One Post Per Week Now?

 $99.73 Friday

"I love your city!"

Here it is Sunday, and I have 20 minutes to do this before I will get on my bike and head for the plasma place.

I had been on my way there Friday but changed my mind after riding most of the way to the bus stop that is about a mile and a half from the apartment.

I would have had to get on the 3:25 p.m. bus and then gotten off of it in Gretna then raced (against a stiff breeze) to the plasma place, arriving there sweating and with an elevated heart rate/blood pressure. The last time I took that bus I got to Octapharma at 3:51, just 9 minutes before they close; and had actually propped the door open by shoving my hat in the door while I locked my bike, so they might think twice about closing a few minutes early -the hat was meant to say "Don't lock the door just yet, there's one more donor, who raced all the way from Canal Street to get here!"

I was also thinking about the energy depletion that would result from my donation and how that would put the Friday night busking in jeopardy.

As it turns out, had I gone there to get a hundred bucks for my plasma, and then decided I was too fatigued to busk, I would have missed out on just about exactly a hundred bucks in the tip jar.

I decided to just ride through the Quarter instead of making the mad dash for Octapharma. That was a very eye opening ride. The place was swarming with people in town for the "Final 4" of the "March Madness" which is the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

I figured out which 4 teams were in it by observing that the tourists were adorned in basically 4 different team colors; with Kansas people and Duke people both wearing different shades of blue and Villanova people looking more wealthy and tending to be in more expensive looking team colors.

The University of North Carolina people were mostly black, and so that goes...

I was surprised to be getting smiles and head nods and other forms of greetings from random people; and can only conclude that they somehow gleaned that I was from here, due to my appearance, and were trying to communicate: "I like your city!"

"Just like that!"

Just Like That

I was very nearly in a self loathing frame of mind because I had spent the whole week, since Jacob and I had busked the previous weekend, wasting my time with drinking and drugs and bingeing on Youtube.

Putting the best positive spin on that, I convinced myself that I had learned a valuable lesson about the dangers of watching the videos that Youtube serves up to me in the form of suggestions, or just automatically plays, if I should be away from the laptop when the previous one ends.

I had finally figured out that I need to massage the Youtube algorithm by manually typing things like "Samantha Fish" into the search box, first thing in the morning, or "John Anderson." 

Otherwise, the machine would take on a life of it's own and, after, say, a video of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock (for the 88th time) played, I would be sitting on the toilet when the sound of Donald Trump's voice would start booming from the living room, and I might have to get up, mid poop, and run over to reduce the volume, in case someone walked past my room and heard the cheers and the: "We were energy independent for the first time in, oh I don't know, years and years!" coming from my room, which might have led to me being (further) ostracized by my fellow residents.

But, I was on the verge of self loathing over what I had failed to do, over the course of the week; things such as learning a brand new song to debut out there at the Lilly Pad. That is something that can elevate my spirits as I proudly trot the new tune out; perhaps doing it 5 times in a row to seal it in my memory and work the little bugs out.

But instead, I enacted The Law of Attraction and put myself in a happy and grateful state of mind, figuring that I, at least, would be no worse than the weekend before, if not noticeably better in any way. I would find some angle to take to inject enthusiasm into the evening's proceedings; and I wouldn't be feeling drained of my platelets, on the bright side...

Then, I checked my phone and "just like that," Jacob had texted to say that "just like that" he had come into some tabs of acid and was looking forward to us tripping and basking that night.

I began to look forward to us tripping and busking that night, with my only concern being what the quality of music from us would be, after our instruments had turning into huge cats that we were sitting there petting instead of guitars, and the purring of the cats turning into music like we had never heard before, type of thing...

Already, the 20 minutes I had to do this has turned into almost an hour, so I will have to continue this later, so I don't put myself in a situation where I am pedaling my bike against the wind and hoping that Octapharma doesn't decide to close 10 minutes early on this sunny Sunday.