Should I Choose To Grab The Lower Benefit Amount And Run...

This reluctance to go out to busk -just to see what comes of it, because 9 dollars is better than nothing, plus, what else is there to do on a Tuesday evening?- is approaching the status of a crisis.

The voice of reason in my head is telling me to get a job somewhere if, for whatever reason, I keep finding excuses for not going out...

Today's excuse, besides waking up at 3 in the afternoon, still feeling tired because of all the food I ate before I went to sleep, was that I got a call from Dorothy at the front desk.

I almost didn't answer, thinking it was a drunken and stoned Jr. who was going to say "Let's jam, bring your six string up here; I've got vodka and weed, and I'm about to make some shrimp gumbo!" or something similar, and who was then going to try to shoot down every excuse I came up with, for not wanting to.

The reality is that, only after a few shots of vodka and a couple hits of weed, am I ever in the mood to jam with Jr. That is always the state of mind he is in when he is overcome with an urge to jam (on the 2 chords that he knows).

I almost see Jr. as a living, breathing warning to me of what I might become if I basically scrap all my higher goals in life and decide, in less than 2 years, to just start getting a $660 Social Security check each month, and divide the sum into 30 cheap fifths of vodka -one per day, and maybe a 40 dollar sack of weed, that I would have to stretch out, so as to be able to become sufficiently dopey every morning.

Jr. has apparently no long-term memory. Every time I have ever let him in my place, he has pretty much said the same thing, verbatim. He sees the Casio keyboard and then ejaculates: "Oh, you have a keyboard?!" He then tells me about the Yamaha keyboard that was given to him, and how it is in storage, and how it has a button on it that you can press and the thing will play itself, and how he is going to get it out of storage one day. The problem is that, he keeps living the same day over and over like that movie with Drew Barrymore (I think) where her character has some form of amnesia and the male lead (Adam Sandler?) has to meet her every morning "for the first time," ask her out, etc. and, by the end of the day, they are lovers; but she wakes up the next morning not remembering any of it.

I think the character starts to realize that if he says the same exact thing to her each morning, she will respond the same exact way; and so their days go according to a script. I'm not sure how the script writers dealt with contingencies like: what if there is a violent thunderstorm one morning and his usual "Let's go watch the sun rise..." line, or whatever becomes impractical, but...

Jr. is the same way. I could knock on his door and repeat certain lines, and would be invited in to drink vodka and smoke weed. One of which would be to ask him if he had a can of tuna, "because I'm out of cat food," to which he would tell me that he did have a few extra cans, and where he got them from (Carlos; "He doesn't like tuna, so I trade him that nasty cheese they give us...etc.") and then I would have to sit on his couch and grab one of his guitars, while he grabbed his other one, and we would jam away on the 2 chords, interrupted by him offering me a shot of vodka, to be followed by another one, 20 minutes or so later, for as long as I chose to keep him company. My escape route would be to bring up the fact that "My cat was meowing for food, I'd better go and give him that tuna."

Still, he might offer to come with me, so we could feed the cat together, then return to jam on A minor to E major 7 some more.

I wonder if some of the fallout, about which I've been warned by other residents, who have said that he is "trouble," and that things will just about fall out of the sky and hit you on the head just because you are around the guy, extends to the way, he will, as a last resort it seems, say that he is feeling lonely, and only in need of a friend; and how that can make me feel like a heel, for going off and doing my own thing. I had been racked with guilt a bit as the words "Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that, you do unto me," of Jesus crossed my mind, after leaving Jr. to his loneliness.

I rationalize it by concluding that, it is the daily vodka consumption that is altering the biochemistry of his brain, leading to his feeling "lonely" a lot of the time...

But, it wasn't Jr. calling, it was Dorothy at the front desk telling me that Heather (who works for Sacred Heart in some capacity) had acquired a box full of cat food and that I was welcome to go to the lobby with a bag and take some of it for Harold. It was a box with about 100 cans of Fancy Feast, all in the Turkey and Giblets flavor in "pate" style.

I took about half of them, knowing that there is one other resident who has 4 cats. If she doesn't want the other cans after a few days have gone by, I will be able to take them. Harold isn't a big fan of "pate" style food, but at least it wasn't any of the "grilled" varieties of Fancy Feast, which he absolutely turns his whole body away from when presented with it.

Not having food for Harold would have had me headed for the Lilly Pad with the guitar on my back. But, now I have about 50 cans, and the freedom to do this instead. I have to consider that, on a night when I hardly make anything, I'm still putting wear on the strings of the guitar, and I don't want to be in the position where I'm going out on a busy Friday night and playing crappy sounding strings for a lot of people, knowing that the five dollar bills they throw might have been 20's if I had sounded just a bit better...

Plus, there is a lawlessness that is becoming more prevalent everywhere, stoked by whoever has control of the "mainstream" media; perhaps because turning the streets of the U.S. into a violent war zone is part of the agenda of bringing about The Great Reset. And, this adds to the number of gullible screen starers who are being fed whatever the propaganda is that is keeping them scrolling and clicking on more of it; and there is a palpable increase lately in the intensity of the hateful stares that the "white oppressor" in their minds, is getting, lately, just for being out there.

The Chinese, with their Tik Tok, and their strangle-hold on greedy corporations willing to push an anti-American narrative designed to corrupt the culture of our country, seem to be succeeding.

You had people like Alex Carter, talking about pushing people out of the cargo hatches of airliners, should they have been determined to be not vaccinated (before it became common knowledge that the jabs did practically nothing in the way of preventing anything -oops, sorry people pushed out of planes) and now talking about sending Trump supporters to a firing squad, based upon his hook, line and sinker swallowing of half of the double sided narrative, that was created with the purpose of dividing the citizenry into two warring factions, to distract from the fact that that is only about The Great Reset. 

He talks about "spotty" Internet out there in Silicon Valley, without it ever occurring to him that this is a glitch due to information is being throttled; and that he is only being shown the half of all traffic that the algorithm deems suitable to him; in order to keep his fervor for sending Trump supporting "Nazi's" to firing squads at a peak. He just wants to be popular and well liked, and to "fit in" and be appreciated; and, I guess will give a fist pump to The Current Thing for a pat on the back.

Too bad Youtube most likely won't send to his "feed" stuff like Jordan Peterson or John Anderson, and probably even throttles Ben Shapiro (who might talk too fast and use words too big for Alex, anyways). Who could deny that Tucker Carlson is a straight shooter, not bought off by the Murdoch's? Not to hard to "fact check" him, er, unless the Internet is that "spotty."

That content most likely never makes it to his "smart" phone. The algorithm of Google is hard at work. That's why we have a security guard up front at Sacred Heart who has resumed yelling: "Where's your mask?!" to whomever appears in the lobby without one. He sits there for 10 hours a day, staring at his phone. One time I asked him if he ever watches Tucker Carlson. The way he said "No!" spoke volumes. It was as if I asked him if he believed in unicorns.

At one time I would have thought someone like Carter would have the ability to step outside himself and look at the big picture. But, as a California version of our mask Nazi security guard, he turns out to be someone who desires to push people out of planes or shoot them; due to his having become intoxicated on the Kool Aid that the algorithm is feeding him, being blind to the theater that "politics" has become. 

If most of it isn't mere sensationalism, and click bait, and if most people don't know that, then why was there not even one attempt made on the life of the dreaded, hated, evil fascist orange man during his 4 years in office? It seems like all that pillow punching and TV kicking would have spilled out into the real world. Oh, but there were plenty of screens poked and "send" buttons targeted!

A Gavin Newsome vs. Ron Desantis (or Trump) contest will truly be a sanity check of the United States.

I'm not ruling out moving to Italy or somewhere, after the November '24 election; because I would be just getting my first Social Security check around that time, should I choose to grab the lower benefit amount and run...