Don't Look Back, You Can Never Look Back

 Don't Get Mad, Get Even

As I embark, at last, upon a fast that will quell the riots in my head, I have to push away any thoughts that it will be too little, too late.

Standing in the juice aisle of Winn Dixie and not seeing any prune juice, I was reminded that part of living the enlightened life is knowing what you are going to want, before you want it.

I've never been good at stocking up on things that I had no desire for in the moment but that I knew were part of my overall consumption habits..

I was in the store to get prune juice and apple juice and alkaline water, plenty of alkaline water. At least I had remembered to throw my backpack on so I wouldn't have to balance 30 pounds of liquids on the handlebars of the bike.

As I looked along a 40 foot display of juices, there was an employee, a young black guy who seemed to be doing a combination of stocking shelves and talking over his phone, who I might have expected to ask me if he could help me. Especially after, not seeing any prune juice, I started to sift through the boxes that were sitting on the floor, to see if perhaps any prune juice had come in. I think the employees have to scan the bar codes on the products before putting them on the shelf, and so, were I to take something that hadn't been scanned it might appear like it had been stolen out of the back room and never made it to the shelf.

But, even factoring this in, the guy still didn't seem to even notice me searching for something. He apparently couldn't stock shelves and talk at the same time either, because he just stood there, having some kind of conversation and maybe cutting a box open every minute or so.

If I were to get a job there, I thought, I would probably piss off the existing employees by demonstrating to the management just how much work a single person could accomplish during an 8 hour shift. If I knocked out in less than 3 hours, what typically took them the whole night to do, I might find my bike's tires going flat at the bike rack, or maybe a group of them might encounter me and tell me that I needed to slow down because I was making them look bad; maybe even threatening me with physical violence, or calling me a racist who is trying to show that a white guy could do the work of 2 black men, or something...

Catching myself thinking this, I just determined that I had decided to do the cleansing fast not one minute too soon. Then I saw that they did have prune juice, only it was in six packs of small cans of it. This makes sense in a way, because not even I can drink more than 12 ounces of the stuff and expect to be out in public, unless I am wearing a diaper...

I was thankful that I had so much food stamp money (through the pandemic, an extra amount was being loaded each month) and that I actually had had my necessities provided for. All the cash that had gone for nicotine vapes, weed, beer, kratom and Zebra cakes (which I lump together with the preceding) was on me, and I had only myself to blame for running out of money.

I could have gone out to busk as soon as my balance started getting low, but I was just caught up in the high life, washing down my meals with fine wine and smoking a pipe as I sat in front of Youtube all night...

Already, my mental acuity has increased after a couple weeks without pot. This afternoon, while practicing out of one of my method books on "flat picking" I saw a black and white photo in it of a guy named "Furry Lewis" whom I have to believe is/was one of the flat picking greats. The fact that I remembered his name (and will be Googling his name soon) is a testament to the memory coming back. A couple weeks ago, I would have had to flip open the book and find the name again...

And, after just one day of juice only, my sense of smell has increased enough so that I am going to have to clean my kitchen, empty the trash can (which has some empty cat food cans in it somewhere which have now become offensive smelling) and will put my backpack in with the next load of laundry because it is a little musty smelling from the time a pipe burst and it wound up sitting in a puddle of water in the closet where it sat. It had been placed there after the last night it was used to haul my busking gear, sometime in early April of 2020. That is about a year and half ago, now...

This lapse is probably what is making me ponder getting a job at Winn Dixie and letting go of the busking "career." This might just be lack of confidence. I know when I was smoking weed and "the paranoia" set in, I would look out the window into the dark of night and think that there was no way I was going to go out there, ever again...

There was something about having the backpack on my back again -the one that I had on every single day from when I started busking in January 2007, and for the next 7 years, almost exactly.

I remember how, after I got my apartment, I sat on the couch in front of the coffee table and emptied it out, like a person on vacation unpacking his suitcase in a hotel room. Opening the drawers of the dresser in the bedroom to put the 3 changes of clothes I had in them; leaving 4 out of 6 of them empty. And how everything echoed in that mostly empty place with the 16 foot high ceilings and the bare hardwood floors. And the feeling that everyone else in the place could hear everything I was doing. How it put a damper on my guitar practicing as opposed to when I would go sit under a tree by the river, a hundred yards from the nearest person and work the kinks out of the songs...

But, having the backpack on as I rode the bike was stirring up something inside me and waking the slumbering giant of busking. As I rode by a cop who was sitting in his SUV, I saw his head turn my way for a second. It was one of the ones who has been working in this zone forever and who used to see me all the time with the guitar and backpack on, going to and from the Lilly Pad.

Just the visceral awakening of my ride to and from the store with the back pack on, has got me primed to practice the guitar purposefully -the way you practice a song backstage when you are going on "in 20 minutes" to perform it for an audience; an audience that includes a girl that you have a crush on...

All my senses seem to be heightened. I can hear my sink dripping in the kitchen.

I have figured out that I should file a lawsuit against Youtube for the way their algorithm steered me intentionally towards incendiary videos.

It was almost by accident that I heard an interview of someone who talked about the fracturing of society into two factions. "One group sits and watches Tucker Carlson all day, and the other watches stuff like Rachael Maddow," the interviewee said.

Rachael Maddow; never even heard of her, I thought.

So I put that name in the search box and was shown a video of a woman whom I can only describe as "the female Carlson Tucker."

She had a completely diametrically opposed to Carlson Tucker viewpoint and was covering totally different "news." When she did cover stories that were common between the two, her take was the complete opposite. But what was most glaring was the sarcasm; that sing-song type of high-brow putting down of the same people that the other would praise.  "Oh, of course, since so and so is such a genius and knows everything, he thinks we're all stupid enough to think xyz. Give me a break! And all his followers are just as stupid!" type of stuff.

On one side, Biden is a doddering old fool who is personally responsible for "the debacle" of the Afghanistan withdrawal, but on the other side, there was a veteran giving a tearful interview thanking God and Biden for ending a nightmare that had kept him from seeing his family for 20 years, and praising him for having the courage to do what the former president just hadn't had the courage to do; talk about wanting to as he might have; actions speak louder than words, type of thing...

I would sue Youtube for all the anger that was fomented in me because its algorithm steered me hard in just one of those directions, after having sorted me, based upon my online activity.

It kind of all started with the "Joe" video that I posted.

By the time I did the "The Buzz Is Right/ White Flight" one, I had become cynical and sarcastic myself. Good job, Google; I hope you made a lot of ad revenue off me from my clicks...
I had been shadow banned, and the whole point of that video was in the vein of that "how do you like me now" attitude of; Oh, you don't like me? Well, let me give you something to cry about, type thing.

I was actually going to take genuine kiddie porn off the dark web and make a music video out of it, or Photoshop the sitting president's head into the Kennedy assassination footage, or....

Well, I need to go check out Furry Lewis now...put Youtube to some constructive use...