The Temperature Speaks For Itself

 

The coldest temperature that I ever busked in was 37 degrees, and I remember that, in between songs, like if I was talking to someone, I had to keep my hands wrapped around the neck of the guitar. If I let go of it, the next time I fretted a chord or something, I would feel how the neck itself had dropped in temperature and it might have taken a minute or so of playing before the stinging in my fingertips subsided. At 37 degrees, I just relied upon a few simple chords that could be played using the strongest muscles in the hand, like a G major chord, played by wrapping the thumb around for the bottom note and using the third finger for the top note. The pinkie was kind of out of commission at that point.

I used to play at a Kangaroo store in Jacksonville that was across the street from a bank that had a large sign that alternated between time and temperature. I was able to not how every degree that it dropped below 50 became noticeable. As the temperature went from 44 to 43 was when the stinging in the fingertips started, with me having to blow on my hands in between songs and to keep one hand wrapped around the open position frets to keep the neck as warm as possible.

It is 34 now, according to the Bourbon Street webcam. At that temperature, I would be telling my hands to form certain notes and chords, but there wouldn't be enough strength in the fingers for them to obey.

If it were a matter of just sitting at the Lilly Pad with the guitar, wearing gloves and not playing, but rather just making myself visible, I might consider going down there. When it starts raining and I duck under the overhang to wait it out, I often get tipped by people who might make the observation of: I guess you're out of business; that sucks... before handing me a 10 or a 20. But, in a cold weather situation, the tourists are usually hurrying past, trying to get into the warmth of the bar as quickly as possible. It's unlikely that I could draw any of their attentions with the simple 3 chord songs I would be relegated to playing; the ones that are played using the thumb and the ring and first fingers.

Although, I will say that 99 times out of 100, I am rewarded in some way for just going out there. There are the tips that come from people who admire the courage, or desperation, of someone busking on a 43 degree night. "I don't know how you do it..." they might say. And it is also probable, in such situations, that someone who is in the 1% and might have about 500 bucks on them will drop a 50 dollar tip, thinking that that might be about all I stand to make on such a night. On more than one occasion different people have given me like 65 bucks and said: "Get a room, and get out of this cold, or sit in some bar, buying a drink every hour or so until the sun comes up" type of thing... But I would say that, more than 90 times out of 100, I end up thinking: I sure am glad I decided to come out...

But, right now Harold is inside with me, and I think I'll do the Wim Hof breathing method exercises for a half hour and then I might call Lilly. I'm sure the first thing out of her mouth, while skipping the formality of saying "hello" (she has caller ID and almost never say's that, but often continues a conversation from a previous call. The last time I called her, as soon as it connected, she said: "He's really polite; he's a nice guy, really polite; the girls thought so..." which was referring to Jacob after the time that we were busking and Lilly and the girls stopped on their way into the house and chatted for a bit.

During the pandemic lock down, she would answer with: "Did you get the vaccine?" and I would say that I hadn't even left the apartment all week, telling her that I had stocked up on groceries and cat food and was hunkering down. Not even Lilly's worrying mind could envision me catching the big "C19" from Harold.

"You can't be sure, Daniel, maybe cats can spread it without getting sick themselves, and then you would be screwed. It's a horrible death, Daniel; horrible!"

She would then talk about how her and the girls had been bed-ridden with vaccine related symptoms, taking Tylenol and NyQuil, and basically suffering, probably to the same degree as they would have, had they gotten the virus.

It's just astounding how the Phizers and Modernas of the world, that account for something like 70% of the advertising revenue of what people had been conditioned to regard as the "mainstream" media, working in cahoots with the Bill Gate's and other Davos elitists of the world, were able to pull the wool over so many eyes. 

Something like 72 news channels are owned by a handful of people, who were able to create the impression that "everyone, everywhere" was saying the same things; and so that became truth by preponderance. Not aware that they were all following the same marching orders, people would "flip through the channels," thinking: "Oh, look, they're condemning Trump, too! And, so is this channel, and this one. They all are! If I was Trump I would just resign, because, obviously everyone is on to him, just look at all these reports, from Whoopie in the morning, all the way up until Colbert before midnight. "Everyone" can see what a jerk the guy is!"

I know some people are gullible, but, how hard is it to see that the democrats literally accuse "the other side" of doing exactly what they (the democrats) are doing?!
Rachael "If you take the vaccine, you won't get Covid, you can't spread it, etc." Maddow actually said she wasn't going to air Trumps "victory" speech, because she refuses to air "misinformation." Wow...

I guess Don Lemon at least won't shame all of the previously healthy young people who have dropped dead, the world over, in the past couple years; because of some factor that has surfaced in just the past couple of years...hmm 

Funny how those incidents didn't get any media coverage. Even when that Buffalo Bills player collapsed on the field during a game, none of the announcers said anything like: "I wonder if it's one of those vaccine related heart issues that we've heard about..." Oh, my bad; I guess they wouldn't have heard about that; unless they were watching some podcast that they could get themselves fired from their jobs just for watching...
Russell Brand has shown about a 3 minute video of nothing but young athletes collapsing on tennis courts, basketball courts, soccer fields etc. etc. etc.
Oh, but I'm forgetting, Russell was accused of an incident of sexual harassment that allegedly took place like 20 years ago. I guess that means that video was Photoshopped or AI generated...just the type of thing that someone anonymously accused of such a thing would produce. Sometimes I forget.

"Is There Anybody Else Up There?"

I admit that, at first, I was apprehensive. I noticed that the lion's share of people had capitulated to the fear mongers who have a monopoly on the mainstream venues.
Even Catholic people, who would normally have their throats blessed at the start of flu season each year, seemed to have relegated that particular article of faith to voodoo or witchcraft. Some kind of invocation to the Holy Spirit to ward off that year's strain of flu, is all well and good, but "not if my life depends upon it," type of thing.

I was waiting to see if the city would be coming around yelling: "Bring out your dead," pulling tumbrels stacked high with cadavers, before even considering taking a medicine that later was proven to put healthy people under the age of 35 at a greater risk than from the C19 itself. (those statistics come from insurance providers, whose livelihoods depends upon cutting through the hype and the lies and analyzing hard cold facts.

The tumbrels never materialized, and at the same time, I was seeing footage on the local news of the hospital down the street being overrun with C19 patients. On one such day, I had been to the very same emergency room because of a toothache, I think it was.

There was no such crowd of patients. Furthermore, there was a follow up report maybe a week later, ostensibly to illustrate that the situation was still dire. I recognized the people shown as being the same ones from the older broadcast; the guy in the Houston Astros shirt alongside the short pudgy lady with her jeans tucked inside her boots. Yeah, that was them...still in line a week later...

It (the way fear had weakened people's faith) reminds me of the joke where I guy falls over a cliff and is hanging by that little tree branch that cartoon characters always seem to grab on their way down.
He is trying to hang on and is yelling for help: "Is anyone up there? Help!"
Then a voice like thunder cascades down, saying: "This is the Lord, your God. I will save you, but first you must have enough faith to let go of the branch..."

The guy thinks for a second, then yells: "Is there anybody *else* up there?!"

Well, I've managed to stay up all night again. The sun will rise shortly. It's 24 degrees outside with a wind chill that makes it feel like 17. There's still a bunch of stuff I wouldn't mind staying up longer in order to get to...
The highlights from the 2 playoff games that I missed because, in the case of one, I went to the memorial service for Dorise Blackmon, who passed away last November, on a day that I had been thinking about her for some reason... 

Christmas Eve Eve Eve Live on Bourbon Street at the Lilly Pad

From The Big Head To Canal Street

Thunderstorms; heavy downpours, Harold entrenched somewhere dry...

The uncluttered living room, which is where I spend all my time now, when I'm home; reminds me of a jail cell.

Some of my most content moments were spent while in solitary confinement in one county jai or another. All I needed was a good book and coffee and I would stay up all night, reading by whatever light filtered through the bars.

What has to happen is, a period of extreme boredom has to set in. 

Going from a busy lifestyle with all kinds of choices, and plenty of stimuli, on the outside to being thrown into an 8 foot by 9 foot cell with just a minimalist cot, and a stainless steel toilet/sink combination, with 4 walls, a ceiling and floor with bors in ther front and a slit of a window in back can bring this about.

Pacing back and forth is an option, and looking out the window at whatever the view is, another.

One time, in Jacksonville, I was on the 6th floor with a window that faced west. The sunlight would beam through the window for a few hours each day, right before dusk. Using a pencil, I would track the beam by putting marks on the wall, showing, for example, exactly where it fell on the wall when the evening meal showed up, and was pushed through the bars.

Soon, I had a functional sundial, accurate to within a couple minutes.

With the changing of the seasons, the exact spot where the sun went down would shift (to the left, if it was fall) so that it would go down to the right of some tall skinny building on the horizon, perhaps, but would shift, a quarter degree or so, to the left (if it was fall) each day, and might disappear behind the tall skinny building for a few days, before starting to touch the horizon on the other side of it. This became like a calendar of sorts, and I was able to protract where the sun would sink on whatever day I was slated to get out.

 I always liked the solitary confinement situations, where I would only be let out for an hour each day. This is an arrangement that is used to punish inmates who break the law, somehow, while in there. They can't put you in jail for attacking or stealing from someone, because you are already in jail. So, they make it "worse" for those hapless souls by locking them in a special cell (called a "lockdown cell," by the unimaginative institution) by themselves for 23 hours a day. Most other inmates hated this, as they were the gregarious types that would pass time, like 8 hours a day of it, playing Spades in a groups of about a half dozen. They would loudly slam the cards they were playing onto the stainless steel table, accompanied by a gutteral vocal ejaculation, the way Karate guys do when they punch and kick and break pieces of lumber.

I guess the idea behind all that racket is to add an element of intimidation and underscore the power of whatever card they are slamming down, as if to say "Take That!!"

After each card is so presented, in the manner of a basketball being slam-dunked, it's greatness is then hailed through the barking out of a series of various gutteral groans and ejaculations. These are invariably delivered, at least by the black inmates, with as much "bass" being put into their voices as possible.
Because of the acoustics of a jail pod, these notes get really muddled and it sounds like a pack of dogs all barking at once. Things like: "What cha gonna do?! Huh? What cha gonna do?! I got this hand; I got this hand, you ain't got s***!"
The irony is that, a lot of times it is a fight that breaks out during a card game that gets one or more of them sent to lockdown.

Those types hate the solitary confinement. Another aspect of the punishment is that the lockdown cells are in an isolated part of the jail so, no talking half the night through the bars.
And, if the locked down inmate can't read, that's even worse.
But, I always enjoyed the peace that came with isolation.
     

I can't really tell which came first, the chicken, or the egg...

With the "chicken" being the uncluttered living room, and the eggs being the ideas.
It might be that I was ready to make a change, and decluttering the room was part of it. Or it might be that the spaciousness is helping me to keep my thoughts simple.
When all you have in a room is a couch, it's easy to sit on that couch and appreciate being alive and having air to breath. Then when I bring one item in from the other room, where I shoved everything. that item gets my full attention. That saves me from spending only 5 minutes on 25 different things and not getting very far into any of them. This gives me the chance to gradually add things to my environment. Just a guitar and one method book is enough to keep me busy. And it is a high quality of focus.
But, since the water from my bathroom sink comes out piping hot, but the tub's faucet is lukewarm, it just dawned on me that I can get some kind of attachment to connect a hose to the sink, and I can use that to fill the tub with hot water. I've had a lukewarm shower for about 2 years now, and only now did I think of that...

Then, I was thinking how nice it would be to have some kind of jogging application that uses GPS on my phone, so I can start jogging and not have to measure or guesstimate the distances I might be running.
Not long after having that thought, I accidentally clicked on the Google Playstore app and, front and center on their page was a jogging app that does just that.
So, with fun added to jogging, especially for a statistician like myself who loves pie charts and graphs, that was a fortuitous discovery and might help me realize one of my new year resolutions, which is to start a jogging program, so as to help phase out tobacco, which is another one of my resolutions....
Right now, I resolve to get some sleep.
These are novel ideas that are coming to me, connecting the dots between things that have been right in front of me, forever, but that I just never noticed.
Earlier I tried the app while slowly jogging from where there is a large bust of some historical figure's head in the park to Canal Street, finding it to be .42 miles. Eventually, I would like to be able to run that distance in 2 minutes. 

My Stripped Down Environment

I woke up for the first time in 2024,

and was in my stripped down environment, which I could ascertain the reality of by opening my eyes and scanning my surroundings.
The "decluttering," as promised by the author of the decluttering book, has returned positive results in the way of organizing my existence.

Before, I would wake up and then situate myself in front of my laptop, where I would succumb to the powers of suggestion and wind up retracing the previous day's  cyber journey and wind up clicking my way into what was threatening to become an habitual state of mind.

No Longer In That Rut

There was a literal rut in the couch cushion that was forming from me sitting in that same spot, day after carbon copy day.

My living room was cluttered with about 25 things that could only hope to attract about 4 percent of my attention each.

Now I wake up in the openness with a couch and 4 walls and immediately turn myself inward, fostering a feeling of gratitude, which is ironically "for everything I have," as I sit in the almost empty room.

So far this year I woke up with the idea of plugging my full sized USB keyboard into my Android phone, thinking that it would circumvent the "thumb typing" that had been my only method of blogging here using my phone, after the hot spot data runs out, typically half way through the month.

The encroachment of clutter...

I have already typed this in in about a third of the time it would have taken me with my thumbs -a great discovery made less than 8 hours into the new year!

The only thing I haven't been able to do is to add a photo and then to continue putting text in. Going to the editor, I see the photo displayed, but am unable to click in an area outside of it to resume typing...
But, I guess there are more ways than one to skin a cat...
I'm going to try to put a photo in now that the text is done. Done, except to add that I am about to run to the Brown Derby, where I should have a whole months worth of food money on my card, but where I might just get some juice in order to do a beginning of the year fast and cleanse.

$271 Friday Before Christmas

Yeah, and follow that with a $3 New Year's Eve, but more on that later, I guess.

The alternative to embarking upon the juice fast and cleanse would be to go and sell plasma. It seems like the 3 dollars I split with Jacob last night is earmarked as bus fare to go and do just that; and get the 40 bucks that I would have been satisfied with from last night's playing.

It's not like a couple people didn't come and smoke us up and one of them give us some magic mushrooms. Peace of mind: priceless!

New Orleans New Year