Perfect Victim

After the shortest day of the year was in the books, the sun went down, promising to be up for a couple minutes longer the next day (today).

The latest finds

I woke about 3 different times; and went back to sleep.

Then, opposite of the proverbial "drowning man," who goes down the third time, never to come up, I got up the third time, never to go back down...

It had been a night of bizarre dreams, which I blame upon my having eaten a lot of sweetened peanut butter with added honey, the previous evening. My blood sugar levels contributed to dreams about my cat biting the nose off of some little Yorkshire Terrier that some unidentified person in my dream had on a leash.

This meant that the "juice fast" was broken upon the 4th day of it, though, it already had been broken by the consumption of one 22 ounce Heineken beer in the big green bottle.

That was, when I was going over to Jacob Scardino's to jam and record music. 

The house owner, Bob, was off playing dominoes with friends, making it more suitable for us to play loudly.

The beer was especially delicious and this was in part, I'm sure, because I hadn't gotten any carbohydrates over the course of the 4 days of juice, so I'm sure my brain was sending me signals of approval on the grain content of the Heineken, at least. I could have gotten this sense of fulfillment by drinking a non alcoholic beer, also, but I was in the mood to compromise between being too drunk to play well and being totally sober.

After I got up, I went up front, both to see if there was any donated food sitting there, and to see if any parcels arrived from London, addressed to me.

It was 12:45 p.m. and I was informed that the mail lady had already "run."

There were a couple of plastic containers of food sitting there; approaching room temperature; the attainment of which meant that they would be tossed into the 40 degree dumpster outside, to protect anyone from potential bacteria.

This is the kind of food that I need to have a few beers in me, in order to eat.

Slob Mentality

I have to be in that "slob" frame of mind, like when I used to be drunk enough after busking that, on my way to the wharf to sleep, I would stop by a certain five star steak house, to look for food.

Certainly no doggie bags ended up in their trash containers, their 80 dollar steaks being good enough for even a Yorkshire Terrier.

The containers were steam cleaned/pressure washed each morning. 

This was so that not a whiff of offensive odor could be discerned within the entire perimeter of the business. Somebody strolling up the sidewalk, approaching the place, and maybe still deciding upon where they would eat that night, isn't going to be swayed towards going in there if they are, just at that moment, affronted by the stench of "dead carcass."

Popeye's Chicken could learn from that business model. But, in Popeyes defense, they've got some pretty good advertising, involving their dumpsters, that relies upon the "14 rats and countless pigeons can't be wrong" philosophy.

But, I would open those heavy bags and find the entire spines of cattle in there, with most of the good meat hacked off, but done so by chefs who were trying to get the steaks on the table as quickly as possible, not letting pennies hold up dollars by having to carve off every last bit.

That's where my drunken self would come in. 

I would eat the meat right off the bone, and it would melt in my mouth. I am of the opinion that there was next to a zero chance that the meat was "diseased" in any way that would afflict me -and the animal had only been dead for 24 hours at the most.

That was one of the selling points of that business.

They slaughter their own grass fed, hormone free, cage-free cattle to order, on their own ranch; killing them in the late afternoon, dressing them out in a refrigerated room, and then transporting it maybe a couple hours to the restaurant in the back of a refrigerated truck, to be placed in the viewing room at the restaurant.

This is a room that has a lot of windows, both on the restaurant side and the side facing the street. Under jewelry store style lights, and almost identically styled glass cases the freshly slaughtered "still twitching" beef sits on tables or hangs on meat hooks.

At least they are meat hooks if those gangster movies that depict people being tortured by having such hooks shoved up their butts and then being hung in a meat cooler are accurate. 

That might just be "Hollywood," and the restaurateurs changed to similar hooks to align themselves to what the public's perception of what a meat hook is; I don't know. I don't know a lot about steak houses. I'm not a connoisseur of steaks over 20 dollars, just free ones.

It's even possible that their animals are treated cruelly, depending upon whether or not that would produce the best meat.

But, my point is that, after a few drinks, I am a little more adventurous in my eating. 

I have to disable the higher seat of reason, or the most frontal part of my brain, and just let mother nature do the rest.

A few times, well dressed couples walked past as I was tearing into the flesh, with, usually the lady evincing some sort of horror, maybe voiced as "Oh, my God!," or maybe just: "Is he....?!! (unable to finish the question)."

Five Stars!!

To these, I would usually just smack my lips and say "Five stars!!" just as loudly before taking my next bite.

I always thought it ironic how those people seemed to think that I was taking a bigger risk of getting sick, than they were by eating the fully prepared steak, with a mashed potato that is going to absorb the acid needed to break down the protein, so that it will pass, only partially digested, to their colon, to fester and eventually leak unhealthy bacterium into their blood stream and organs, and then polishing it all off with a decadent desert with a glass of sugar rich cream sherry.

The above is a lot to get out in between bites of flesh; so I wouldn't lecture, but would abbreviate it to: "Five stars!!"

What an amazing liberty it is, though, to have the option of going back for more sleep upon waking.

 I think the closest things to hell on earth have been the times in my life when I "had" to get up.

One such time that comes to mind was in 1996.

I had to go to court.

It was some kind of b.s. thing that would have been much worse had I not gone and gotten fined or been given 10 days of showing up at the jail to wash police cars, but being able to go home afterwards.

But, I had worked my pizza delivery job and gotten home at about 1 a.m, or about 7 hours before someone was going to bellow: "All rise!!" and I was to be there to rise with the rest.

But, old habits die hard and I just couldn't bring myself to go right to sleep. I smoked my joint and turned on my music equipment and probably improvised some song about the justice system..and probably dozed off at about 3:30 p.m, or about 4 and a half hours before the "All rise!' or 3 and a half hours, factoring in getting ready and driving over there.

People who might get jail time don't want to drive their cars to court because then they might wind up sitting in jail thinking about their vehicle having been towed and impounded at a 35 dollars per day "storage" fee.

Plus the cost of replacing the stereo and speakers that will somehow have been stolen out of it "before we even towed it..." type of thing.

The last time my car got impounded and my really nice stereo was missing out of it when I went to retrieve the car, there were little clippings of the wires that had been cut laying on the ground right outside the driver's side door. So, whomever stole the stereo out of the car before they ever towed it, must have sneaked into the impound yard and scattered those wire clippings around the car just to mess with me.

But, my alarm went off at 6:45 right when I had finally reached the R.E.M. stage of sleep and I remember sitting there with every bone in my body wanting to just lay back down, but I couldn't.

I had to see my dead-tired pale face in the mirror and try not to picture a judge looking at it, and to convince myself that he might just give me a break, if I put on my best shirt and show up on time, and smile.

I remember sitting there and saying out loud: "I hate this!"

And what I found incomprehensible was how human beings have instituted such things as men who can sit in judgment over others and cause them to be locked up in a cage for maybe a year; or they could say: "On second thought, make it two years," just because they think the defendant has an attitude they don't like.

I have had jobs before that I hated, that I had to set alarm clocks for, and would wake up in the dark, in the dead of winter, and have to prepare myself to go in to suffer through the next eight hours, just so I could keep a place to rest up for work in, and food to keep me nourished so I could work, and a car to get me to the job and back, and maybe a little TV to watch for a couple hours at night until it was bedtime. 5 a.m. comes quickly when you are resting up after a day of working in a factory...

And so, it is a great liberty to be able to wake up and decide that your body could use a couple more hours of sleep, and then to roll over and get it.

This was one of the greatest joys of living in a tent in the woods; to be able to let the chirping of the early birds gradually ease me out of deep slumber, as if the birds that started chirping while the sun was still an hour away from rising were there, not to wake me, but to give me the general sense that it was getting there..

And then, only when the sun was high enough and the sounds of rush hour traffic became a distant roar, would I get up and light the fire for coffee, and bathing, and starting a day that wasn't going to end until after midnight. I had all of the pressure to make at least 12 dollars the whole day, just to keep me in beer and a little weed. I used to sit around the camp and play the guitar just for my own amusement. What a long way from that morning when I sat there and said aloud: I absolutely hate this!"   

I have put another patch on the tire of the bike. Now I need to just push it down to the gas station and fill the tire again.

I am putting the puzzle together...

I don't want to believe that a bike can be jinxed, or of voodoo or demons and all that, but it is now 3 different tubes that have developed very slow leaks in them on that cruiser bike, which is Jacob's, and that I am only riding because I really messed up the derailleur on the GT "Windstream," which I have pretty much determined to be a 20 year old bike.

The Windstream is upside-down now, being used as a cymbal holder. The kickstand makes a nice peg for it.

I am putting together the puzzle which is the JonBeney Ramsey murder.

I had kind of determined, back in 1996, around the time of that court date, that it was her younger brother who had accidentally hit her in the head with a golf club, and then had strangled her to keep her quiet.

But, this doesn't jive with some other facts of the case that are coming to light in the book "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town" that I am reading.

I guess "Perfect Victim" is conspicuously left out of that book title.

Left: My window needs updating. Drawing being something that I haven't been keeping up on.

It's like everything; you go on Youtube looking for videos on charcoal drawing, and you wind up just giving up because there are so many better artists out there...