It's Time

 I remember the day I came across this book, perhaps 3 years ago.

My apartment was so cluttered that I had stacks of books everywhere. Some stacks were behind others and so I couldn't even see a spine or part of a cover sticking out that might remind me of having a book that I would have gotten somewhere, interested in reading.

I've got to organize my books, I thought. Just to emphasize this point, I said to myself: You see, for example, I've got this little light green colored one wedged in between two larger ones, and I can't even tell from here what book it is, or where I even got it. I definitely need to declutter this place!

Then, I went and pulled it from the stacks. It was the book shown.

I am thinking of practicing the art, as part of a broader ranging New Year's resolution.

And the place to start, according to marie, after resolving to stop capitalizing your name, perhaps, is in doing a visualization that she describes thusly: "This means visualizing the ideal lifestyle that you dream of."

I have come about putting my own visualization together by deciding to revert to the lifestyle I had in 1998, when, at the age of 35, I was a bundle of energy and would race against the neighbor's dog to a store a quarter mile away, where I would get a Sobe "power" drink (plus a treat for the dog) to start each day, around 1 PM.

I played the guitar at least 5 hours each day, and did about an hour and a half of working out on a weight set in the garage, consuming at least 3,500 calories, 25 grams of protein and 100 grams of carbs, all out of bottles labelled with names like: "Ripped Fuel," "Carbo Force," "XXL,"and "Metabalol." I didn't chew at all until the evening meal of fish and greens with garlic and hot sauce, to go with a bottle of red wine. 

This one looks like it was taken from Emerson Pond, where my friend, Dave and I caught many a Painted Turtle...

So, I visualize waking up in an uncluttered apartment, where I will create the only dirty dish in the place by making a cup of coffee, and then will do the WIM Hof breathing exercises, before stretching out for a mile jog to an outdoor gym comprised of equipment that utilizes the weight of a person's body as the "resistance," where I will work out before jogging home.

Switching my diet back will be a challenge, as I have, only in the past year, eaten things like pizza and even ice cream sodas.

The pizzas were thin crust, gluten free, organic and topped with white cheese and spinach, but still something I would have passed on in 1998.

The ice cream sodas were me trying to recapture a part of my 14 year old self, the part that did things just for the sake of being "creative." I kind of came to the conclusion that I was possessed of that energy despite the ice cream sodas.

I used to hop on my 10 speed bike and ride 37.5 miles to the base of Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire, lock the thing up, then climb the 3,704 feet to the peak of it, eat a bagged lunch I'd brought, take a few pictures, then ride back home. That was just a typical summer vacation day when I was 13 or so.

I have lost some of that initiative, and perhaps it's because my house is too cluttered.

Treats Of Seedy Texture

I guess I should be posting at least something.

I mixed powdered chia seeds into kombucha -apple flavored kombucha and, I've never tasted anything better in my life, unless it was some time I washed a lamb and feta pita down with a 40 dollar bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from the Russian River valley part of California.

I'll bet that there isn't a homeless problem in that valley..

Chia seeds and kombucha!

You can soak the chia seeds in hot water if you want the texture less seedy and more like tapioca, it's up to the individual. I'm not telling anyone how to prepare their kombucha and chia seed beverage.

I have been squandering a lot of time watching YouTube and searching for random things that pop into my head.

I don't know,; I like watching guys panning for gold somewhere in Alaska that can only be reached by helicopter and grainy black and white footage of Cassius Clay fighting that British champion...

It just gets to be time consuming..

The sun will be up soon and I still haven't checked out the volcanic activity in Iceland.

I want to see if the population is standing around the thing warming their hands, or what...

Miracle Food Cures From The Bible

I seem to have, once again, made an abscess go away without having had to go to a hospital, or lanced it myself, using one of the hypodermic needles that I sometimes collect off the sidewalks of the Quarter and bring home.

They are pretty good for draining those infections, since they can draw as well as inject. Only when the pain in the gums is worse than the stab of the needle could ever be, does the idea of self-lancing become feasible...
This had been my body declaring in no uncertain terms that, no, the 35 years of health that I've enjoyed while avoiding certain foods has not made me invincible against them.

About 10 days before getting sick, I had been straightening out my refrigerator and, noticing a box of a certain seafood broth (meant to be the "stock" in making clam chowder or lobster bisque, perhaps) that had been in there for at least a couple months.

As I am pretty sure that refrigeration retards the multiplication of bacteria but doesn't stop it entirely, I unscrewed the cap and took a whiff of the seafood type broth. It smelled very peculiar, maybe like fermented lobster tail, or something; kind of like a linseed oil essence. I decided to toss it out, rather than rely upon boiling it to make it OK to eat. After all, there ain't a whole lot of calories in seafood stock, nor protein, carbs etc. You might get some calcium and maybe some trace minerals from the deep sea, but I think it's role is to just add flavor to -I don't know- crab cakes?

Within a half hour or so of having smelled the likely rancid stuff, my nose started to feel irritated. Soon the back of my throat felt weird and I felt like I might be "coming down" with something over the next few hours. That never came to fruition but made me wonder if people can get sick just from smelling food that has gone bad.

Out of all the foods that rot, it would be interesting to survey people on which ones smell the worst. Chicken would probably place or show, besting beef, in the stench-off, my opinion. Rotten eggs go back generations, striking the fear of metaphorically becoming one into whomever might be "the last one," in various competitive situations.

I think the rotted shellfish and crustaceans might not be as offensive because we might have developed an immunity against sea borne bacteria from our primordial ooze days. 

This past Saturday, after having consumed the protein drink made from soy, yogurt and raw honey, I got a swollen gland in my throat. The throat became scratchy, then there was sneezing and some lung congestion.

Friday's post went semi-viral...why??

Then I ate the Pillsbury Crescents™ rolls, trying to get some hand eczema to flare up. This made me feel miserable enough to cancel busking and stay home instead. And to have an ice cream soda.

That's what started the toothache. Just like the folklore that has been handed down through the generations warns that it will. "But you'll have to have them all pulled out, after the Savoy Truffle," sings George Harrison on the White Album. He's talking about teeth, of course.

I had always assumed the lore referred to the decaying of the tooth's enamel from eating sugary foods then maybe not brushing well enough. Now I think that it is actually the sugar in the blood stream that somehow feeds bacteria from the inside, weakening the body's immune response. 

I was in so much pain that I could measure my heart rate using the throbs of pain in my gums. I had dug into a book I have on "Miracle Food Cures From The Bible," and along with doing Wim Hof's deep breathing method, and doing acupressure at different spots on my head and neck, and soaking a face cloth in hot water and applying it to the side of my face that was swelling, and doing push ups and other exercises, I was able to find a couple bags of chamomile tea -one of the miracle cures from the bible for abscesses, with thyme being another- and stuffed one of them between my cheek and gum where the pain was.

This was somewhat of a leap of faith, trusting something from the bible, I thought. But then I thought that Pharma would always censure information about any cure not involving doctors and pharmacists and insurance companies, etc. and the fact that I had never heard of such cures meant nothing in the real sense. Hell, when I type in the word "kratom" in this editor, Google puts a red squiggly line under it, as if to imply "this is not even a word." I think that is because people use kratom (there's that line again) as a means of getting off of opiates, which must be disturbing news to the pharmaceutical companies, whose CEOs probably give their yachts names such as "The SS Oxycontin."

Love Thy Neighbor

So, my faith in the unerring wisdom of the Lord, and with a tea bag stuffed in my cheek so that I probably looked like a major league baseball player, I stepped out into the hall, to see my neighbor, Wayne emerging from his apartment one door down. He greeted me and I mumbled a reply as best as I could.

Wayne seemed to figure out right away that I had a toothache. Either he thought that the teabag in my cheek was part of an abscess, or that I had stuffed a teabag in my cheek because of one, he piped up and asked: "Bro, you got a toothache?"

"Ymmm, Immmm, gmmhh, fmuommmer, mmmhah"

"Come on, I got some stuff my dentist gave me that I never used. I don't like to take anything for pain, I like to tough it out..."

It's probably easier to "tough it out" after a dentist has done his part to relieve pressure, remove decay, etc. But, when you are in a situation that is only going to get worse until it kills you (which is another "belief" that I take with a grain of salt -pink salt, in the case of a toothache- as probably having originated with the medical association to keep people from using home remedies and other things, instead of letting them solve the problem at 90 dollars per hour.

My neighbor gave me a couple of antibiotic capsules and a small handful of, wait for it......hydro-codeine pills. It was a miracle cure, brought about by my faith in the bible. All I had to do was step outside my apartment with the chamomile tea bag in my cheek and, boom! -just like that- I found comfort.

In one of the anecdotes in the section of the miracle foods book that talked about thyme was the testimony of some herbalist who had affected the cure of some disease in a man, mentioning that he first got him to cut out white sugar and white flour from his diet.

Resist the Pillsbury dough boy; and he will flee from you!

Anyways, the sun is coming up on a beautiful Tuesday. I am on the lookout for a Christmas card that my mom has sent that might have money in it (along with "the thought" that actually counts) as well as a parcel from The Lidgley's of London, who have resurfaced after having weathered the U.K's authoritarian Covid edicts and come through the immunization process unscathed.  

Something To Be Grateful For And Glad About

My hot spot data was "re-filled" at about 8 this morning.

I now have 2.5 gigs to use, and will be very careful to not view short "reels" of video on Facebook, as that was where I think a lot of bytes were spent last month, when the data lasted only about11 days, instead of the whole month.

Hand Eczema Update

I ate one roll of the Pillsbury Crescents, and how stupid that was...

I was thinking that it would give me a flare up of hand eczema, like I haven't had in decades, so that I would be accepted into the clinical trial of the new miracle cream that some company is trying to put on the market.

This was stupid on so many levels.

First of all the phrase "If you have your health, you have everything" kind of surfaced in my memory right as I was starting to notice that I was starting to feel like crap after eating the things. This puts in jeopardy any trip to the plasma place that I might have been considering, since I don't feel up to it.

It might even screw up busking tonight, should I not be able to get to sleep because my mind is racing from having eaten this disease causing "food." Serendipity didn't disappoint, as I just happened to land on some video where the discussion was about how people are given medications to treat a slew of ailments, but never advised to stop eating the kind of crap that is making them sick. 

They were talking about Pillsbury Crescents; I know they were. 

Bleached white flour, sugar, soybean oil...and that's before you even get to the preservatives. They seem to be trying to position the "Some ingredients derived from bio-engineered sources" message on the label like it's a good thing. Right under the "no high fructose corn syrup" one. Who needs high fructose corn syrup when you've got bio-engineered ingredients; like who needs enemies with friends like them, type of thing...

I'm going to meditate and then try to sleep and maybe recover enough to make a plasma donation before they close at 5 PM. I don't think it's too cold to busk, in fact I just checked by going outside and estimating that it was about 65 degrees at 10 AM. 

It's not too cold, so if I don't get the plasma money, at least there will be a couple hundred to be made at the Lilly Pad tonight...if I feel like playing for 5 hours, that is...
But, I'm glad to have the hot spot data. The last couple posts, done on my phone, were tedious and I was missing every 10th letter or so and had to back up and then had to scroll the screen manually because it wasn't keeping up. Those government phones come hard wired with Google and are just mind control tools. If I try to watch Russel Brand, the video will stop and start the whole way through. But if I want to hear someone talking about how Trump is going to personally shoot all the Negros, Jews, and homosexuals that will be lined up against the wall (that's really why he wants to build it so badly) and yadda, yadda...then the video will play in high resolution just fine; Rachael Maddow will look life-like. Yikes...
Sure, the legacy media were full of crap about all things Covid, and full of errors of omission about all things Ukraine, but that just means they are overdue to be correct; and this "Trump-will-come-into-your-house-and-eat-your-Poptarts-if-elected" narrative might be just that time.

Hand Eczema

I haven't had hand eczema since I was about 17,  and was consuming the daily trays of school cafeteria food which were laden with soy based products I'm sure; and wasn't paying attention to the ingredients listed on anything.

I've read in more than one place that people are prone to being allergic to the foods they crave the most or vice versa and after being diagnosed with having food allergies are mortified over the thought of living the rest of their life without whatever that is be it Pillsbury crescents or circus peanuts candy.

I mentioned the latter because when I was just about 7 or 8 years old I got a hankering for Circus Panuts™ after trying them somewhere and making them my new favorite candy on the spot.

I begged my mom to get me some, and she soon came home with a family-sized bag of the things,  probably the smallest bag of them sold at the grocery store.

I remember digging in to them, and them being delicious until about half way through the bag, when I got sick of them, literally. 

Not in the stomach but more like when you chew too much tobacco and lose all desire for more. 

Circus Peanuts™ are basically soy flour, sugar and God knows what to put them in the ballpark, at least, of being the color of real peanuts (like some opinions about presidents, I thought they looked too orange to be real).

But, I had gotten an acute craving for a food that I would turn out to have an intolerance for, with eczema being my body's way of protesting it.

I rolled up the cellophane bag of orange candy, put them in one of our kitchen cabinets, and never ate another Circus Peanut. That was 54 years ago; and mom, if you're seeing this, you can throw them out if they're still there.

I went to a dermatologist who diagnosed my condition as " hand eczema." I remember thinking: isn't there a more Latin sounding term like rosacrucia Manis for the disease?

But, cutting certain foods out of my diet after switching to a chiropractor / nutritionist for my care signalled the end of hand eczema in my life. 

Now almost 40 years later I get an invitation on Facebook to participate in a clinical research study on some new kind of topical cream that has been invented for sufferers of hand eczema.

I suspect that this is related to me being excluded from another study at the same place about a year ago because I had no medical history, as far as having been prescribed much of anything since the age of 19. Maybe that made them suspicious. Just a record of having been diagnosed and treated for hand eczema 41 years ago.

I'm not inferring that the research people unlawfully dug up my medical records and discovered it, that would be "underhanded." Facebook probably provided them with the tip after snooping through my blog posts and personal messages, and|or from listening to everything I say around my phone. Nothing underhanded about that...

So, I called and made an appointment.

 I've not had problems with eczema for 40 years except on occasions when I ate something without knowing it's ingredients until after my fingers would start itching as if it was emanating from under the skin, and I would go back and read on the side of a box that I had eaten a bunch of hydrogenated soybean oil, perhaps in the guise of Malted Milk Balls™ which have, as a prime ingredient; listed even ahead of sugar and chocolate: hydrogenated soybean oil.

It might be problematic to show up for a hand eczema study without having any symptoms of hand eczema, I lamented.

I went out a little later, and was on my way to get some food at the Brown Derby -something healthy, to help me overcome a cold that has persisted the past 3 days which came on right after I consumed some protein powder that wound up having soy in it.

A gland swelled up in my throat, which then became scratchy, leading to sneezing and then ultimately a slight fever and, well, a cold.

I made it no further than the box outside our place where people place food donations, where I espied two cans of red salmon -the kind I can't even afford because it's $5 for a can half the size of one of pink salmon.

At that point, I could have turned around and gone right back inside without walking to the store, because I had enough to make a meal out of red salmon, and myriad other things in my cabinet.

Then I saw it.

A box full of Pillsbury "Crescents" croissant type rolls loaded with soybean oil both in the hydrogenated form and as a whole oil.

Sugar; white flour (bleached, at that) -it was all there- a recipe for hand eczema;  there for the taking.

If I I chow down on those, then show up on Monday, they will probably admit me into the study and start giving me $75 per visit, over the next 4 weeks or whatever they said.

I'm in a quandary over the idea of making myself sick so I can get paid to research some new kind of cream which very well could make me even more sick, to the point of maybe killing me.

The fine print in the little booklet of "possible side effects" that comes with the newly invented cream might state as much...

I've always likened cream for eczema as being like spray paint to coat the leaves of a dying tree with green, as an alternative to transplanting it into good soil and giving it clean water and sunlight.

 You are only treating the symptoms, and not the root cause (no pun intended).

That's where it stands right now. 

I'm looking at my cans of salmon and there's the box of croissants that I grabbed...

Pillsbury Cresents; original crescents; air fryer ready; no high fructose corn syrup; no colors from artificial sources...

There's the little Pillsbury doughboy,  looking pretty excited as he stands in front of an enlarged picture of the product. 

It might as well say quick baked hand eczema, ready in 15 to 18 minutes.

When I was a kid, I used to interlace my fingers and grind them together, often to the point where my skin (my epidermis) broke and lymph oozed out, and eventually blood if I kept bearing down.

I still can't decide if it would be worth the suffering just to make 500 bucks by participating, I would be poisoning myself right down to the roots...

Smart Post

One work around for

the problem of running out of hotspot data each month is to use the blogger app which is made to run on smartphones like the one in my left hand.

Not long after publishing my first post in weeks my data ran out, with Facebook reels watching being the only difference in the way I used the hotspot for however long it lasted...

And now I go to pose the question on Reddit somewhere; "Does watching reels on Facebook use a lot of data?"

A Hertofore Not Even Dreamt Of Occurance

 So, I went down to the Brown Derby to purchase my own whatever.

"What are you going to get?" asked Jr., who had shown up at my place half in the bag (three sheets to the wind, if you prefer). claiming that he would be able to meet all my needs.

"I need someone to jam with."

"I'm gonna get whatever I decide to, once I'm down there..."

"Well, yeah, that's good."

He invited me to make a detour to his place to get "loaded" before embarking upon my foray into The Brown Derby.

But, assiduous student of history that I am, I knew that this ascension to the loaded plane would entail falling in place behind him as we climbed the stairs one floor to his apartment. I would hear him say exactly whatever he said the last time I had acquiesced, and was scaling the stairs with thoughts of a few gulps of vodka and some weed on my mind.

I think it would be upon reaching a certain step in the staircase that he would wail out: "Trumpets and violins!!" -a line from a Hendrix song that holds a pretty prominent spot in his vocabulary.

"Trumpets and violins!" has become a warning to me that, unless I was so drunk that, even if a fight broke out between us, we would each swing and miss, but still both fall to the floor from the momentum of the errant swings, I shouldn't hang out with him.

Once we entered his apartment, he would proceed straight to his electric guitar and amp and, after flipping on the switch to the latter, would hand me the former: "Here you go, all ready for you...Trumpets and violins!!"

And it would proceed according to a script well known to me by now. I've tried to radically break the pattern before by going right to the guitar and grabbing it before he could, on one occasion, and this seemed to disorient him briefly, but after a couple trumpets and violins, he had regained a sense of  awareness and was thrusting a bottle of Gavno* vodka towards me, and saying: "A sip; not half the bottle!" He say's that; Every time.

And, so we were right back to where we would have been had he handed me the guitar himself and then gone to his freezer for the Gavno.

*"Gavno" is the Russian word for "shit." I'm drawing a blank on what the actual brand name is, of the cheapest vodka sold at the Brown Derby, but I think Gavno can't be far off.

I decided to go to the Brown Derby and get my own stuff. The fact that Jacob and I had busked on both Monday and Tuesday nights, drawing about $18 each with about 5 hours of effort playing, meant that I had that option. What price can one put on freedom from Jr.? 18 bucks surely seemed like a bargain.

But, as I started walking towards the store (he had been ready to walk with me, before I told him that I might jog some of the way) I started to contend with the negative emotions that were present, which manifested in the form of anger.

Stepping back from myself it seemed that I was angry because I felt that he was trying to buy my company with intoxicants; and, maybe more specifically, employ those substances to put me in the mood to jam with him, but I was most angry over the power dynamic whereby he would be in control of the intoxicants and I would have to meekly ask him for every sip I took, or if he was planning upon lighting the joint any time soon, type of thing.

So, swelled up with the pride that a man feels after he has gone out and worked and doesn't have to resort to charity, I shook off the negative feelings and started to enjoy a walk through the park towards The Brown Derby.

I thought about how The Law of Attraction has been working lately to the point where I almost feel like I'm on Spy TV (Like, the producers aim was to leave a copy of the law of attraction book somewhere and let someone find it. Then, observing that he actually sits somewhere and reads through the thing, they then they drop things in various places right ahead of where he is walking the next day -a 5 dollar bill just laying here on the side of the bar, a half smoked blunt crushed on the sidewalk another hundred yards ahead, and then...what's he always drinking, Celsius, right?...an unopened can of it, cold, and perched right atop this trash can that he's about to come upon...maybe someone bought it and then, after reading the fine print, decided to leave it for someone else who might want it, type of thing.

Those who know the secret of the Law of Attraction, know enough to totally surrender control of the details to a higher intelligence. It is perhaps beyond Man's capacity to have a pregnant and/or lactating woman show up at the Brown Derby and decide not to drink a Celsius that she just bought at that very moment; that's just beyond Man's understanding. And, she might have just driven there from Bugloosa, Louisiana. How is one supposed to envision all the details of such a circumstance and then see it manifest?

Then, after following and covertly filming me all day, they would have placed a box full of dried dog shit on the little shelf outside my apartment door and would be there to capture my eyes lighting up and my face full of gratitude and happiness over what the next blessing could possibly be, and would all bark out: "You're on Spy TV!!" just when I had peered inside the box and my nose was beginning to wrinkle at the stench..
 

That's how it has seemed.

I went to the Brown Derby and got a gallon of alkaline water, having not felt 100% after having had a large cup of coffee made with tap water earlier.

A large black man, who sells crack, was at the Brown Derby. He is someone who knows me from seeing me on Bourbon Street, and greets me as "guitar man." 

I used to run errands for people like Carlos, who got their money on a plastic card on the first of every month, but who dreaded making the trek to the store to hit up the ATM machine, because they could hardly walk, and would have to inch along, using a "walker."

Being familiar with the neighborhood that the Brown Derby is situated nearby, Carlos thought it not unreasonable, on the first of one month, a few seconds after midnight, if, after withdrawing $220 in cash from the machine, I could pick him up a 20 dollar crack rock.

I supposed, in order to help support the big guy's family, I would bring him some business. The big guy would "bless" me with 20 dollar rocks bigger than what Carlos himself might be sold. One time, one of the big guy's friends was hanging around him, and after I had gotten Carlos' rock and was walking away, the friend said something, to which the big guy replied: "That's cause I know him; he's good people," which I assume was germane to what the friend had judged as being an awfully fat 20.

Carlos had looked at the rock, and what flashed over his face, I believe was contempt for all the others whom he had sent on the same errand and how those motherf****ers must have been breaking off a piece for themselves and bringing the remainder to him; and then being treated to a hit by him. I felt a tinge of pity for whomever else he had sent before me.

So, there was the big guy in the place. He asked me if I was "alright," by which he was insinuating: "or are you alright, except for not having crack?

I had just 9 dollars on me. Even if I wanted to feel like King Kong for about 45 minutes, and then spend the next 3 hours biting my nails, feeling like nobody could ever love me, and jumping out of my skin at the slightest sound, I couldn't afford it; I was a buck short of the minimum purchase of a 10 dollar rock. Maybe in some neighborhoods you can get a 5 dollar rock, but The Brown Derby is in a little more upscale neighborhood; -more classy people, type of thing...

I was lamenting the fact that 9 dollars had me also short of being able to get an ounce of kratom. Those come to $10.98, after tax.

I was wondering if, in order to safeguard me against even considering a 10 dollar rock (and it would have been a fat one for guitar man) the higher intelligence that animates the universe, right down to the level of pregnant and/or lactating women, had arranged things so that I would have only 9 dollars. That would be depriving me of one thing to keep me safe from another...

I was pondering this as I was leaving the Brown Derby and, there in the parking lot, was laying a capsule of kratom; the extra-potent kind of extract that is sold inside. I knew it was kratom because of the logo on the capsule; I washed it down with blackberry flavored Celsius..

The Pothole

Then, I went to the India House hostel to see if there was any un-smoked weed in their ashtray. There wasn't; but I thought to check inside a certain pothole in the street right in front of the place. I had found roaches in there before. There were two sizeable roaches of a dank smelling herb at the bottom of it. The pothole is just small enough so that the tire of a vehicle riding over it wouldn't bottom out and crush any roach sitting at its bottom. I'm wondering if, since I have struck up conversations with some of the guests of India House while sniping the ash trays on the porch, and have been espied walking away, at times, by staff members, who quickly rushed outside to find that lighters, packs of cigarettes and cellphones that had been sitting on the table next to the ashtray were still there, if one of those staffers might be leaving his/her roach ends in the pothole (I love the pun) for me, like I leave chicken bones with some meat still on them for the possum that lives around our parking lot.

Pegged Pretty Well

I haven't had Internet access for the past month, at least.

I now know how dependent one can become on the little device in the pockets of about 80% of the population. Most of the remaining 20% are either older than 60 or younger than 4, I would guess.

The battery on my phone became useless, so that I had to keep the "immobile" phone permanently plugged in. This was an inconvenience, but not to the degree that it became after the malfunctioning battery swelled up so much that it was no longer making contact with the pins in the socket, rendering the phone itself useless.

It hadn't dawned upon me that, in order to order a replacement, I would have to log in to sites like ebay; which would require me to confirm my identity by tapping "yes" in response to a text message sent to my phone.

I had to resort to living the way I used to, years ago. I was reading books and watching TV. It was weird.

In a certain way, the quality of my life improved. After a couple weeks, I stopped reaching for the device any time I wondered about anything at all, like how much money was in my account. I would just swipe my card at the store with my fingers crossed, type of thing.

I couldn't contact anyone; nor update this blog. It felt like I was in prison, on Alcatraz perhaps, and nobody knew it, so they couldn't write to me, nor could I inform anyone that I was alive.

I would go to Elizabet's apartment and use her phone so I could at least call my mom and explain why I had disappeared.

While I was using her phone ads would occasionally pop up. One of them was from some entity that was begging for money to save kittens that were at risk. The cute kittens shown would surely die if Elizabet didn't send money. That particular one hit her phone on the 1st of December -the very day that her money comes in every month from wherever she gets it. Those poor little kitties.

Elizabet has 3 cats, and does about $150 a month in business with the "Chewy" online pet supply store.

I never got ads like that on my phone when it was working. Mine were always from Donald Trump, asking for money. Or from Ukrainian women looking for American husbands.
I guess the algorithm has got both Elizabet and I pegged pretty well...

But, at this moment, after not having slept in 24 hours or so, I will do the prudent thing and type no more, as my attitude is teetering at the top of a cliff, with a 200 foot plunge into the ocean of negativity at risk.