What To Eat, Who To Pray For, Who To Love..?

Wednesday night, waking  up fully rested; but at 4:30 p.m...

I'm trying a  new approach to busking whereby I'll actually write out a set list of, say, 12 songs, to be done more or less 'in order.' That will allow some forethought to be put into the thing...

Am about to  go across the street to check my bank balance; and will go from there...

I woke up  with the urge to read, and will pluck one of the 57 or so books that I'm currently reading, off the shelves.

Other than that...fully  rested...

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I'm Gonna Have To Contact The Lidgley's One Of These Days

The pretty up  the text script shouldn't embolden words I'd rather it not; like "I'd," "I'm"and "I'll."

Small improvement, but  something that had been bugging me; and the solution apparently surfaced from my subconscious mind, helped by creatine monohydrate. Test sentence: I've solved the problem I'd mulled over for a few weeks. I'll see if I've fixed it. That would be Capital..

So, now I  have to write about things as an excuse to play around with the Python3 script.

Kinda like when  I was 10 or 11 and got a speedometer/odometer for my Schwinn Le Tour 10 speed. I had to get out there and ride around, to nowhere in particular; just to watch the wheels go around -at least far enough to watch the second digit turn from 0 to 1 at the ten mile point. I'm sure I came home with 10.7 miles.

And, my best  friend, Dave, also got a speedometer for his Schwinn Varsity, and, of course we began a race to 10,000 miles, the back-to-all-zeroes, Mt. Everest summit of Schwinn speedometers...

Now Dave is  retired, after a career in writing Python, and other, scripts...

His job is  now my hobby. He could take up the guitar and harmonica to follow suit..

I had a  pretty decent pair of walkie talkies, back in the 90's. Finding another person willing to 'play walkie talkies' with you is the hardest part of that particular hobby. I used to turn one of them on and put it in front of a microphone feeding a sound recording device; then leave the apartment and walk far away -up to 3 or 4 miles; while speaking into the other one, giving a run-on narration; updating my position.

It was pretty  weird; listening back later from the apartment, to myself speaking from 4 miles away

And, hearing church  bells that rang across the street come through walkie talkie speaker a second or so before coming through the window screen...

Tonight, I will  be a simple man; and live the simple life of having one good Andy Gator beer, some kind of meal, and then playing the acoustic guitar.

At this point,  my food stamp account has been 'closed' effective July 1st. That's because I'm 63, and cannot prove that I work 80 hours per month; unless I travel to the office, which is on the other side of town now, and present myself before one particular worker there who lives not far from Lilly and who, in the past has rubber stamped my 'proof of employment' sheet, affirming to have 'seen you out there,' and 'heard you all the time...'

She is an  ace in the hole that Nichole, my caseworker isn't aware of.

She has told  me that there must be 'paperwork' to go along with any claims of employment.

But, Nichole is  working on the situation, from some angle.

She might have  to dig up the assessment of myself as being 'alcohol dependent' and thus, 'disabled.'

I had to  be a disabled veteran, back in 2014, in order to be taken off the street and placed into Sacred Heart Apartments; and alcohol dependency seemed the easiest row to hoe; towards that aim.

And, I did  my best, over the following years to not make a liar out of whomever signed off on my disabled status... She slept better, knowing I was out there falling on my face each night, type of thing...

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A Prettier Way To Say Nothing

I'm sitting at  the Holy Ground Pub and I haven't felt a drop of rain yet. I've got to go into the Python script and add the words "I've," and "I'll" to the list of words to not become bold-faced in these manuscripts.

Putting them in  quotes worked above because it appears to the script that the word begins with """, and not a capitalized letter.

That will be  a fun project to work on at home (as I have now just felt the first drop). I'm thinking of making a list of all the words to be immune from becoming bold faced, then giving that list a name, so I can say: "if NOT IN (NotToBeEmboldened)" then bold-face it..

That will clean  up a really long statement being evaluated for each word in the text; although each one will still have to be checked against the list, so I'll have to see if I've made the script more efficient.

In other news,  I have replenished my kratom supply and my creatine monohydrate reserve.

It was educational  to have experienced what a week without those substances was like.

My tolerance of  sugars and other carbohydrates seemed to ebb to the point that I was waking up out of nightmares the mornings after having put too much honey in my coffee...

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Honey Nightmares

Third day in  a row of waking up from a nightmare.

In this one,  I had gone to my apartment to lock myself inside, only to find that my door frame was missing and so there was no way to do so. This, after I had ridden a bike around the Quarter seeing buskers on every corner and in every alley, all with cases full of money; in spots where I had previously never thought of playing, myself.

I was trying  to ride by my spot in the dream but kept getting trapped in places like coming to an alley with a staircase at the end of it, in the direction I needed to go, then carrying my bike up the stairs to find that there was a bar or pub at the upper level that was only accessible by the same staircase I had just scaled. Then, turning around to go back down, I encountered a group of people coming up the stairs and had to try to squeeze by them, holding a bike...

Just about every  detail of the dream, I could trace back to prior experiences, a lot of which I had dwelt upon (been tormented by the recollection of) the past few days...

Going off the  sardine diet, as I had done the week that I had been broke, coincided with the nightmares and the waking up heavily depressed each morning, but for only a few minutes; as if toxins in my bloodstream had been mobilized, maybe earmarked for elimination through my organs, but hitting my brain along the route.

I'm suspecting that  honey, or at least the brand that I have now, could be a neurotoxin to me.

I woke up,  initially, after maybe 5 hours of sleep and had the notion of trying to stay up, being only 'half' tired. I made a cup of coffee with some butter and enough honey to sweeten it and drank it while listening to the thunder of Tropical Storm Arthur outside my window, but soon tired enough, despite the java, to lay back down and have the most recent nightmare over the course of about 3 more hours..

Now, I'm waiting  for myself to become hungry again after finishing off the sourdough bread, which had seemed to contribute to brain fog, to the point where I would be looking around the place for where I'd put my coffee cup down, maybe to watch the lightning flashes out the window.

I'd bought the  bread during a drinking binge fueled trip to the store, congratulating myself after which for not having bought a box of Zebra Cakes, and rationalizing that bread, butter and honey had been a more sensible choice.

The alcohol consumption  is, I'm pretty convinced by now, the master controller over my decisions turning out to be good or bad. If I had no ambitions beyond being a useless drunk, then this wouldn't be so much of an issue.

I made a  deal with Nichole, my 'caseworker' (who embodies the 'support' in the Permanent Supportive Housing that I'd been offered by virtue of being a homeless veteran) that, if I fell off the wagon again, I would let her put me in an outpatient rehab program, covered by Medicaide..

That has woken  up in me a resolve to help myself, as I have done in the past, that had been faltering recently, particularly the times after my monthly 'retirement' funds have arrived.

And, come to  think of it; the nightmare of being pursued, then finding that the door frame was missing is relatable to that. Perhaps the sentiment that I can't lock myself inside and hide from the world with drugs and alcohol, but now, as per my agreement with Nichole, 'they' can barge in and take me away in a van for a couple weeks, if I do so. Although the hiding from the world aspect is debatable, as I am still able to roam the world, like an inebriated fool, on social media and even here, from the confines of my permanent house..

In probably about  3 or 4 hours, I'm going to feel hungry, and will respond by drinking water, until the hunger subsides, signaling that I'm burning up the glucose from my liver (or the glycogen, I'm not sure; I'm not Doctor Sten Ekberg...).

Given the mood  swings I'm having on this Tropical Storm Arthur Day, June, 18th, 2026; I'm sure I will change my mind about drinking alcohol along the walk to the store; but there is an equally good chance I'll change it back to not drinking before I get to their door.

I wish I  could take a big enough dose of LSD so that it would alter my brain chemistry and literally burn away my perception of "who I am," leaving just my higher self in its place. A self to whom it would never even occur to smoke off a vape or drink. Do I do those things? I don't think I do... I might then think.

Tinnitus Too?

The recent issues  with my laptop and hotspot (routed through a 'government' phone) and bluetooth connection to my stereo speakers cutting out randomly, along with a tinnitus that will start in one of my ears as if a switch had just been toggled, and then do things like jump to the other ear just as abruptly, before maybe going away for weeks at a time, combined with the fact that one of the wifi signals that pops up at the top of the list (being the strongest signal) of available signals after I turn on wifi is named "NSA," and began to appear a short time after I posted "I think 'delta variant' is just code for 'injured by the vaccine'" on Facebook, back in 2021; which also concurred with the readership of this blog going from 400 or so daily, to 12 to 16; has got me wondering about the 'free' government phone -shout out to Ed Snowden; and one of my biggest regrets is having drank away what I could have used on a new phone using a different carrier.

Meta AI told  me: "12 to 16 readers is good for a journal blog!"

Yeah, but what  happened to all the people who used to randomly land on it, by typing away like a million monkeys and searching for the exact phrase I entitled a blog post? I once made a post that almost 5,000 eyeballs landed on. But, I suppose 'they' fixed that little glitch, haha.

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"Decluttering" Needs To Be Added By Webster

Sunday, June 7,  2026 is in the books.

I watched about  12 hours(!) of Youtube stuff, slept about 8; and made a run to the food and water store. That just about chewed up the entire "Sun" day.

I was able  to soak up about 25 minutes of sunlight, as that orb was setting; giving me more of either the red or blue end of the spectrum -I forget which, and am not up to speed yet with jumping from here to an AI engine to ask it real quick..

3 hours of  the Youtube "watching" was taken up by the 'meditation' video that put me to sleep and then continued to beam certain frequencies into my brain; along with repeated affirmations, designed to hypnotize me, and plant the suggestion that I 'declutter' my mind, my environment and as a result, my life.

The irony of  using a 3 hour video as an aid to cutting down the time I spend watching videos is not lost on me.

And, to think  I haven't even checked out Instagram, X, Tik Tok or Substack...yet...

Not to mention  migrating to Rumble in order to ultimately find a community of people that some algorithm isn't hiding me from.

It's unfortunate to  be living in the era before the bugs have been worked out of the "humans using the Internet" continuum, at this point in time. 

Has it really been 15 years?

Back When I Wore Brown (left)

Looking back 50  years from now, how stupid will we seem for doing things like wearing masks and kneeling before statues of violent criminals who overdosed while being taken into custody; because of what we saw on the screens of our phones, all day, every day...?

Well, I haven't  been tinkering with this hobby much, lately -not so much the one of blogging, as of working on the Python script that decorates the rendered text.

I want to  see if the word "June" is going to be bold-faced in the first sentence, and how '12 hours(!)' will be interpreted.

The "end of  sentence" punctuation (!) will make the script think that the next character is the start of a new sentence. Will ')' be counted as a word, then? All proper nouns are to be in bold face. They are recognizable from their capitalization. So, all capitalized words not at the start of a sentence are bold faced. But, what if a sentence starts with a proper noun?

God help me  solve that coding problem! But, God as the second word of a sentence is bold faced; see (the conundrum)?

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