Just Give Thanks To Manifest

Another in a series of things that have been right under my nose all along but that I never saw, I saw this evening.

Carlos, from the apartment diagonally across the hallway from mine, moved out maybe 4 months ago, now.

When the workers, who have been here replacing pipes and generally fixing the huge heating and cooling unit, so that it no longer emits scraping metal upon metal shrieks but now sounds more like a dishwasher in action or so -well, those guy's, I guess had on their list of units to put temporary portable air conditioning units in, Carlos' apartment, even though he is long gone and in arrears something like $6,700 on his rent, as rumor has it.

I picture the scene: the workers let themselves in his place and are startled by the sound of a rodent scampering into hiding. They flinch. They then notice that the place has been hastily evacuated, with someone having grabbed sundry items and left others everywhere. They leave, but don't lock the door behind them; maybe so that, if the building manager tells them to go ahead and put a portable A/C unit in the place, even though its most recent tenant left 4 months ago, owing almost 7 grand; to keep the mice comfortable, that would save them having to unlock it again.

Anyways, I wasn't worrying about having lost my nail clippers, and the fact that I was out of toilet paper and could really use something to clean my walls and some other surfaces, and, not only that I was out of food money for the next 10 days and almost out of food...
I knew something would turn up and I offered up a prayer of gratitude in advance of the way things were going to work out in equal measure to the providence that I accord to God...

It was immediately upon feeling this sense of gratitude that the thought kind of materialized that the door to Carlos' former place may be unlocked. 

I had actually been walking through the hallway just as 2 or 3 of the heating and air guys were at Carlos' door, fumbling through a ring of keys, about to go in. I told them that "That guy hasn't been there in about 4 months," but I guess they wanted to confirm that and see for themselves.

They hadn't been in there long, I remember.

Thanks, Carlos!

So, I walked over there and tried the door, to find it unlocked.

In I went, and emerged about 20 minutes later with unopened boxes of toothpaste, a good set of nail clippers, and a couple different cleaning solutions in spray bottles. I also had a bag full of canned food items, some of them less than 5 years out of date. Thanks, Carlos.

With a crime rate of 52 per one thousand residents, Bogalusa has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 19.

Had anyone noticed me coming out of there with the loot, I was prepared to tell them that I had just gotten off the phone with Carlos ("from Bugalusa," I would add, to cement the lie using a concrete fact. Every Sacred Heart resident knows that Carlos is in Bugalusa, Louisiana now; and hearing that information issue forth from me, they would have no choice but to believe that I had just gotten off the phone with Carlos, and that he had indeed told me: "Go one an' git you whatever you want out of there!"

Here's one of Bugalusa's race riots...

It was Stephen King who said, in his book entitled "On Writing," that the key to telling lies is to add ancillary details to your lie, thereby making it much more believable. If you are going to lie to someone and tell them you just got back from the little store down the street, when you were actually home, but just didn't feel like answering his knocks on your door; tell him, as part of the yarn that the store owner was cussing out some old, skinny black lady; or that you stepped in some dog shit that was on the sidewalk right in front of the entrance to the little store that you were never at. That will make it almost impossible for them to persist in thinking they are being lied to. I mean, how would you know about the lady being cussed out if you hadn't been there to see it, type of thing. King is right about that; I always use that technique, in the rare cases that I ever lie to people...

Carlos left behind at least a dozen jars of peanut butter but, alas each had "fully hydrogenated" oils of rapeseed, cottonseed and soybean listed in the ingredients. A non-starter for myself. 

I suffered for probably about 7 years with "eczema," in my mid to late teens -7 years of being girl-crazy though having dry, flaky skin and an anemic skin tone- before learning that I somehow can't metabolize those particular oils, but rather, pass them, unbroken-down to my lower intestines where they are seen as foreign invaders by my immune system,provoking an overproduction of histamine, along with the concomitant "bad skin -probably the body's way of insuring that I would never pass my genes along to children who would be disadvantaged by not being able to eat school cafeteria food...
 

But anyways; there was Carlos' place with the door unlocked all this time that I might have been stressing over how to keep my nails short enough to be able to play the guitar, so I could make money to feed myself and buy toothpaste, toilet paper, and some stuff to clean my walls, because their dirtiness is suddenly bothering me, now that I have detoxified my body through a week long fever of 103.5 degrees and a diet of only distilled water, followed by one of spring water (the distilled stuff is good, but will eventually leach the minerals out of the body through reverse osmosis -good for getting the poisons out, but not to be overdone...3 days is enough).