In Which Moby Dick Might Enter The Frame

I'm looking at  my calendar and it's Thursday, March 26th and will be, for another 4 hours and 18 minutes..

A whale has  the whole ocean; but, when you get to the bottom of it, it lingers at the surface. Hard to fathom...

I just completed  a walk around the block; which included walking past a gaggle of about a dozen people hanging around the Holy Ground bar; none of whom acknowledged me, nor any of them I, I thought as soon as the thought of: "I'm being ignored," tried to gather energy in my consciousness.

There is a  big difference between "I'm being ignored," and: "They're ignoring me..."

The latter would  be explainable by the fact that, they are pretty much the same dozen or so people who might be there next Thursday before sundown, and whom I recognized at least half of, from seeing them last Thursday before sundown.

I have, or  try to have, no qualms or shame in picking a snipe of tobacco off the ground in front of them all..

And, I suppose  skeezers -not me; but skeezers- do such a brazen thing as a ploy to get one of them to offer a cigarette, out of pity perhaps. But that becomes entangled in the social fabric as, the other 11 or so would be witness to this; and so the benefactor might have to justify, not his imparting the gift of one of his American Spirit's™ -maybe it's well known that the guy makes pretty good money, as per his braggin's after a few beers, but his falling for "one of the oldest skeezing tricks in the world."

Because of the  presumed shame in someone who is picking up a butt right in front of them, as they sit with a yellow American Spirit™ box on the picnic table in front of them, they might indeed feel they are being manipulated, or at least having their "heart strings" pulled, by the poor guy.

I always decline  any offers of cigarettes when that happens. I say something like; I think it might eventually get me to quit smoking by putting me through the humbling rite of sniping in front of people.

"I have this  internal conversation that goes like: OK, you want a puff of tobacco right now; and there's one right there on the sidewalk...but, you're too proud, aren't you. There's pretty ladies there, too...

Then I just  figure that the price to pay for tobacco is that..

But, I'm also  aware that people might think I'm trying to evoke pity, so that's why I don't take cigarettes if they're offered. Plus, I usually just pick up American Spirit™ snipes. Their tobacco, along with being flavorful enough to have gotten me to 'un-quit' smoking, about 20 years ago, now; is packed in tightly, so that if there's a half inch left, that's enough to get you a righteous nicotine fix. You really don't have to smoke much more. I think they package cigarettes so as to imply "this is how much you smoke each 'time'" OK?

That's probably them  trying to get the public addicted..."

And then I  go back to Sacred Heart with maybe some weed in the size of a raisin and some tobacco.

Maybe after: "Yo,  dude; I don't feel manipulated, I know you said you don't take cigarettes, but, here...(reaching towards me holding 2 American Spirit's™)"

Now, that's how you skeeze!

So, I got  back and it's almost 9 at night and I have had 1 grapefruit and 4 cups of coffee and a hefty shot of an herbal tea the color of kratom...

I'm going to  be flat broke if I think about it... I must feel grateful and happy; maybe the tire I posted on Facebook Marketplace has attracted a buyer at $20. It's an almost new tire, by my judgement. It doesn't have the little nipple things that brand spanking new tires, at least I think used to come with. Little pins of rubber that I guess show that the tire's never been driven on. This one has all the tread and is just a bit shiny on the bottom. Like a fallen tree that people walk over to traverse a stream out in nature, maybe.

I have had  the bane of a social media mafia of teens, I would guess, f-ing with me "hard," as they might say; on Facebook Marketplace over the tire. They seem to be doing the equivalent of calling store managers to ask if they have Prince Albert™ (loose tobacco) "by the sack" (or "bag")

And after he  answers in the affirmative (you've been in his store and know he has it) you say something like: "Well, you better let him go; that must hurt!" and hang up..

Then maybe you  get a friend to call back inquiring about King Arthur sardines, 20 minutes later.

In 2026 this  have evolved to expressing a great amount of interest in the tire, then seeing how long you can string the guy along and take up of his evening, through a series of; "I had to drop a friend off downtown, but I'll be there in 15 to 20 min" type of posts. The idea is to paint the picture of a skinny guy with long hair and a hat, standing all evening in front of Sacred Heart Apartments, babysitting a tire that's new but doesn't have the nipples...

And then, in  the wee hours of the morning, punctuating the gag with; "Oh, I just checked; I need an R16, yours is an R17; sorry," type of thing...

The tip off  to me, after 3 or 4 such contacts is the initial: "I really, really need that tire!!" Their over exuberance over a tire suggests that they are trying to get me emotionally invested in the process. To get me pumped!
I'm supposed to think: Wow, I'm definitely going to sell the tire tonight! This as a primer for me to stand out front waiting for a white corolla "any minute now" to come down Lopez Street. Even after dark. Even though it's after midnight. The guy really really needs the tire; and has just been having the worst luck trying to get here, type of thing...

Yeah. Thursday and  I don't know what I'm going to eat, if anything, on top of the grapefruit and 4 cups of coffee; make that 6.

It's time to  leave this here after running the new and improved Python3 script; which now features a comma in the format of the "You've just read X words" printed at the bottom. All I had to do was add a ": ," in the print statement and it puts the comma in 2,877 for example. It wasn't doing that before, so I fed the script to Meta AI and said something like: "you are a programmer and need to only change this script so that the {word_count} variable will print in the conventional, more readable by humans, form"

I thought I  was going to have to massage the word_count variable so that it had the comma inserted into its string, and then print that. But the function that counts words didn't have to manage commas; it just counts the words and returns it as an integer. I wasn't sure how I was going to get it to put a comma between every 3 numerals..

The print statement  can, with the addition of a colon and a comma. I would have been digging in the "Learn Python3" book, looking at ways to split the variable into 2 with one just keeping track of the "thousands" and the other counting from 0 to 999.

This would have  been a delightful evening spent, learning how to become a better "coder." Instead it took less than 10 seconds for me to learn to "Change the print statement in line 87 to..." and now there should be a comma in the number of words this is; even if it exceeds 100 trillion.

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