The Fight Is On

24 hours into a juice only fast and I already feel better; though I might not have said the same just a few hours ago

One of the things keeping me from intermittent fasting over the past few months had been the plasma donation. It was hard to imagine going in there all light headed and seeing stars every time I stood up from a seated position; and having had nothing but alkaline water over the previous 3 days or so, and to donate the stuff. There is probably a pretty good reason they advise you to consume plenty of protein and drink a lot of water before showing up; not just to drink a lot of water.

So after they told me I couldn't donate for at least a week, I left there feeling kind of relieved. It had also led me to cut down on my busking hours; so there was no way for me to know if I would have made the same 45 bucks playing for a couple hours at night; as my plans to do both things and to get ahead 90 bucks on a given day fell by the wayside, as having the 45 bucks became an excuse to not go out and play. I would tell myself that the music I was recording at home was worth sacrificing the money for.

But I have just decided to wage war upon addictions; using the only tool that has ever worked; namely starvation. After the flu-like thing that I got last week, my lungs are just recovering enough so that I feel like I'm benefiting from the Wim Hof breathing exercises a little more, able to hold my breath for 3 minutes and 20 seconds on the 5th round, whereas, the past couple days, and especially the day after I tried the crystal methamphetamine, I was a full minute short of that.

So, now I have reached the 36 hour mark, give or take, of the juice only phase, and will transition to water only. As far as the deprivation of the the 45 bucks from selling my plasma, as soon as I was able to usher in an attitude of gratitude and happiness over "the big picture," I was informed that I can go and get 100 bucks tomorrow, just for taking some survey somewhere in town that I can reach by bike. I just have to be up before 8 in the morning and get with Carlos, who lives on my floor and knows where to go...

I am being tested by Jr., about whom I have entertained the notion that he is possessed by a demon who seeks to devour and destroy the good in anyone he encounters.

24 hours into the fast, he was knocking on my door, mentioning that he had just baked a whole chicken with stuffing and gravy etc. and that I was welcome to hang out with him. He was holding a box of foodstuff that came from one of the residents who are over 60 years old, and thus eligible to receive a box full of food every month, I guess at the end of the third week, because the lobby was strewn with a few of them, left there by people who get them but don't want them, or who only take out a few items and leave the rest.

The rest is very often the canned black beans, and vegetables.

Jr. had grabbed himself about a half dozen bags of powdered milk, which is probably the worst thing I could ever eat and, of course, was offering me one. He wanted me to get him a "quart" of mayonnaise at the Winn Dixie, after I told him I was going there -probably the second worse thing I could possibly eat, because of the soy oil; though he wasn't offering me any. It probably goes into a lot of his recipes that he is constantly inviting me to partake of, though.

He didn't have any vodka or weed, but did give me a cigarette, along with his ATM card that he said had $1.80 on it, then handed me some change that brought the total up to $3.06, which I guess he thought was enough for a bottle of some kind of liquor.

Then he told me to grab him "an 88 cent loaf of bread," and put it on his food stamp card along with the mayo. There was 5 bucks and change on that.

So, off I went to Winn Dixie, where I grabbed another bottle of grape juice and a gallon of alkaline water to continue my fasting. I could smell a lot of food in the store more acutely -one of the first signs that the fasting is starting to work. The little apple pies I had to just stare at and try to eat one in my mind.

There is no such thing as "an 88 cent loaf of bread," and it is not surprising that Jr., who seems to live in the past -repeating stories from events that happened in the 1970's as if he hasn't already told you them a dozen times- thinks that those loaves would still be 88 cents. They have gone up a buck, there wasn't enough on his card, and since the store was closing soon, and I was the cashier's last customer, her frustration grew with every complication that presented itself.

"Take the bread off, I guess."

"The mayonnaise is more than the bread," the young lady of color said.

"It's for my friend, he wanted the mayonnaise more than the bread," I said. She must have thought that removing the bread wouldn't have reduced the total enough for it to go through, even though the figures were right in front of her on the declined receipt.

I got out of there, and then instantly regretted having to go to the Shell station to present his card with "$1.80" on it, along with enough change to total $3.06. Was that amount another figment of his not yet adjusted for inflation memory? It sure was.

The vodka was now 30 cents more, and I had that amount of my own change on me, but decided not to cover the difference. I wasn't going to drink vodka because I'm fasting "and cleansing" with the goal of kicking all addictions. God knows that the next 50 dollar night I had busking would probably make me remember how cool it was to be productive and not sleepy at all for 2 days on the methamphetamine (and how effective an aphrodisiac is had been -a man could probably have sex a dozen times in one night on the stuff) and powerfully addictive substances call for equally strong curatives to nip them in the bud. It wasn't like the heroin that Bobby let me try, which I hated.

So, not throwing in my own money to get Jr. his vodka was kind of safeguarding myself against taking the gulp off it that he would surely have offered. Or the evil spirit inside him, whomever it would have been...

A gulp of vodka (especially after a day of grape juice only) would have made all that food in the lobby look better; the cereal (with forbidden sugar), the peanut butter (with the wrong oil base), the packets of "beef stew" that are really "beef and soy" stew, and the canned yams (more forbidden sugar) -basically everything that is donated to the residents here to combat hunger; would all become more tempting should I have weakened my resolve with cheap vodka.

But, Jr. either is incapable of empathizing, or has been successfully brainwashed by the food industry which is the purveyor of those hunger fighting "care" packages, that are probably subsidized by Big Pharma and the medical association. You make them chronically ill, we'll treat them and sell them chemicals, then bill their insurance companies, type of thing.

Alternatively, there is the evil spirit theory.

Pretty soon, I will start cleaning my place from top to bottom, and then probably getting into a hot tub with some Dead Sea salts. This week off from donating plasma turns into a blessing.