam! you would have a page absolutely chock full of posts (with another one coming within and hour or two) that accuse the Democrats of being hateful and ignorant, and expressing a desire to do harm to those people whom they have never met and whose only knowledge of comes through third parties. Other people, but ones that hate Jean's (as that is her first name, at least) knowledge sources enough to want to kill them.
So, to step back from this and be like: "Wow, I disagreed with her that the girl who shot the video of Floyd being abused by the cop in Minneapolis was "a hero," and she just unfriended me.
The girl made a subsequent video where she showed back up at the spot of the arrest and introduced herself, and said that she had made "a video" there that had gone viral. She paused there, as if allowing it to sink in.
She then went on to say that she had been criticized on social media for having stood by, shooting a video, instead of (jumping in, and pulling the cop off the guy?) doing something..
But, without going down that thought-road that I am fighting hard not to identify with, after having lived in a predominantly African American city, and even in close quarters with them.
I think that Jean had chosen the wrong word.
She might have fused the fact that the girl's video coming to light is going to save the lives of countless people down the road, through basically just coming to light, with the forth-coming police "reforms" et. al. with the assumption that the girl had put herself in harm's way and risked her life to save the others.
Unless they have changed the Webster's Dictionary entry for "hero" to reflect that you can in fact qualify as a hero by becoming famous, the girl was in the right place at the right time and, since she didn't actually make some kind of physical move to get the cop off the guy's neck and succeeded, while putting herself in peril, she was a bystander, not a hero.
This was, after all, what she had supposedly been negligent in.
There was the tone of a lottery winner in her voice.
She had a friend with her, and the spot was still crowded with people wanting to visit the sight and hold a vigil of sorts; along with the news media, following up upon their follow up stories.
But, it also seemed like she knew that a video about a viral video was likely to become infected.
But, the fallout was that, I compared another one of my Facebook friends with Jean; just because of the frequency with which they both post. A dozen a day.
So, then my old friend, Donna P. got mad at me just for having mentioned her in the "unfriending" story.
Because I had bashed the other characters in that post, she seemed to think she was being bashed, too.
Since I am just about recounting the whole thing anyways, here is the post.
From Facebook Re: Being Unfriended
Well, what's on my mind is that I have been "unfriended" for only the second time in my life.
I would like to think that the first time didn't count because the guy was deranged.
I remembered him as the guy who claims that his father was one of the infamous "3 hobos" from the whole Kennedy assassination thing.
He did bear a striking resemblance to one of the "hobos" in the old black and white stock photo, I must say.
One time, he told me the "story" of how J.F.K. was done in by a marksman who was hiding in the sewage system, and had fired upwards, from that angle.
But, I had encountered him in downtown Mobile, Alabama; standing at a street intersection, on a cold night, without a jacket and visibly shivering.
He greeted me and basically communicated that everything was OK with him, except that he was freezing his ass off.
It was probably about 45 degrees that night...
He offered to smoke weed or buy us beer, I forget.
"Man, I'm freezing my ass off," he reiterated.
Well, I had an extra winter jacket; a really nice one; a kind of expensive one...
I couldn't wear 2 heavy coats at once, I supposed, so I offered to let him borrow my extra jacket, after making it clear that I wanted it back.
But, this was 2009 and I was homeless in Mobile, Alabama.
The only way for me to live off the money I was making doing music was to cut out things, like mainly the landlord, and so I had set up residence under a holly bush, near the railroad tracks.
That would be the spot where I would eventually hop on a freight train bound for New Orleans.
I was actually "caught" doing that, after some rail yard cop saw me. The train was stopped and I was accosted by a couple city cops, But after an order came over their radio to the effect of: "Mckenna, no, let him go! Let him go!" I was allowed to just stay on the train.
I liked to think that they felt that New Orleans was a better place for me, and were acting out of kindness....
Mobile was really was a Christian hotbed, with maybe one church for every 17.8 people, or something..
Anyways, Thomas was wearing the jacket a couple days later when I saw him, and I attempted to reclaim it. The weather had warmed up considerably.
He shrugged his shoulders and said: "Well, I've kind of moved into it. I mean, I've got all my stuff in the pockets..."
I had gotten pissed, and said somethin like:
"Well, you're being evicted, take your stuff, and get out. I want my jacket back!"
It might seem that I hadn't learned much from the scripture about giving your brother your shirt too, if he asks for your coat.
But, I had done that.
I saw that my brother was cold, and so, in christ, I gave him my damned jacket.
But, I had brought him down to the holly bush, under which I slept, pacified by the rumble of freight trains 10 yards away, and presented him with it.
Over the course of the next few days, some of my things began to come up missing.
Anyways, he was the first to unfriend me (although, he has since friended me again).
He was the first and only person, until now...
It took a couple weeks before it dawned upon me that I was no longer seeing posts by Jean Broughey Dean appearing in my feed.
And, that was odd, because she would post 8 or 9 times on a typical day.
But, then, they stopped.Her whole wall seems to be devoted to
And I am reminded of that protester that stood up at a Trump rally and started to shout something out of the litany of things that he might have shouted.
And, Trump's security guy's descended upon the guy and, in effect, clamped a hand over his mouth and dragged him bodily out of the assembly.
I remember observing the irony of Trump's campaign kicking off with the very first amendment coming under scrutiny, with the muzzling of the protester.
But, I wanted to hear what the guy had to say, and I had already heard the: "Idiot, Idiot!!" or whatever it was, from the protester, and had recorded the gist of it, and noted his opposition to the man; and I was prepared to respect his point of view, after weighing the validity of his arguments, etc. etc..
But, he was yelling right when another man was speaking, and that is just rude, the way I was raised.
You don't yell over a guy who's speaking, and who may even have leased the venue wherein he was doing so.
So, you tackle the guy, clamp a hand over his mouth, and drag him out, right? Right, Jean Broughey Dean?.
That way the video it isn't even marred by his being able to reiterate his point on the way out.
That is the Donald Trump way and, apparently the Jean Broughey Dean treatment, too.
Birds of a feather, I guess.
So, she unfriended me. I won't be seeing any of her messages in my feed.
Tackled me and gagged me and dragged me out, away from her wall. Censored me.
And I thought that was a cliche; people who shut you off if you don't agree with them. And people who can't step out of themselves long enough to see what a caricature that makes them.
Oh, wel, I still have 84 friends.....
The black people that I live with yelled things at their screen like: "That's it baby, make that money!!" at the point when the young lady was saying that she was just a child (old enough to have a few tattoos that you could see) and had been traumatized by the whole thing.
But, the girl, like what percentage of "kids" these days (93 percent?) had her phone on her. And, from what I've seen of her generation, it is second nature to record anything worth looking at, I guess. How could she have stood there and
not shot a video? What would she be doing with her hands?
This is the generation after the "
Millenials" that I am talking about.
Here in
New Orleans, it is very common to see a person of color shooting a video of cops interacting with people that they just pulled over. A bystander will just stand a respectable distance away and record it as if out of common courtesey.
We are being conditioned to be that way with every spectacular video that we see in which something amazing was captured by just someone with their phone. Maybe they were already recording something else when it happened.
OK, when the Orca whale shot up out of the water and took a ladies head off, over the railing of the sightseeing boat...
Pulling the camera out is far from an afterthought with "kids" these days, is what I am saying. And she wasn't really a hero, just in the right place at the right time.
And so Jean Broughey Dean unfriended me; apparently for saying that whatever her name was, was not technically a hero; and to think of her coming upon the scene and NOT shooting a video as being a preposterous notion.
So, when I woke up Friday, it was after my friend Jacob was already at a job site, watching a house that has a Terminix tent over it.
I was up around 1:30 PM and did a 5 gram serving of kratom in pineapple and then drank a little bit of prune juice and waited for the morning dump to arrive.
There is no point in letting food stay in the body for more than 24 hours, in my opinion, and I had really been irresponsible in eating a whole box of toaster pastries the night before. I was a bit more constipated; a bit more dehydrated, and a bit more depressed upon first waking up. I can't imagine what people who live off stuff like toaster pastries end up feeling like...
The thing I notice about the depression is that it shares some characteristics with a hunger pang. You can sit there feeling like you are starving, but can actually feel the pang fading away if you are just a little patient.
I try to locate just where in the body it is; and it seems to be somewhere around the stomach.
I had been messing up by drinking almost a bottle of wine almost every night the past week. It is usually a less than 5 dollar bottle of wine. But, to me it still represents the ultimate loss of freedom, for it is the freedom from needing to work that having money provides.
But, Jacob had texted me, about me bringing weed to where he was stuck sitting in a car for 12 hours.
He wanted to get a couple of "major" things done on his computer or something, while he was there. if he could buy a joint, because it brightened the prospect of being stuck in his car for 12 hours, making sure nobody goes inside the house full of deadly poison.
I really only had a bit of bud, and I had plans to sit on here and tell this story, or to record music, listen to it, or something that would make me want to consume it. I hadn't listened to the "self help dialogues" recordings in a while, nor soaked in the bath tub.
But, I said I would stop by where an older black guy has regularly had some very decent bud. It has the occasional seed in it, but that just tells you that it was probably grown outdoors, in the real sun; not under some light source that only pot in other galaxies has adapted for.
 |
| "The Strongest; Whew!!" |
Some of the highest "grade" bud, is touted as being "medicinal" and never has any seeds, is analogous to grain alcohol, in my opinion.
One might conjecture that, to alcoholics whose motto is: "The strongest!," grain alcohol would represent the cleanest and purest drinking experience of all.
But, alas, it is just too nasty to be enjoyable; not even by the likes of
Leslie Thompson. It is more gaseous than liquid, going down the throat, is all I can say to describe it.
So, I rode around and didn't see the guy, and was thinking of calling Jacob and informing him of the weed situation and maybe even opting out of making the trip over there.
He was going to smoke and then get certain "major" things done.
I decided to get a half pint of brandy from
Banks Meat Store; which I did, and then I was on my way back to the apartment when, lo and behold, the skinny older guy in the white truck was at his hang out spot near a little vacant lot where, a couple of chairs and a makeshift table had been assembled.
The guy is something like 7 years older than me.
People Getting Petty
We wound up talking about current events. I mentioned the defacing of T
om Petty's mural in Florida.
He sincerely thought that was a shame, and we agreed on a lot of things.
It was just refreshing to talk to the guy; he reminded me of other black guys who are about 10 years older than me; and how they at least seem to get the fact that us white kids that grew up in the 70's were just as clueless as anyone else, and we carried no inherent resentment towards them, and vice versa.
At least this was how it was in the 70's in
Massachusetts.
And so, it was like meeting a brown skinned man from an entirely different tribe; one that you grew up with and had no problem with.
It wasn't until I came to the south that I saw things like a look of disbelief on the face of a black guy of about my age after I had drank off the same can of energy drink as him. We were on a job, working out of the labor pool in
Jacksonville, Florida.
Now that I think of it, he must have thought that, as soon as I had passed him the can (so he could take a sip or two) then its entire contents were his.
He might have been in his late 20's and me 10 years older at the time. But, he looked mildly surprised when I held my hand out in a gesture of wanting the drink back. Then, he watched the can all the way to my mouth and then might have even watched to see if I was really drinking it.
That offers a clue as to the complexity of race relations here in the south.
But, it was almost a spiritual experience to get out of the house (the house of horrors if you are glued to
Youtube videos about almost anything in the news) and to have a very friendly exchange with a black guy, and eventually his friend, too, after the latter might have gleaned that I was "alright," (as pretentious as that might sound).
And then, something kind of unusual happened. I started to relax in the company of these two older black guys, and through undergoing that process, became aware of just how nervous black people were currently making me in my present life. Kind of like when you don't realize you've had your fists clenched until at some point, they un-clench.
I had told my friend that I was looking to buy a dime of bud, and he had been in the process of producing it from somewhere as we talked.
Then, I tried to say something about living in the present moment -you know, lay some
Eckhart Tolle shit on a nigga- and this was a result of my trying to focus on "being" and it dawned upon me that, until then, I think I might have assumed, through prejudice, that such matters might have been over the heads of those particular two older black men who hang out at that spot at one of theirs' truck.
So, I learned something about myself; and was able to let go of some of my fears and misconceptions about "the man of color," and, for some reason it seemed therapeutic at the least to become comfortable around these black people; because all the sitting at home and only catching glimpses of news, but then seeing things like the defacement of
Tom Petty's mural in
Florida...can allow fear and hatred to fester in you. Going out and basically hugging a couple black guys who thought it was ridiculous about the
Petty statue also, and who listen to classic rock enough, to well, to at least not have been raised on nothing but rap.
So, after having had an interesting and deep (yet not deep) discussion, the weed guy went to the drivers door of his truck, and uttering a mild oath, said that he couldn't find the weed that he thought he had.
But, he quickly dispatched his friend to ostensibly get more.
What I think happened was that there was some really good weed at one of their residences, but he acted like he couldn't find the other stuff because he wanted to "bless" me with the better kind. Maybe it was good for their soul to talk to a white guy who isn't all full of hatred from sitting in front of the wrong Youtube channels all day...
Ater I hung out and smoked with them, I enjoyed a combination of the air temperature being perfect, the bike's fully inflated tires, and all my pent up energy and I proceeded to get happily lost, just taking streets that looked fun and were in the general direction of where I was trying to get.
I hadn't felt that good in a while. It could have been due to some accidental chemical state that I had unwittingly put myself in, maybe I had gotten some trace element from one of the weird looking things from the
Ideal Market, which are sold alongside the yucca roots.
The small amount of brandy plus the warm (but only 40% humidity) air, which seemed fresh, perhaps because of so many less cars in operation lately, became the perfect combination and I enjoyed every pedal crank of my ride.
I texted ahead to
Jacob and may have layed too much emphasis on the weed being magical, when it could have been a rare and unique situtation for me (which I may never replicate) that was making me feel like I did 30 years ago.
I
did get a bottle of "testosterone boosters" that were on sale at Walgreen's and they have been making me feel more youthful.
So, then I got to where Jacob was working. He was sitting in the dark in a quiet residential neighborhood, feeling very self conscious.
I actually rode right past him, within maybe 80 yards, at one point; which was a testiment to the accuracy of my "down this way some, over a few streets, now that way more" method of having thrown reason out the window (verifiable by the fact that I did so while riding a bike) and was just using, I guess the same facilities that a cat would use, were you to drop it off in
California, and then it were to find its way to your doorstep in
Kenner, Louisianna 5 weeks later.
But, I wasn't to glean just how well I had navigated because, at that point, all I heard was a whistle.
Whistling is something that a dopeman does to a customer when that dopeman has had to move to a place a short distance from where he can usually be found.
And it is anonymous because, how can you recognize someone's voice because of their whistle.
Who is going to hear a whistle coming from the dark in an unfamiliar neighborhood and walk towards the source of it to see what the person might want?
I finally came to my senses enough to start looking at the house numbers; and was able to find Jacob.
He no longer wanted to smoke weed.
We sat there, trying to get the data stick that I brought to play on his laptop, but it wasn't to be. The
Linux Startup Disk that I had made on the USB stick would not work on his Apple. It was this disk that allowed me to access my old hard drive that has been frozen for I think it is 2 years now. It was where I found the song "I Am" from yesterday's post.
So, as we sat there, my vaporizer ran out, and I started to think about running to a nearby store so I could snipe some tobacco and maybe get some more brandy.
Jacob wanted to know what I thought about him sneaking into
Sacred Heart and us jamming, after we smoked some of the magical weed, that I might have built up a bit too much.
I had visions of him, after he smoked, going into a manic state and beginning to play too loudly for the midnight hour that it was, and him feeling that any attempt to turn him down was and attempt to stifle his creativity. I thought about him grabbing the 5 gallon water jug that I have and slamming it down on the floor at some point, because he loves sudden loud and abrasive sounds (during some sessions he had even rewound the tape in order to replay a part where the microphone fell to the floor or something).
I had to consider what kind of action the management would take against me, were I to get caught sneaking somebody into a building that has been quarantined. I wasn't going to take a chance that that would be some kind of federal offense, or that I wouldn't be charged with reckless endangerment, or something.
Then, there was the distinct possibility that the weed wouldn't translate into a good jam at all; especially if we became paranoid about getting Jacob out of the building without him being seen. We would be trying to keep the volume at a minimum.
Plus there was the matter (which wasn't dawning upon me when we were considering the thing) that my apartment was probably about 90 degrees inside it. Jacob is used to air conditioning, and so would probably not be able to stand more than a half hour in there, especially with the exertion of playing music factored in.
But, it was soon approaching the time when
Jacob's replacement was to come in; and I suddenly got to urge to ride some more on the bike. Rather than stuff it in the trunk of his car; I figured I could get a good head start, and be back at
Sacred Heart at about the same time as he did; and that way he could talk to his replacement for 15 or 20 minutes, like he had done on other occasions.
I was very sensitive to feelings of being trapped, and I thought I would have been pacing back and forth, waiting for him to finish talking to the guy.
This has been annoying to me in the past, when they were talking about work and how many shifts they were getting in, and how much they were going to make sitting there doing nothing at 10 bucks per hour, when I might have been flat broke at the time and stressing out over whether I would ever get another job as long as I lived. I'm sure that wasn't their intention, but it put me in a worse mood.
I guess I owe Jacob an apology for the way I kind of just brushed past him in the parking lot after I got back later than I had planned, and then scooted inside.
It was just the momentum of my ride back; I felt like I was in a fluid motion, and didn't want to stop and sit anywhere. I wanted to get my vaporizor charged up, make coffee, then get back to work on something.
Part of that has to do with drinking the brandy, which can make me more impulsive.
As soon as I opened the door to my place, I was reminded of how hot it had been in there. I knew that a jam session would have been highly unlikely; no matter how good the weed was.
But, it was rude, and I apologize.
I guess I will have to sober up and hopefully return to my normal self.
I was going to send Jacob a text message, but figured I could type faster on this thing, and it has turned into this post. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the part about him, I was almost out of gas, having been at it for at least 12 hours.
