The Morning Redaction

Drinking The Problem, Once Again

I was up, a little bit late -my clock said: 9:35 AM- and I immediately had to go to this blog and see what I had written the night before.

I lean to the left in order to try to read this weeks edition of the ever thinner Gambit, the free rag that I have used to start many a cooking fire with, when I lived outdoors. Its weight loss has been due to the removal of all the listings for live music, and for restaurants, etc. I can see it "evolving" towards being just a big sheet of paper with "Black Lives Matter" on it; folded in the middle.

I was thankful that I had deleted the bulk of the post from the night before about a half hour after writing it

It had been written in anger, defiance and ingratitude.

This is threatening to become a regular thing -the morning deletion of what my drunk self posted the night before. But, it is the drinking that is threatening to become a regular thing..

Here it is a beautiful sunny Monday morning; and in the light of day it is clearer to me that "the drinking" is, or is becoming "the problem" once again.

Friday, A Bike Ride

I took a leisurely bike ride Friday, to pick up the money that my friend Ted Broughey sent me. He doesn't want to take any credit for having done so. There he is in the photo to the right..

A leisurely bike ride, with a stop at the first store along the way for a 16 ounce can of Coors "Banquet" beer led to kind of an adventure, as I continued on into the French Quarter, where I had ran into some old familiar faces that I hadn't seen since the day before the start of the pandemic.

Xavier, one of the workers at the Rouses Market on Royal Street had put the bug in my ear about the 600 dollars per week that unemployed people here have been getting, since the start of April.

That made sense to me, because there has been no looting or things being burned down, and there doesn't seem to be people getting mugged by The Starving as soon as they step out of their houses not brandishing a weapon.

Then, I had gone to the spot where I used to play (the Lilly Pad) and was pleasantly surprised to see Lilly's SUV parked across the street from her house.

There were 2 beautiful girls of about 18 sitting on the "other" stoop from the one I play next to. Neither were wearing masks.

If I Only Had A Brain

By then, I was working on my second can of beer, and that was a larger 24 ounce can than the first one.

The small one had been $1.99 and the big one, $2.29, so it had been a no-brainer; yup, quite a no-brainer indeed...

I asked the girls if they had a pen I could use to write a note to leave on Lilly's windshield. This led to us talking for about an hour, during which I told them how I used to play "over there" and about other interesting things.

As I polished off the 24 ounce can of beer, I eventually had to ask them to excuse the fact that I wasn't used to drinking, and that that day was like a "falling off the wagon" one for me, or whatever the term is.

I left the note on Lilly's windshield, not sure, even now what I wrote, or how she will take it. I remember putting: "I have been praying for your soul because I thought you might have died..." in it.

Having still the $160 (minus the cost of the 2 beers) in my pocket, I offered a dollar to the girl who had lent me the pen "for the ink," but she declined to take it, and then, before they got up to walk off, the other one handed me a 5 dollar bill.

It was the first 5 dollars I had made in the Quarter since April 7th, I think it was, I'll have to check my records (older posts).

The effect that had on me was to make me feel like the French Quarter was going to take care of me one way or another, somehow, but always through some kind of magic.

I felt kind of like I had been tipped for being a colorful character.

Several guys who had walked by had said "You're beautiful," to the girls while I was talking to them. And one short black guy, whom I had seen before wanted to use one of their phones. They refused him, probably thinking, as I was: what was to prevent him from just running away with the thing.

Saturday, I went to the Jefferson Feed store, intent upon getting Harold a can of something more exotic than the Friskies that has been his staple.

I had promised Ted that I would do so, after I texted him back to thank him for the cash, and he asked me to send him a picture of Harold eating whatever I got.

Then, I went over to the Winn Dixie, the "other" grocery store in our area, where I grabbed a 24 ounce can of Yuengling lager, out of their "beer cave" and then went over to the meat case, where I noticed that they had some great prices on pork, but that it was all labelled "previously frozen."

Turning to a Pakistani looking guy of about 20 years old, and wearing sandals, I said: "Previously frozen; that means I would have to eat it all tonight, cause you don't want to freeze it twice, doesn't it?"

He then kind of rudely said, "I have no idea, but I want get this," as he advanced towards a pack of pork, that I was standing kind of in front of, with the implication that he just wanted me to move and get out of his way.

All of the things that I dislike about the "generation z" kind of bubbled to the surface as I looked him up and down, and saw in him a selfish special snowflake whose smartphone was probably his best and only true friend, and whose despicable social "skills" were a product of him probably only interacting with other humans out of the necessity to shop for groceries after he had worked up and appetite from poking his thumbs at a screen.

I just mumbled "Pfff..generation z waste of flesh" and refrained from going any further and perhaps saying something like "Of course you would have no idea...your just f***ing wandering around in a pair of sandals like a beach bum...or some wannabe terrorist"

He reminded me of Travis Blaine, who stayed with me for a couple weeks and wound up paying me in sugar packets from McDonald's when it was all said and done; one of the most selfish f***s I've ever met. (there are posts about him that I need to move to the "biographys" section; maybe after making them even more scathing in their indictments of the guy.

Travis in a nutshell

"Now, to me....in my opinion, I'm like; OK, I've always been kind of; what most people don't realize about me is; ok, I have to take you back to when I was 12 and lived in New Jersey; see, where I got my views about certain things; and I'm gonna get to some of that in a minute, but I've always been, I like to think,-and you may or may not agree- people have different opinions of my views, but I'm gonna explain some of them..you see, another thing a lot of people don't realize about me is.....like when they first meet me; now first I have to tell you about the school I went to as a kid, I don't know if you've ever heard about St. Mark's Academy in Long Island, but it's basically one of the highest rated schools not just in the country, but in the world, and you're probably gonna understand a few things about me more clearly in light of the fact that I was considered a genius by the time I was 5 years old; and that is interesting, but what is most interesting about me being considered a genius is...ok, some more background: my mother worked long hours and used to let me sit and Google stuff all day on the computer, so I wound up supplementing my education just sitting there, and some of the stuff I was Googling was not what a normal 10 year old kid would be Googling; I mean it attracted the attention of some real academics; That being said....and again, I'll fill in more details as I go along. See, I've always thought.....and the story I'm about to tell you will make this clear; but that story needs to be told after I lay out some more groundwork....When I first got to St. Mark's the instructors were like: (and on and on .etc. etc. etc.)

One time I was getting ready to record something on the guitar when he interrupted me, but the microphone was still on.

He went on for 45 minutes before I finally had to tell him that I needed to get back to recording, and he could finish his story later.

At that point, he retreated to the couch where he sat with his arms folded across his chest, staring straight ahead and breathing a bit heavily; visibly upset that I would have opted to do whatever it was, rather than listen to his story.

That Travis Blaine

I later played back the 45 minutes during which I had gotten only about 5 words in myself, and I was able to count something like 150 occurrences of the words "me" or "I."

That Travis Blaine -the one who, after I had not gotten a job that I was hoping for, had never even had it cross his mind to recommend to me that I could do the micro tasking work for Amazon that he did. It wasn't until I asked "What about me being able to work like you do?" that he piped up as if the thought had just occurred to him. That Travis Blaine...

And so, I was looking this guy up and down and seeing more and more of a resemblance to Blaine the more I looked.

I was, once again, surprised at the level of anger and hatred that seems to dwell "just below the surface" of me.

It was probably fomented due to the most obvious factor, just like the meaning of dreams is usually related to whatever the person was thinking about when they fell asleep; and that would be the internal tug-o-war over the can of Yuengling in my hand, which is what I had been grappling with when I made the ill fated decision to consult another human being about previously frozen pork.

The fact that I had decided to drink a second consecutive day was probably in conflict with my core values.

I decided to grab a shank bone instead, to make bone marrow soup rather than risk wasting some of the 88 cent per pound pork steaks.

I was still doing the self examination over why I was so pissed off at the special snowflake for having dismissed me so rudely, and was thinking about how by drinking alcohol, I am depriving myself of a sense of superiority over the likes of Leslie Thompson, whom is someone that I would look down my nose at, the times I had run into him over the 3 year period that I had gone without touching a drop.

Who was that masked man?

I even told him once, when I found myself behind him at the register of the Unique Grocery store, after he had stood there with a stony face, ignoring me (there's that peeve again) after I greeted him: "I give you about 3 more years to live, you're drinking yourself to death, you look like you've aged 5 years since I saw you a year ago; you'll probably never live to see the year 2020."

Oddly, such a terrible sounding thing to say to someone, had actually made him smile. Was that the nicest thing anyone had said to him all day?

I was remembering this exact incident, when I turned to my right to see none other than Leslie Thompson about 6 feet away from me, or at least I thought it was him behind the mask.

I decided to ignore him, and then walked off toward the cat food.

But then, I started to think about it.

I remembered another time when I was trying to quit drinking and had managed to go something like 28 days before breaking down. That time, I literally had bumped into Leslie when coming out of the store with the drink that was going to ruin the campaign.

I thought it odd that the same thing had kind of happened again. I thought it at least a minor coincidence that Leslie was all the way up in my neighborhood, when I had never seen him there before.

I changed my mind, and decided that if I still saw him in the store somewhere, I would walk up to him and greet him as warmly as possible, "Hey, Leslie, how's the virus been treating you?" or something.

I would be as friendly as possible and then leave it up to him whether or not to ignore me.

So, sure enough, the Leslie look-alike was at one of the registers with his back toward. But, as soon as he spoke, I knew it wasn't him but, rather, his doppelganger; pretty darned close.

I was tempted to ask him if he was related to a Leslie Thompson, but then had misgivings about where that would get me. He looked pretty angry, and I had had my fill of people returning rudeness for my friendliness. I was going to be drinking beer and didn't need anything to stew over while doing so.

The Loaf That Spoke To Me

So, I went outside and was unlocking my bike when, along comes the Leslie look-alike. He still had an ornery look about him, and didn't even look at me; probably thought I was about to skeeze him for a cigarette. He had stopped his cart about 10 feet from me.

But, when he stepped out of sight a bit, I had a chance to look at his groceries.

Something about the loaf of bread melted my heart for some reason along with the eggs and the lettuce. It was just sitting there, the loaf of bread; it spoke to me on some level I can't explain. I found that I liked the guy. Maybe because everything in his cart was so normal, bread, milk, eggs, cheese.

So, after polishing off the 24 ounce can of beer as I stood there, and even though he had stood there the whole time and not acknowledged me, as I was shoving off on my bike, I said a hearty: "God bless you; I see you've got your daily bread!"

At this point, he began to speak.

He said that it was the most he had ever paid in his life for groceries, but that he had been down to a can of beans and a can of tomato sauce.

I asked him if he was sure they had put his "rewards" number in "'cause their prices are ridiculous without the card..."

Yeah, they had swiped his rewards card...

He then went on and said that he had made some tiny amount of money too much in order to have gotten the 600 dollars per week.

"Oh, yeah, a friend of mine was just asking me yesterday (Xavier) if I was getting it, that was the first I'd ever heard of it. But, I'm a street musician (showed him the callouses on my fingers) so I'm up the creek without a paddle with a headwind.."

No, not really, you can get it. Hey, they don't check. These agencies don't communicate with each other, so you can just about tell them anything, and in this situation they're so swamped; they're gonna just send out the check. Tell 'em you were making a couple hundred a week -don't tell them over 540 a week 'cause that's where I screwed up, but tell them that because of the virus you're out of a gig; you should be able to get at least the minimum..."

"Wow, thank you so much," I said.

And then his cab arrived simultaneously with me shoving off on my bike the second time. "Like a Swiss watch," I remarked about that.

If I get the check, and I see him again here, I'll buy him at least 20 or 30 bucks worth of food.