"Please Be Gone, I'm Tired Of You..."

 

There is something wrong with this picture. I've never logged on to the Bourbon Street webcam to find the image so dark. It's as if the power went out, but only on the second floors of every building.

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.

And, my lungs became so congested that the breath holds I managed when doing the Wim Hof deep breathing method, fell from 3 minutes and 40 seconds to not even 2 minutes.

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...

And then, looking at the webcam to see that either the power had gone out, or the more dire possibility, that half the businesses on Bourbon Street are now defunct, and thus, not in need of light, I decided that there is always tomorrow.

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?