If You Don't Have Anything Nice To Say...

The Japanese art of decluttering and organizing...

"'Ya ready?!! Come on, E to A minor!!"

I had woken up at about 4 in the afternoon, and decided that I wouldn't try to make a dash for the plasma donation center, as that would have involved leaving immediately.

Instead, I decided that I would spend a sober Wednesday evening doing housework.

So, I threw my most often worn clothes in a tub full of soapy water, then lied down to do 6 rounds of the Wim Hof deep breathing exercises.

I was on the final round and right at the stage where total relaxation and being "in this moment" is called for, when the now familiar knock of Jr sounded on my door.

As he had knocked right in the middle of my final breath hold, he was no longer at the door about 30 seconds later when I opened it. I went up to his place, partly out of courtesy, so he wouldn't think that I had shunned him if he found out that I had been home when he knocked, but hadn't answered.

"I was right in the middle of my deep breathing exercises when you knocked; I couldn't go to the door..."

He was drunk and high, having returned from his own trip to the plasma donation place with some of the $125 that he would have gotten there already exchanged for a half gallon of vodka and a sack of weed.

"Your what?!" he asked, just as he has every time I have mentioned to him the Wim Hof exercises that I do.

I have accepted the fact that Jr has some kind of mental tic whereby he seems to have no memory of certain things; while at the same time having vivid recollections of other things, and obsessing on them to prove that. 

For example, he has thanked me at least a dozen times for having gone to the front desk to request that they call an ambulance for him the time I found him splayed out at the bottom of the staircase by the parking lot entrance, with what turned out to be a broken arm. I didn't know him that well then, and initially tried to slip past him without him noticing me. For all I knew him falling down might have been a nightly thing. I was afraid he was going to ask me to prop him on my shoulder and half carry him up to his place; something that I suspected might have been asked of me as a cry for attention, and that he might have been feigning being injured, so that I would do so out of sympathy. Then, I feared that he would want me to help him take his boots off, help him to bed, fetch a drink out of his refrigerator and bring it to him; and that it was possible that he would keep ranting; perhaps heaping gratitude upon me, and that it would go on and on, in such a heartfelt and garbled by alcohol way that I would find it hard to find an appropriate time to break away.
"Listen, before you leave, I just want to tell you that, when I was about 10 years old; and this has a lot to do with what I've been going through lately, and I'm going to get to that..." type of thing.

Though that incident has seemed to have stuck in his memory; he seems to have no recollection of having thanked me for it a dozen or so times. "I'll always owe you a debt of gratitude for calling the ambulance for me that time I fell down the stairs" takes its place amongst countless other phrases that he repeats ad infinitum.

I thought it was a matter of my own personal growth that I recognized the anger that welled up in me and my urge to snap back at him: "I KNOW, you've told me that two dozen times!" and then maybe recap the rest of the story; so he wouldn't have to. I decided to not get mad at him over memory issues that are beyond his control and to just accept him as being kind of a human parrot.

Then I became aware of my tendency to anger over him showing up at my door at random times, very drunk and high, insisting that drop whatever I might be doing, such as maybe sleeping, grab my electric guitar and amp and follow him to his place, where he would play basically the same notes and patterns over the E to A minor chords that he would insist that I play, apparently assuming that I was just as baked as him. "Come on, let's go; E to A minor!!"

As he quaffs more and more vodka he invariably falls into the habit of sitting right next to me on the couch and accompanying every other note he plays with a bump from his shoulder against mine; as if he is trying to make me "feel" the music or something. And, this can be annoying when I am stone cold sober, and he is in intoxicated euphoria and baying the lyrics to whatever song he is doing out of the meager collection that he knows, right into my ear, from just bumping distance away.

I find myself wanting to say: "It must be nice to be as high as you are right now," but the truthfulness of that is something that I have an internal debate over, and that might just make him pass me the half gallon bottle of cheap vodka.

So my anger over that particular has more to do with me projecting my own failings upon him. If I go to his place because I basically want to drink vodka and smoke weed, then I need to take responsibility for that, and not blame him for "getting me" wasted.

And a third aspect of it, which is a realization I came to as I was riding my bike to the Winn Dixie earlier, is the anger I feel over his apparent assumption that I have nothing better to do than to hang out and jam with him, which is more self loathing over my not going out to busk, lately, as much as I used to. I could politely tell him: "Sorry, I can't hang out because I'm going down to the Quarter to play for a few hours," if that were the case. Then I wouldn't have to suppress an urge to lash out at him with something like: "Hey, I'm not your servant; you don't own me, and I don't owe you anything; where do you get off thinking I should be at your beck and call every time you are loaded and feel like making noise with your guitar!!"

So, again, that is a case of self loathing and guilt over my not busking enough. I find that almost everything I get mad at another person for is either something that I do myself; or something that I'm mad at myself for in connection to, but am projecting on the other person.

Right: The milk crate in the upper right, I just added an hour ago. This is progress.

A Tale Of Two Syncronicities

In order to add another milk crate to the bookcase shown, I had to look for my bag of plastic ties. So, I went into a closet that I use as a vocal booth, as I have stuffed as many pillows and winter jackets and clothes I don't wear onto its shelves, and to throw other random items that I might have a use for some day, into.

I couldn't find the bag of plastic ties, but I did notice a really nice black "Adidas" winter jacket that I had forgotten I own. It probably goes back to the heavy drinking days.

It turned out to be a "closet full of synchronicities." There was a neatly packed emergency blanket, the size of a wallet, which could have come in handy last week when I was freezing while waiting an hour for a bus...(see the blog post: "Hey, Stranger!")

On the floor of it was a milk crate that had a red fabric of some sort draped over it, which hid the fact that it contained about 15 music CD's. I have a vague recollection of finding it somewhere and must have stashed it in the closet, planning on going through them, then forgot all about it.

A few months ago, I found a song on one of my data sticks that I liked, but which was unlabelled. It was sung in French.

I didn't understand the lyrics but guessed (pretty incorrectly, as it turned out) that it was an uplifting, encouraging song about an ant moving a rubber tree plant or something. I decided to queue it up on my laptop's desktop folder, where it would be available as a "morning wake up song," so upbeat it sounded.

My friend, Jacob Scardino, was able to use some app to identify the song, which had lyrics that translated into something like: "I don't want to work, I want to lay in bed and smoke cigarettes." Some morning wake up song...

It was by a group called Pink Martini.

The first CD in the box that I only vaguely remember finding somewhere and taking home, was by Pink Martini. It didn't have the morning lay around song on it. That is kind of a synchronicity.

This morning, when I was thinking about busking I decided that I was going to Google "Neil Young's most popular songs," so that I can learn a few and put to rest the uneasiness that I have been living with, spawned by the number of times people see me at the Lilly Pad, see the acoustic guitar and harmonica, and see an opportunity to request: "Any Neil Young?" I would put in a couple hours and have a few of Neil's songs ready to go, I thought to myself.

Next in the stack of CD's in the box I had forgotten about was called "Neil Young's Greatest Hits."

All the rest of them were artists I had recently checked out, for one reason or another. The "Tastes Like Music" website is always ranking the Top 10 albums by one band after another and not long ago they ranked all the Blondie albums, barely able to scratch up ten of them, but one of the three guy's that rank had mentioned a song called "Maria," as being one of his personal favorites. There it was in EP form in the box.

And there was a similar connection with each disc. Even Frank Sinatra, I heard mentioned just yesterday by Dave Rubin on his podcast, as being the kind of music Dave likes, and "The Voice: Frank Sinatra, The Capitol Years" was in this box I wasn't aware I had.

Macy Gray; I have just recently read the Wikipedia page of, after something made me curious about her. There was her disc: "On How Life Is."

And, as if this wasn't enough synchronicity; the disc at the very bottom was: "Synchronicity," by The Police...

The bag of plastic ties had been hidden in plain sight, on the table that the milk crate bookshelf sits on. This is something that Marie Kondo mentions in her "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up" book -how things that you don't really need in a cluttered room become "invisible," -you see them every day but never see them...