The Fast Begins

I See The Light

Brian Hudson with "Grandpa" Eliot

on Royal Street

It's time to put away childish things, like getting drunk every night, stuffing my face with a menu of food items that teeter on the unhealthy (2 a.m. trips to the candy machine to slide a dollar in and pull an apple pie or white powdered doughnuts out) and stagnating.

"When you're standing still, you're going backwards," one of my early mentors, Jim O' Leary, the PGA golf professional whom I worked for as a 12-15 year old, once said. And nowhere is this concept better illustrated than in my apartment, where I have been lucky recently, to just clean up the mess from the previous day, never mind making progress on anything.

Things pile up, some of them not being addressed for months, such as the bikes which sat upside down near the entrance with flat tires for weeks, as I walked everywhere, putting myself in more danger from being a slower target, easier to shoot with a paintball, perhaps, and wasting the most precious commodity of all; time.

Last night, I got a text from Brian Hudson, who used to busk in the Quarter, but who went back to Texas, where he is from, for the pandemic, I guess. His family seems to have money, and he is a medical student at one of the local colleges, who busked on Royal Street, always with a $2,000 Martin acoustic guitar, run through an expensive amp, etc.

"Hey, Daniel! Still playing at the Lily(sic) spot?" was his text.

The French Quarter was pretty much packed with people, the webcam on Bourbon Street showed, when I went there after having answered his text.

"No, Lilly wants me to get vaccinated and show her proof, before she will be comfortable with me sitting on her stoop and playing.." I answered. I went on to joke that, for "political" reasons I haven't been out there yet, and then voiced my fear of losing the spot to some other busker, who may have seen me playing there before, but not now. Some buskers take a "monkey see; monkey do" approach to choosing a spot, figuring one place must be good, if someone is seen playing there all the time.

When Brian didn't text back, all I could think of was cancel culture -he read that I haven't been vaccinated, and thought "Uh oh, vaccine hesitation; probably voted for Trump..." and then, cancelled me; by not only not responding, but by blocking me or removing my name from his contacts, type of thing.

I do hesitate to do anything that I hear Biden tell me to do, and especially A.O.C. the middle school mentality congresswoman from wherever she is from. Since they are always lying about everything, why do anything they tell me to, is my opinion. It can all be traced to the oligarchs like Bill Gates, who are really running things; trying to run the whole globe with the United States just being one wing of it.

Someone convinced the most powerful people that the planet is being destroyed and perhaps we must do away with all fossil fuel consumption, and that people are not going to voluntarily give up their gas powered cars etc. and so the brain trust has come up with a plan to seize power and force certain changes to come about. Trump had to be removed. That is obvious now. That is why so many people will tell you, through their masks, that he is all kinds of evil; with the reason being that "he just is." Don't you watch TV, use Facebook, and Youtube, and Instagram, how can you not see that Trump is evil? It's everywhere! Have you been living under a rock?" type of thing. 

I've heard those exact words out of the mouth of one of the cashiers at the Shell station, who had removed her mask to smoke a cigarette outside. This was about a year ago, before the last presidential election. "We need a new president, I know that!" she added, before flicking her butt, pulling her mask back up and then going back to work, ringing up items when not staring at her phone.

So, I'm opting for the natural immunity which I've probably already acquired. I think both Jacob (Scardino) and I both had the virus, the couple of weeks that he stayed in my apartment. First he was sick with flu-like symptoms, then I got it a week later.

I know I said that I am trying to steer away from politics on this blog, and make it great again. But the cat is already out of the bag; this blog is only being shown to a handful of (lucky) people out of the billions of people that go online.

Funny how it only started to seem like nobody cares what I think after I started thinking "the wrong things." When this blog was mostly just anecdotes from my life that aspired to be amusing, I would occasionally have up to 287 people or so reading a particular post; and sharing it! Now there are people who won't comment upon anything I post to Facebook, because they are afraid of losing their jobs, their homes, and probably their lives. And, so Brian never texted back, most likely because of the vaccine comment...

On A Brighter Note

Last night, for the second night in a row, I spoke to another one of the residents here at Sacred Heart, rather than just giving a curt nod and a mumbled word or two.

I was returning from Rouses Market, pushing my bike through the hallway, with bags on the handlebars containing alkaline water, a large wedge of watermelon, a beef shank "soup bone" type thing, a bottle of wine, and an assortment of treats for Harold.

I was soon going to work on the bottle of wine, with any hopes of creating anything worthwhile, fading with every sip. At least I didn't pass out and leave all the bags on the handlebars, like I had done a couple nights before, when the fish thawed out and the ground lamb got warm, and it all had to be cooked and eaten right away, because thawing and then re-freezing stuff can ruin it to a degree. This had led to me feeling like I had food poisoning, which made me appreciate the good health that I had enjoyed over the years when I rarely felt like laying on a bed and moaning in agony, waiting for my guts to explode and a bunch of worms crawl out. But my drunken self still made the mistake of chucking the bag containing the watermelon in the freezer; now I have a frozen solid piece of watermelon. But, watermelon is one of the best things to break a 10 day fast with...

But, even before I got to the apartment, I passed a couple of thin black people whom I had seen before and just given a nod and a mumbled word to.

A thin black man, with a thin black lady who was leaning on a walker, they held the door open for me at the entrance of the "smoking" room and then again on the other side. I thanked them, and decided to converse some with them.

This is because I have seen the light, in a sense, and am positing the theory that I had been only hurting myself by directing derision at these black folks that I live in the same building as.

The man, who introduced himself as Clarence, remarked that he had a bike just like mine and that he wished he could fix a flat tire that is on it, because he is walking everywhere, and it was stressing him. He would have to take the bus all the way to Walmart to get a new tube.

That is a trip I made a couple weeks ago, to do the same thing. Only I had gotten a 2-pack of them. You see where this story is going now, right? I had a 2-pack of tubes, and Clarence has a bike just like mine.

Well, I told Clarence that I had an extra tube. It's the one that developed a pin-hole leak after I put it in the tire, but the Slime™ seemed to do its job after I submerged it and the little stream of bubbles that gave away the location of the pin hole stopped leaking right in front of my eyes after a kneaded the rubber a bit.

Clarence was overcome with joy after following me to my door, where that particular tube was right inside, ready to go out with the rest of my trash, as I still wasn't sure I trusted it, although no amount of squeezing it could produce another bubble from where the hole had been).

I explained this all to him, and wished him luck with it. He lives right next door to Freddie, the greasy hand print assassin.

And, once again, my spirits were lifted by the encounter. I am starting to think that I have been placed in this situation because it is some kind of next step spiritually to learn to love these black people whom I live with. Arguably, they are the hardest challenge, in that regard, because they are predisposed to being racist and against me.

But, the text from Brian and then seeing how crowded Bourbon Street was on the webcam really left an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. This makes me realize that the busking has not been only about money. If I wait until unemployment payments stop before going back out, then scratch that last sentence. It's a feeling I haven't had since I was a teenager and I saw a girl that I had a heavy crush on, talking to another boy. I'm afraid of another busker taking the Lilly Pad, and having Lilly say: "Daniel, you just haven't been around, and (insert name here) is a really nice guy, I've been talking to him, and...he's a really nice guy; he hates Trump, too. I told him he could play here..."

I could go out and play acoustically and work on the headset microphone situation on the side; that would motivate me to go to Webb's Bywater Music store to talk to Mr. Webb about how I can hook up the mic to the amp and run it all off of batteries.