I made it to the food stamp office on Friday, where there were only 3 people ahead of me (numbers 52, 53 and 54, as I came to know them) and, after telling them that I, once again, got a letter telling me that I had until the day before I got it to submit a "simplified report" document, or else my food stamps would be cut off; I was able to complete said document, get one of them to say: "You're OK," and get out of there rather quickly.
Today is a pretty huge day; I still have a lot of the plasma money from yesterday; and so I'm thinking I'll go get a 3 ounce bag of kratom. This will actually help me to accomplish the next task, which is to visit the food stamp office. I had let maybe 4 days go by without having looked in my mailbox. I really wasn't expecting anything; the mailbox has been pretty quiet for almost the past year; but when I did finally open it there was a letter from the food stamp people; saying that I had to complete and submit a document and, honest to God, this letter had arrived at least a day after this had to be done.
This happens about every year. And straightening it is so easy by showing up in person at their office; where a click of a mouse and the assurance that you will get your food the next month; is so easy; it must be that the real purpose of these letters being sent out; and the timing, is that they want to see everyone's face and that they are alive; and nobody is continuing to use the account and eat the food of, a deceased person.
There is something in the manner in which they nod after you identify yourself, as if to say; "OK, still alive, just checking..."
I'll bring the water bottle that Jacob left behind yesterday along with me so, I can immediately mix up some kratom, right in front of the store before getting on my bike; hoping that someone will come along and ask: "What is that?" so I can tell them all about the plant that grows in Asia, is a relative to coffee, and about which you will never hear; such a good job of censoring and cancelling having been done that, only from another kratom user, in front of a store perhaps, will you find out that kratom makes a good substitute for some addictive opiates that, I guess, are highly profitable to whatever interests are behind the censoring of the information; and, in my personal experience; I think it works like the Ritalin that I was born about 10 years to early to have been put on in 3rd grade. I surely would have been given a Ritalin tablet (out of the candy dish type bowl of them on the teacher's desk) when I jumped up upon my desk and gave an impromtu arm pit fart performance while humming The Battle Hymn of the Rebublic, I think it was; at the very latest...
But, I remember Tyler, the 11 year old son of my only ever black girlfriend; would go from unable to stay in his seat and reportedly trying to exit the classroom through a window that opened upon the recess yard; to tranquilly sitting at his desk, staring as if hypnotized, at a sheet of paper upon which he was completing his schoolwork correctly and in neat penmanship. After being given "his" Ritalin out of a supply that the school had on hand for such a purpose. They would have to call the kid, whose about to climb out a window's, home to make sure that he wasn't already given his Ritalin at home -they didn't want to be double dosing the kid- but they already knew the answer to that in cases like Tyler. I could hear it in the voice of the school staff person who sounded apologetic over having had to disturb me with the phone call; when they knew Tyler well enough to be able to tell with certainty that he hadn't had his Ritalin one any given day..
The point being that, I guess since I'm not in pain and substituting kratom for some prescription "pain medication" (billed to my insurance) the effect upon me is to focus my thoughts and keep me interested in things for long periods of time (The longest post I've ever put here took something like 36 hours to write; I had a bag of kratom that time. It was a post about the "Lose It At The Lake," music festival; where I suffered one of my first public performance failings).
Jacob's Bottle
I can mix some of what water is left in Jacob's bottle with a few grams of "green maeng da"(or red, if they are out of green) in front of the store; and that will help focus and keep me interested in seeing through to completion the trip to the food stamp office. Today is the last day I can do so; and I would have to rely upon busking money for all my food for a while should I not get this thing over with...
Then, when I get back maybe I can write about yesterday's "Deus Ex MaQuina" moment...I'm not sure if I spelled that right..
I'm getting on the next street car to go to the plasma place, copy of "A Visit From The Goon Squad," by Jennifer Egan in hand; and I am feeling the dual nature of my mind quite strongly.
I don't know if I'm going to get a half bottle of red wine out of Walmart as soon as I have the 40 bucks on my plastic card; or if I'm then going to get a "tiny" hit of crack when I get off the bus on Rampart Street, feeling the buzz from having broken the rules of the bus company and sipped down half the bottle on the 45 minute ride back to town.
And then if I'm going to forget the world for about a half hour, and then later, try to placate the other side of my brain; the one that, earlier, decided that I'm not going to do any of that, perhaps by telling it that I at least got cat litter and food for Harold.
My true essence, which must play the arbiter of the duel, might settle upon a compromise, whereby I skip the wine and just get a sack of weed from the guy's who will pounce upon me as soon as I step off the bus on Rampart.
That way, I can return home and get lost in practicing the exercises out of the Chet Atkins Guitar Method book, the Charlie Byrd's Melodic Method For Guitar one, and the Building Right Hand Technique one. That part of my mind knows that little else puts the wind in the sails to send you out to busk than when you are playing "better." Even when stoned enough that you have trouble remembering the 4th chord of a 4 chord sequence, you are still building up "muscle memory;" one of those parts of the brain would say...
Then there is the part of the brain asking me: Why would you even write this kind of stuff to your blog?
Maybe because it's shadow banned again; visible only to subscribers...
I can hear the street car coming...
I wonder why Google doesn't just go as far as removing blogs from existence, behind the hackneyed concept of "spreading misinformation." Maybe that would bring about too much backlash from cancelled bloggers and draw attention to what the algorithm is really up to. Maybe they want the blogger to remain visible to themselves, so as to spy on the author; to see who he is meeting on the street who might become a reader, this marking them as being of similar mind to the heretic; perhaps flagging them for shadow banning, through association.
I wouldn't be surprised if Alex Carter's entire body of Amazon reviews, which were cancelled with the explanation that there has been "suspicious activity" on his account, weren't done so with the "suspicious activity" being more specifically that "he has read the Street Musician Daniel blog." Therefore, he might be against having some chip implanted in his body so all his activity can be tracked in real time by, not by the U.S. government, but an overarching global governing body similar to the Chinese Communist Party, headed by the likes of a Bill Gates. An identifier which will be linked to his bank account so that his red meat purchases can be phased out over time, and he will be unable to buy a gas powered car in the near future, type of thing.
He can't be a woke Californian who gives fist pumps to BLM rioters, and supports Gavin Newsome's bid to become the next POTUS, so he can work towards making the whole country more like California -a Nation of Zombies. It doesn't seem that he is a good "do bee" who pays his taxes, is clean cut, and triple boosted (with recurring headaches to prove it). Not if he reads the Street Musician Daniel blog, type of thing...
So, I guess I'm back to having nobody notified when I post here and this blog on page 8 of any Google search results. That's OK, I can use the time off radar to hone my blogging skills so that, after my 90 day shadow banning is over, a new audience might form.
Either that, or the censorious algorithm might be exposed as being under the control of a woke few and a push made to have the quasi monopoly of Google dissolved.
A Band Of Tigers
This was the sloppiest "make it up as you go along" thing that came out of Jacob and I's foray into the tiger den which is Jr's apartment.I'm kind of looking forward to hearing more from the 2 or 3 hours that we spent up there with our microphones and amps all feeding into separate channels of a mixing board. This arrangement allows Jr's contributions to be separated off into its own sandbox, and only brought to the fore for instances when he was at his most stellar and at the top of his game; i.e. when we weren't all just jamming away chaotically.
 | ||
| "I'll tell you what, man; we just THREW DOWN on guitars and bass. We just finished now. I'm telling you WE. THREW. DOWN! Apartment A206 was just like Woodstock, with the ghost of Jimi Hendrix hovering over us!" |
"Yeah? That's cool. Hey, you gotta cigarette?"
I continue to get my 3 hours of practice in, even on the nights I don't go out to busk. Those nights I wind up at Jr's on the second floor where, for some reason you can play with your amplifier on 10 and nobody complains; not even the people above me, who stomp on my ceiling as soon as I play a few notes at a volume of "3" on my amp. They are right down the hall from Jr.
Maybe those people have gotten tired of complaining; and take into account Jr's mental acuity or lack thereof, and his forgetfulness (to the point of repeating things that he just said 10 minutes earlier, as if they are novel thoughts).
But, at Jr's, I have to scream as loud as I can just to hear myself over the amplifiers; and this done with his door wide open so the sound spills out into the hallway.
And so, I'm going back in time in my imagination, guided by one of the "self help dialogues" that I use as often as I am sober enough to meditate, and actually "changing" the past, which is one of the stated purposes of that dialogue in particular.
It is supposed, according to the genius who wrote "Awaken The Genius," that changes you make to the past can have a great effect upon one's present moment.
It is just starting to dawn on me; that I hadn't lasted very long at all in the high paced "field" of computer technology back when I was around 20 years old.
The revelation is that this is not an indictment of me; and my skills with computers and electronics.
It's just that, at age 20, my heart wouldn't let me just work at Wang Labs (which was the third largest computer manufacturer in the world, back then; and still a few years shy of when the fallout from all their ill advised hiring decisions, would come to haunt them.
A 5 Football Field's Length Tombstone
I remember showing up for my first day of work for An Wang.
I had parked my car in the parking area the size of 3 football fields, and was walking towards the building, which was about 5 football fields in length and about one football field wide. It was tall enough, at 4 stories, to cause the sun to set, from my perspective, before I had even gotten within a half football field of it. This was about 5 hours before what the sunset time would have been if there were no Wang Labs building.
So, the sun was going down on me as I headed for my first work day; and on top of that; once the sun was out of my eyes and perhaps helped by the after-image of it, the building resembled to me in just a flash, a 5 football fields in length tombstone, into which I saw carved:
Daniel McKenna
It might as well read: "Turned a lot of food into shit, while he lived..."
Fresh out of technical school I had been snapped up by Wang, after a job interview that I had, during which, I was just about free-styling it; and I remember actually coming to comprehend certain things just from having to think for a second of my best bullshit response to the interviewer. Sitting up straight with my Buddy Holly glasses and composing techno poetry; explaining how certain things worked, while at the same time, in the back of my head, thinking: "You know that is probably the concept behind virtual memory; that sounded right..."
Wang Labs had come up with the slogan: "The 'People' Company" for themselves, and one way that they aspired towards that ideal was illustrated by the payroll department.
For one thing, hours worked were logged using an honor system. You logged into the system each week and reported the number of hours you worked. Any time worked exceeding 8 hours on a given day was paid as "time and a half." Any time in excess of 40 hours in a given week also earned overtime pay. You could work up to 12 hours any given day; so it was possible to get 40 hours in with 12 of them having qualified as over time.
Hours worked on Sunday were automatically double pay. And, since the management were all salaried employees, there was almost no chance of any "higher ups" popping in on a Sunday to discover that half of the crew had gotten themselves up early enough to drag themselves in by 5 a.m. and then, after clocking in, had gone right back to sleep. They were everywhere; on desks, on the floor on heavy pieces of cardboard, on motionless conveyor belts; everywhere.
The other half had pooled their double-time pay together to buy an ounce of cocaine; and were very much awake and playing poker.
The time off allowed to employees, fell into categories like "sick" days (3 allowed per quarter; if you didn't use the sick days, you would get a separate check worth the 3 days pay. Then there were plenty of "holidays" -days that you would be compensated for, should you choose to take them off to celebrate; but if you work on them; it's time and a half again. You hadn't really planned to do anything special on Flag Day, anyways; probably...
And everyone was allotted 4 "personal" days per year with the understanding that no questions will be asked about their use; it was none of "The People Company"'s business why you are taking off; that's personal, type of thing...
Well, to keep the story from getting any longer, the idea is that; I have gone back and re-framed my experience with the huge computer company, after realizing that I've been carrying some baggage my whole life related to me seeing myself as having been a failure of sorts (I should still be there snorting cocaine and hoping to pick up either a 9 of spaces or a 4 of spades on my next draw; I mean, who kills a Golden Goose like that? What, so he can hop trains with a guitar on his back?)
Somehow, with this letting go of negative associations I might still have been clinging to; I've changed my perspective from, I was never that good with computers, to, Oh, I was smart enough; that wasn't the problem..the problem was I wanted there to be a whole lot more on that gravestone; "at the end of the day."
GET LANTERN (enter)
And the lack of people on the street, even at almost 3 in the morning; makes me hope that it was indeed some kind of power outage, with generators having kicked on so the street level businesses could able to at least stay open in some limited capacity; maybe the bar continued to serve drinks but the high wattage bands and karaoke machines were shut down, causing tourists to bail early.
I had slept for maybe 4 hours that seemed more like 8. Some of the weird dreams I had felt like they had lasted 4 hours each. In one of them I was at some kind of car dealership where for sale were about a dozen or so Ford Pintos that had all been painted the same shade of blue.* Some of the paint jobs were so sloppy that you could tell, in the dream, that they hadn't even sanded off the old cracked and peeling and chipped paint job before painting over it in blue.
This was after I had felt good enough, at around 9 p.m. to think about going out and play for a while, and even started gathering up my gear, which was scattered all over the apartment, having been diverted to other uses over the course of the past 10 days that I have been too sick to go out there.
The pattern has been that, after sleeping 8 hours and waking up "refreshed," I would feel that I was over the flu, or whatever it is only to wind up fading towards the end of the day, and winding up feeling like taking some aspirin and laying down.
I suspect this has something to do with the starve a cold/ feed a fever thing (which I was never sure about the order of) and the fact that I am expelling a lot of mucous, through coughing and blowing my nose, and that eating almost anything is placing a further burden on the system.
I actually took a week off from donating plasma, so that I could "juice it" for a few days, but then fell into the trap of alcohol induced hunger when, after drinking red wine one night, for example, I went food shopping (ostensibly to just grab more apple and orange juices, along with some alkaline water) and grabbed a frozen pizza; the consumption of which might have given me some congestion in the lungs on a normal day, when I had no cold or flu symptoms.
Jr. got back from his own plasma donation run and knocked on my door around 6 in the evening. He was holding a large plastic bag, and he was half in the bag.
Having converted his plasma into vodka and weed and tobacco, he was there to inform me: "I've got everything I need," and how it had been a great day, and then to insist that I grab my guitar and rush to his place, where a now familiar to me scene would play out, whereby he, being 3 hours into a vodka journey and having smoked half his weed, would be apparently having the time of his life, playing his best and acting as if he couldn't understand why I wasn't right there at his "level," matching him note for note, hooting and hollering and turning the amps up with the door to his apartment wide open, as if intentionally trying to disturb the other residents on his floor.
Then the realization would settle upon both of us that my best chance at sharing his joy would be if I were to drink enough of the vodka, which he would jealously mete out, passing me the bottle at intervals, along with some admonition like: "I said a sip; not the whole bottle!" and to take a few tokes of his weed, which he would likewise apportion out to me, one tiny bowl at a time; this after having himself clouded up the air in his room, while in the act of retrieving it.
I basically told him that I was glad for him, glad that he had had "the perfect day," and gotten everything he needed. It has started occurring to me that the guy, while maybe not being a classic narcissist, sees the world through a finely focused lens, aimed at himself.
He had everything he needed, except another human being; for companionship, an optimist might say; or to impose himself upon, might be the more cynical take on things.
"I've got something to drink and some weed, come on, let's go!!" he barked at me. "Bring your acoustic and your electric, I'll see you in ten minutes!" he added, in the tone of a boss ordering one of his employees around.
I didn't see him in ten minutes, but that's when my phone started ringing, which I ignored. Soon, his tell-tale knock came at my door; loudly enough to imply that me having my headphones on would not wash as an excuse for not coming to the door.
I opened it to find him standing there, holding a vodka bottle in one hand and his one-hitter and lighter in the other. It was probably a mistake on my part, but I let him in, knowing that his intent was to get me enough of a buzz that I would want to go to his place with my guitar and jam for half the night.
My stereo was playing Crosby, Stills and Nash, which he vociferously approved of, and told me at least a couple times to turn up.
He was already to the stage of drunkenness that I might classify as the "thumping" stage. That's when he will punctuate everything he say's with a thump to my upper arm or my side. Before singing the next line of the C.S.N. song, he would thump me on the arm, as if trying to draw my attention to it, so as to point out the poetry in it, or perhaps to prove to me that he indeed knew the song, word for word. or if I was to go the more cynical route, to make the occasion all about himself, as in: you're ignoring me and paying attention to the music instead. What the song means to me is what matters most here. You can tell by the fact that I know the words that it's an important song to me and I'm thumping you on the arm to call your attention to this and give you more insight into my soul.
I, of course wasn't really "feeling it" at any level deeper than being thumped before anything he said; despite his giving me a few swigs of vodka and then passing me the one hitter, which he had stuffed at the wrong end, making it pretty much useless -kind of like putting the wrong end of a cigarette in your mouth and trying to light the filter...
I think the only line of "Suite Judy Blue Eyes," that I joined him in singing was: "Please be gone, I'm tired of you..."
Then I noticed the time/temperature reading on the Bourbon Street webcam as being 69 degrees at about a quarter till 9. I told Jr. that it was a perfect night for me to go out and play. This was kind of the book end to the perfect day that he had just had, but instead of seeing it that way, he confirmed my growing suspicion that "it's all about him," by upping his game, telling me that he had plenty more vodka where the tiny bottle that he had brought over to my place came from, and plenty more bud. "So, are you coming over?!" he asked.
"No, man. I've got to go out there to my spot. It's just a perfect night to play..." I countered, of which he seemed to only hear the last few words.
"Good, I'll see you in ten minutes; bring both your guitars!"
I then pointed out my bike, which I had poised just outside my door, and the backpack of gear ready to go; and then started putting my guitar in its case. It was, I guess, this visual evidence that convinced him that I wasn't going to try to get as crappy drunk as him, so as to join him in frivolity. Of course, his reaction was to cuss under his breath and look at me as if I were his enemy. A far cry from: "Well, be careful riding down there, and I hope you have a good night and make some money..."
More like: "You son of a bitch!"
But, then, after getting ready to go out the door, I started to feel the familiar end of the day fatigue that has been a part of this flu or cold that I've had. It started about 10 days ago with a tickle in the throat, which turned into me not being able to breath through that same throat without feeling an urge to cough.
After one fitful night after taking a couple BC Powder's I woke up feeling like some kind of fever had broken, and that it must have been a 24 hour "thing."
But, then the cycle started; the one of feeling fine first thing in the morning (and even pretty good after coffee and kratom) only to end the day just wanting to lay down and too fatigued to even ride down the street for more BC Powder.
It was another installment of the lesson I learned a long time ago about busking; which is that it should be done every night possible, because you never know when it's going to be raining, or too cold to play, or when the city is going to be digging up the spot where you play to work on underground pipes. Or when your lungs are going to be too congested to facilitate singing; or your nose too runny to contemplate harmonica playing.
I laid down, thinking that, just because I had used the excuse of going out to play on Jr. didn't mean that I was obligated to do so; I still had my freedom...
After taking a week off from plasma donation, I went back on Monday, which means that I can return today and get $90. When I went early in the day, my temperature was fine when they took it, but by the end of that day, I was once again laying there with chills, alternating with sweating, and tormenting dreams keeping me half awake.
The dream I had about the blue Pintos earlier had me waking up disappointed in myself for not having checked the odometers on them. Not often that I kick myself over something I had failed to do in a dream; but that just might be part of whatever flu I have. I could go see if it is the Omicron or one of those things; but would only do that if there were something they would give me that I could pick up at Walgreen's with maybe a "co-pay" of a couple bucks -one of the therapeutics that once only billionaires and high profile politicians could avail themselves to; about which all references were censored from the general public, until such a point that Big Pharma had exacted about as much money as they could have reasonably expected to do, for their snake oils. Now it's the Military Industrial Complex' turn to make hay, grabbing as much from the middle class as they can (while Big Tech keeps the masses bickering over drag queens in elementary schools...).
I have no idea how any of that "pandemic" stuff works, as I consider the CDC website a waste of time and just a propaganda source (and I say this in good faith, having never been to it). They really seem to think that most people are plain stupid; and in most cases they're right. i feel bad for the people who subjected themselves to the things and got nothing in return other than feeling too sick to go to work the next couple days.
*the shade of blue that they were painted was such a key component to the dream, I would think; that I should be able to identify where in the world I had seen that shade of paint. Somehow all I could come up with were the Bumper Cars at the amusement park nearby where I grew up; which were generally painted in very primary colors, and they would have used a similar shade of blue. It was also the color that Pete Tirado painted his van, which had a body made up of a lot of, I think they called it "Bondo" a kind of plastic similar to the material that made up a cast that I once had on one of my legs; it seemed to be heavy gauze type strips which where probably saturated in the plastic in its liquefied state and then wrapped around, the leg in my case, or over the damaged areas of the van, in Pete's case.
Pete Tirado was one of the 4% in my home town that checked the box of "black," or maybe it was still "negro" when I played in his band, back in the early 1980's. Since there were so few Africans (as Pete referred to himself, usually in regards to audiences as in: "They couldn't deal with the Africans," after a maybe less than enthusiastic crowd response) in my home town, they weren't seen as threatening; and the stereotypes that seeped into our consciousnesses were of the more positive type; and they were generally appreciated for things like their athleticism and any school would have been happy to have seen any one of the handful in our town enroll; with visions of a winning basketball team in their heads; but at the same time, worrying about them being able to maintain their grades. And their "innate" musical abilities. More about that in the next paragraph.
But, Pet Tirado's van was painted blue, over the Bondo, and it was very close to the color of the Pintos in the dream.
As a remedy to the "African's" dilemma, and since Pete resembled Jimi Hendrix a lot, he capitalized upon this by learning a lot of Jimi's material, then starting a tribute band to the late great. -a situation which called for him to preserve the verisimilitude of that legendary act by having two skinny white guys as his backing band.
It was commonly believed, amongst us white musicians the trope that black guys had "rhythm" and I can remember receiving the news that a rival band had acquired "a black bass player," delivered to me by an equally jealous band mate in a tone of voice that might have imparted that the guy's band got a jig on the Letterman show, or something. We thought that Paul Curley's (as that was the fellow's name) band was going to become instantly funky and might start getting "all the gigs."
And, it was true that the bassist who I was replacing, when I filled the requirement of there being a skinny white guy in Pete's Hendrix tribute band, was a guy named Roland, who was about 10 times as funky as me, at the time. So, Pete had abandoned the then T-Blue Band (hence the color of the van) in order to perform under a series of other names like "The Experience," and others which had to be abandoned after it was learned that someone else had already licensed the name. News traveled slowly in the early 1980's; so it wasn't like we could Google it; it was more like someone showing up at a show who was such a big Jimi Hendrix fan that he had ferreted out all the tribute bands nationwide. "There's already a Hendrix tribute band out of San Francisco called 'The Experience'" out of some guy holding a beer at a gig was all it would take for us to be doing our next gig as "Purple Haze," as I recall..
Anyways, the blue was the same shade as Pete's van in the dream; and the crater-pocked paint job fits in the textural department....So, why would I be dreaming of a time when I was able to join a band and play pretty decent sized clubs just because of the color of my skin?
How am I going to do this; this setting my keyboard on what Ann Patchett described as "a cookie sheet," upon which she composed the entirety of her latest novel, "Tom Lake," from the comfort of her bed?
I have my keyboard on top of a clump of quilt that I rolled together in the general shape of a cookie cutter, whatever that is. I imagine that it is one of those "breakfast in bed" contraptions...
Bad idea, breakfast in bed. Best to start the day with a grapefruit and nothing else...
I finally wrote an email to Ann Patchett's bookstore's website figuring that it might come to her attention; since it was directed towards her along with my acknowledgement that I was going about contacting her in a circuitous manner.
There was the question of why I would want to contact an author just to say that I liked her book. In this case, it was a book she had published in 2001. It won a bunch of prizes, something that none of her subsequent books have seemed to have done (with the possible exception of her most recent one, from 2019).
So, she has gone about 20 years without winning any trophies or any "Orange" awards. This is understandable and actually admirable in my esteem as it could be a sign that she abandoned her quest to have a top-40 hit on the NY Times list in favor of writing stuff that just fewer people are equipped to fathom...
Anyways; I e-mailed Ann Patchett in a way; and these are things that I surrender control to, to God and Universe; so, maybe I will be sitting and busking in front of her Nashville based bookstore this coming summer, or not.
It does seem that a lot of adventure went away from my daily existence as soon as I was given this apartment to occupy until the end of my biological life....
What about my spiritual life?
That seems to involve learning how to love the complete scumbags and worthless wastes of human flesh that live at Sacred Heart. To love them though they don't deserve any love at all....
Haha, just kidding; it felt good to type that, so....
My triangle, which I had suspended from one of the arms of the keyboard stand using a rubber band, fell and clanged against the base of the thing, emitting an abbreviated sample of it's tingly sound, before coming to rest on the rug.
This was just after I had opened my door upon hearing something that sounded like a skinny black lady pushing a cart of some kind past my door, just in time to see that Jackie, who lives 2 doors down had been the source of that sound. It was just when I had some thought about her that I can't remember the details of that the triangle fell and made its sound.
I have regularly heard sounds in my place that a more naive mind might attribute to "ghosts," and, having lived in a house where there were most probably the same kind of energies (where my girlfriend at the time would be physically thrown out of the bed, causing her head to bang on the hardwood floor, as if to prove that her body had been limp; and that she hadn't just thrown herself out of bed) I certainly "believe" in them (although I'm more apt to credit the phenomenon to the power of my mind, rather than some spectre; a mind strong enough to throw a 113 pound girl out of bed, but not one to fear it having been done by some ghost) and, I am only half skeptical about the cause of the things that have bumped and clanged in the middle of the night.
It was quite a coincidence that the triangle fell at that instant. It had been suspended by a knotted rubber band for about 6 months at that point. I guess rubber bands gradually slip; and perhaps the actual sound frequency of Jackie's cart that she noisily pushed past my door was just right to shake the triangle free...
I'm not going to worry, nor devote one more word to it...
Everything else I planned to write here was negative -the residents got their monthly checks from the government; I saw a gaggle of them gathered around the ATM machine at the bank across the street from Sacred Heart, shortly after midnight.
And, so now I can have some peace; none of them will be knocking on my door asking for anything; nor offering anything.... Like I said, anything else I might add to this post might be negative.
I should be able to go out and busk tomorrow night, as the cold/flu that I have had the past couple days seems to be receding.
A familiar scene will play out; I will see derisive grins on the faces of those who will try to lord over me the fact that they don't have to ride a bike 2 miles to the Quarter and play a guitar for a few hours each night to make a living; they are masters of the Social Security System...
Then, just like every other month, by the 10th of it, some of them will greet me with mock friendliness upon my returning at 2 a.m. from playing and casually ask me if I had had a "good night," and then, after congratulating me on the good night; ask me for money. It happens every month. Ten days into the month, they are broke with no way of getting more, while I am going out night by night and basically making the same amount as them, where they to divide their monthly check by 30.
Anyways, I guess I will see if Ann Patchett writes back to me. It's at least more probable than that Charles Dickens will contact me; although with Jackie around, who knows....