Bummed Out

"Got Any Nutmeg, Day-in?"

I stayed up well into the morning, listening/watching Leonard Bernstein's lecture series which was recorded in 1973 at Harvard -the university, not the town of about 3,000 in Massachusetts- where he lectured for what turned out to be about 7 hours.

I am only 3 hours into it, but, it was somewhat depressing the way he dissected Mozart's Symphony no. 40, and how he held it up as being a perfect composition, one in a million, but based his arguments upon such things as a passage where Wolfgang used every single note of the chromatic scale, except the tonic note.

The inclusion of the tonic note would seem to be a given, since it is the key that the piece was in.

But, I really think that Mozart was getting bored by the time he wrote his 40th symphony, and approached at a cerebral level the problem of: "let me see if I can use every single chromatic note, except the one that is the keynote! of the piece..." and he went about, using every device at his disposal, to include a lot of talent, to be sure and to apply his by then formidable knowledge.

It certainly wasn't the result of a simple and beautiful melody coming into his head at the sight of some twinkling stars that produced that perfect work.

And, I'm sure that it wasn't one which he wrote in one go, without needing to go back and fix anything -something he is famous for.
"Now, he is in the incomprehensible key of C sharp minor, how did he get here?!?" gushed Leonard.
"And, now F sharp minor...astounding!!"
Sidebar: Speaking Of Amazing:

Below is a link, if it works, to something mind-blowing. It is Tanya Huang rapping, yes, that's right, rapping. Could THIS be what's depressing me?

https://www.facebook.com/100004798244704/videos/987612544742011/?t=0
Part of me want's to be encouraging, to send her a message, the gist of which would be, "Now you know how I feel, at times." It is definitely out of her comfort zone, but, I'm really not sure in what spirit the thing was done. Was she trying to show how hip she is to the hip hop scene? Or are the words to the rap actually intelligent and worthy of being performed? I'm going to have to check it out using headphones. She has more "balls" than I ever thought, though, I must say...

I'm not sure if my not liking that particular symphony, even after having been lectured upon it, means that I don't understand music the way I might have thought I did, and if that depresses me, but that is how yesterday ended. On a G minor chord...

Something to take away my blues?

I probably only got about 6 hours of sleep, another red flag, before I was up drinking coffee in an attempt to make it to the plasma place early enough so that, after leaving there with the fifty bucks, I would be able to do some other things.

Then, it began raining. Of course it did. Right as I was stepping outside.

I have a huge umbrella, which I hate to take with me, because it becomes incredibly cumbersome when it's not raining, and if there is any sort of breeze at all, it makes riding the bike with it open and upright, downright dangerous.

I wound up waiting for the rain to subside and then ultimately just taking the umbrella with me, after the rain only slowed down some, realizing that nobody is going to just hand me fifty bucks, and that a bike ride through a thunderstorm might be the price I would have to pay.

I wound up on the very same 5:04 PM bus as I had the last time I went to the plasma place, the time I had vowed to make it there "earlier next time," because that had me leaving the place after it had closed, in the dark, and unable to go back to resolve any issues with money not appearing on the card, should that have been the case.

This time I was smart enough to set aside bus fare, so that, even if I found a huge smoking hole in the ground where the plasma place had once been, I would be able to get back home. This was a baby step for a self saboteur like myself.

This meant that I could skip stopping at Wal-Mart just to get cash back off the card for bus fare.

I proceeded directly to the stop, where I waited long enough for the next bus to convince me that I could have wandered around the aisles of Wal-Mart for a half hour, grabbing Harold's favorite cat food, and not lost any time. I had always assumed that buses were flying by outside while I was in there, as part of my punishment for having gotten so broke that I needed to use plasma money to get home.

I need to unravel this depressed feeling that I am having and try to trace it's roots.

Ammonia Thief

It's not just because someone stole a half bottle of ammonia from me, I'm hoping.

Some other resident apparently did just that.

I had set it down on the little shelf outside my door so I could manage unlocking it with my hands already busy with the big bag of clean clothes.

Then gotten busy with unpacking the stuff and hanging it around the apartment so it could finish drying. I was hoping that washing clothes in ammonia might keep mildew at bay, but wasn't taking any chances.

In the morning, the bottle more than half full of ammonia was gone.

The larger issue and the source of a more deep-seated unrest comes from knowing that these are the people that I am "stuck" living with.

I can only hope that, as they die off, they will be replaced with better people.

The residents there are just inveterate skeezers.

I once put a ten dollar bill into the change machine in the lobby, as it was the smallest bill that I had, plus, I figured that the 40 quarters I got would spend just like any other money. Most cashiers can deal with, say, up to a dozen quarters per purchase, I would guess.

And, wouldn't you know, after the ten dollars was sucked into the machine, and just as the quarters were about to start cascading down, the elevator doors flew open.

Out stepped "White Cloud," who has rarely spoken a word to me if it wasn't to skeeze, and who had exited the elevator with a slight sense of urgency -someone had probably sent him on a beer run, promising him one of the cans- but who noticeably broke his stride upon hearing the coins tingling in the dish.
He started to say something to me like "Geez, it sounds like you just hit the jackpot on one of the slot machines at Harrah's," or some other utterance intended only to draw me into conversation with him and set me up for the skeeze. I hate that. I have determined that I hate phonies as much as that Holden Caulfield character from J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher In The Rye," but I digress.

The fact that anything White Cloud sees, he will try to skeeze. He isn't craving the second of your Reese's Peanut Butter Cups until he sees them in your hand, and then he suddenly really, really want's one. They have become his favorite candy of all time, type of thing -makes me sick. I know this is because I was raised in a middle class family and all the other kids in the neighborhood basically had parents who provided all their needs, and skeezing just wasn't part of life.

I was actually reliving an experience that I had when I was about nineteen years old, and had joined the National Guard.

This had been so that I would have my education paid for by the government and would be able to choose to study music and English, rather than the "lucrative" disciplines that my dear old dad was willing to apply my college fund towards.

Little did I know that I was also stowing away for the apartment that I now enjoy, er, except for the having my ammonia stolen part...

I sure was thinking about Jesse James Mimms Jr., as I rode towards the plasma place.

It is often that I dwell upon some slight from the past when I am pedaling towards the place, beset with uncertainty over whether or not my blood protein would be high enough, or if there will be a huge smoking crater where the plasma place once stood. When I am totally broke is when I really hate skeezers and will re-play these little videos in my head.

Jesse James Mimms Jr. was in my National Guard battalion. He was literally from the other side of the tracks and was cut from a cloth that I had just never encountered throughout my middle class upbringing.
My dad had warned me, during a little pep talk that he had given me on the night before I shipped out for basic training, that I would meet people from all walks of life. He had basically been preparing me for the likes of a couple recruits who were putting new boots on their feet for the first time in their lives when they were lacing up the combat boots.
When we visited my grandmother in West Rutland, Vermont a few times a year as I was growing up, my attention was always drawn to a couple of miniature paintings that hung in the bedroom where I slept. The were probably copies of famous works by someone, but they each depicted a clown.
In one picture, the clown is smiling. In the other, the clown is frowning. The frowning one also had his pockets turned out to reveal that they were empty.
I came to see a resemblance to that clown, years later when I encountered Jesse James Mimms, and even inwardly called him "po boy Mimms."
He was always broke, never seemed to work, and, I wasn't astute enough to realize at the time, was skeezing me; being a buddy, who was always ready to share any joint that I lit up. I smoked weed for the first time when I was nineteen. Mimms had probably started stealing roaches from ashtrays, left there by whomever his mom was shacking up with at the time, at probably the age of nine.
It was all an education for me. But, the incident that I was recalling was a time that we wound up at my house. I had picked him up in my car, something that neither he nor his family had ever owned, and brought him there.
It was hard to guess what was going through his mind, as he was seeing for the first time everything that I had taken for granted my whole life.
Jesse was a mullatto. His portly, white mother had had a fling with some black guy who was long gone.
I had decided to grab a bowl of instant oatmeal, while we were there, grabbing my rolling papers or something, and I offered one to Jesse.
"Do you want some sugar or milk or something in it?" I innocently asked.
Yes, milk and sugar, sure.
Then Jesse James Mimms Jr. began a series of questions which I only later came to make sense out of.
"Got any cinnamon, Dan?" he drawled the name to sound like day-in; a large part of the reason that I switched to using Daniel as my name, to avoid being called day-in by anyone.
"Yeah, right here..."
"Got any honey, Day-in?"
"Yeah, it's a little crystallized, but..."
"Got any cocoa, Day-in?"
"Got any molasses, Day-in?"
"Got any caramel, Day-in?"
"Got any brown sugar, Day-in?"
"Got any vanilla, Day-in?"
"Got any strawberries, Day-in?"

After each request, I was able to quickly locate the items, from what I just figured was a well stocked, but nothing unusual, kitchen. My  thoughts were more on, how could Jesse possibly like his oatmeal that way, I mean, nutmeg?

It was only later that I figured out that he was mocking me and what he saw as the opulence that lived in, just by virtue of my having been born into it. While he was the bastard mulatto child from across the tracks, and the frowning clown with his pockets turned inside out, but I just couldn't put two and two together.

He most certainly could have skipped the molasses, especially since it probably clashed a bit with the blueberries. If he hadn't been satisfied with the taste, he seemed pleased that he had taken full advantage of my naivety, and would probably wind up telling stories about the bowl of oatmeal to other derelicts, throwing in "They even had blueberries, ain't that some shit?!?" at one point, with the theme of his story centering around how unfair life was for his ilk.

So, there I was, gripping my handlebars a little extra tightly as a voice from the past echoed in my head: "Got any dates, Day-in?"

I wish my father had been a bit less politically correct and said: "I'm going to have to level with you, son, there are some piece of shit niggers in this world, and a lot of them wind up in the army where they put boots on their feet for the first time in their lives, be warned!"

So, how am I going to befriend someone like White Cloud? His whole skeeze stems from the fact that he has some kind of Native American blood in him, and we white people need to give him some recompense for how we abused his ancestors, out of whatever we have leftover after meting out to the blacks, that is.

I can imagine inviting him into my place, for a cup of coffee, and to be neighborly, and him looking around the place and asking me for whatever he saw. "Can I get some of this change off this table, I'm gonna need a beer later? Oh, you got Reese's cups, I love those, mind if I get one?" "Got any nutmeg, Day-in?".


It's possible that the maintenance guys sometimes lend things to residents like bottles of ammonia, and maybe when those residents are done with them, they return them, by leaving them outside their doors.

But, it's also possible that "they" know that I am from planet Jupiter and that ammonia is thus, very dear to me, and they took it just to spite me.

I bought another gallon of it, along with a 20 pound bag of kitty litter at the dollar store, where I had ridden to, after having gotten off the plasma bus.

I then forgot to load money onto my green American Express card so I could use it to pay seven dollars to join the Freelance Writer's Den. I could already be a member as I write this. The seven dollar offer is good for "this week only," with no indication of when the week started, or when it will end.

How could I forget something as important as a thing which might turn out to be a great move, and perhaps launch a career that I will enjoy much more than busking? Subconscious fear that I will join the writers group and then will learn that it is a dog eat dog world that pays even less than busking? Fear of having to cross one more thing off my list of "aspirations," off of which "composing like Mozart," has just been scratched?

Time to do some soul searching to see what is really bothering me....

 

E Commerce Sunday

Holy Sunday.

A truly magical thing happened yesterday evening when I fixed my laptop by pulling on the little piece of cellophane attached to what looks like the SIM chip that is found in a cellphone.
The thing had started having problems the first time I got it wet, and then had intermittent ones the following times that it got it a little damp.
And then would sometimes die for hours, before just coming to life in the middle of the night, while it sat there on the coffee table and I sat nearby, thinking about how I am going to replace my defective laptop.
Vexed again, I was last night, as I set it on the table and began to wait for it to mysteriously come to life after an hour, or maybe two, of just sitting there, like it had done in the past.
But, maybe this time it just won't come back to life, ever, I thought.

Well, there is that little chip in there, by the battery. I had seen it before, thinking that it probably does something similar to the SIM card that is in most cell phones.
But, this time, I grabbed the little clear plastic tab and pulled on it, just enough to make the chip move.
The laptop responded immediately by coming to life.
So, I guess it hadn't been the popping of the battery out and slamming it back in, with the optional waiting of 2 minutes before doing so, and it hadn't been the training a fan on the thing for a couple hours to "dry it out," or the plugging it in while holding the power button down or any of the other voodoo that had been what had fixed it in the past.

Harp And Strings On The Way, Finally

I was able to finally order the harmonica and the strings, to be here within 4 business days.

Last night, I had ridden my bike down to the dollar store to take cash off of the blood plasma card, paying $1.25 for the transaction, just so I could load it right back onto the American Express card that has worked for me in the past to buy things online. It is even recognized and "trusted," I guess, by Musician's Friend, for one, and the transactions go "right through."

I was still thwarted by the laptop being dead when I got back to the Uxi Duxi.
So, today, after having miraculously solved the power up problem, I was able to complete a transaction, finding a harmonica for $14.99 which I regularly pay $20 for on e-bay and sending off for it.

The ones that are ridiculously priced at around seven dollars, had the drawback of being deliverable within 27 days, rather than the 4 that I am now waiting.

It will be in the key of C.

Tomorrow I can go get another fifty bucks for my plasma. Then I will join the Freelance Writer's Den, for their special "7th Anniversary" price of seven bucks.

Things seem to be working in my favor in that regard. I will then start looking at bus tickets, with Savannah, Georgia being a first stop that I am becoming interested in.
Again, I came across a book written about a dozen or so locations in the world, with Savannah, Georgia being the one that I randomly flipped open to, as I was sitting on my bed and thinking about my upcoming trip to points north.

I would love to see my old friend, Larry, if he is still in St. Augustine, Florida, but the cops there would love to run my name to pull up the now ten year old warrants that are still on the books, for trespassing and urinating in public and open container violations, etc.

A Dash For The Dollar

I have to run down to the Family Dollar to take forty bucks off my Octapharma plasma money card in cash and then to load that same cash onto the green American Express card that has been my stalwart, and has enabled me to purchase stuff online.
The Octapharma card, I had linked to a Paypal account when I signed up for that particular service.
But, alas, it is not processing when I try to use paypal.
When I try to use the card directly, same result.
My head is reeling because I have found the Suzuki harmonicas, that I have been paying twenty bucks for, for seven dollars and change on e-bay.
They are supposedly in new condition and maybe they are so cheap ironically because they come all the way from Japan, supposedly.
And, the Freelance Writer's Den, has just dropped their membership fee for the first month, to seven dollars, down from twenty five.
This is in recognition of their seventh anniversary.
This is my time to embark upon a career as a writer, and I am hoping that the discipline instilled in me by the writer's group, along with my refusal to fork over seven dollars for anything and not get my money's worth out of it, is going to lead me to success.
But, now I have to run all the way 2 miles and back to switch money over so that I can join the Freelance Writers Den this very evening, as well as send off for a harmonica at the ridiculous price of also about seven dollars...

The Likes Of Myself

• Second Fifty From Plasma Place
• I Take Essence Fest Off: "You Didn't Miss Anything"
• How To Invest?

I was told that I hadn't missed a thing by Larry, who is one of the bike deliverers for The Quartermaster, after he had said: "I noticed that you took the weekend off."

My first thought was that I must have become a fixture at the Lilly Pad in order that Larry noticed my not being there. He might have wanted someone to commiserate with about the swarms of African Americans that had invaded the city

I told him that I had a recollect of last year's festival as being the last time anyone grabbed my tip jar and ran off with it. "Don't do that. Don't take his money!" said a woman who may or may not have been accompanying the kid, who was about 14 years old. I couldn't help thinking that this was just said to put up a show of her being against his taking my money when, as soon as she caught up with him, she was going to ask: "Well, how much did we get?"

I also remembered another heavyset young black girl who posted up in front of my like a basketball player getting set to jump up for a "jump ball," and who stood there in this position feigning to be about to do something, like, perhaps grab my tip jar and run off.

I had started my basket off with a fake hundred dollar bill.
She had probably seen it, and hadn't gotten close enough to tell that it was fake, as it sat in the shadows of the basket.
She was acting as if she was just playing with me -just pretending like she was about to grab the basket- seeing if I could keep playing, nonplussed by her "fooling around."

But then, as if finally noticing that it was fake, she made a "tsk" kind of disgusted noise, and walked off as if she was truly disappointed, and as if I had in some way deceived her.

I blogged about that, back when it happened, but gave Larry the condensed version of the anecdote.

He nodded his head as if he could understand that kind of behavior out of an Essence Festival attendee.

A Portentous Porterhouse

I also told him that I had taken as kind of an omen the sight of the Winn-Dixie on Carrollton Street being in the disheveled state that I had seen it in.

There was a porterhouse steak, for example, thrown in with the paper towels on that particular aisle. I remembered thinking of what a waste of food it was going to be after they would have to throw it away because it had been "left out."

The whole store had become an exhibit of "things thrown where they don't belong."

"It's as is they want to prove that they are derelicts," I observed to Larry.
I said that this particular omen, along with the other recollections were what made me decide to forego playing during the festival, forsaking anything that I might have made, or had stolen. I guess I'll never know now.


Plasma Money; Harmonica Or Freelance Writer's Den?

Plus, Friday, I had sold another unit of my blood plasma for another fifty bucks.

That went kind of OK. I was light headed and fearing that it might get worse and I might faint and that they would send me away without the fifty dollars, but I stayed conscious.

But, wasn't until about 2 hours after I left the place before the money appeared on my Octapharma debit card, reminding me of the Murphey's laws that seem to govern the whole plasma donation realm.

I was all the way over to Howard Westra's house when it appeared.

I had finished donating by around 6:45 PM; and thus had a whole hour and fifteen minutes to make it across the river to the Uxi Duxi, where waited Jacob Scardino, who had texted me to inform me that he was there.

The trip can be done in under a half hour if the buses cooperate.

I had texted back that I would be there to meet him at 8 PM.

Then, I started to repeatedly get a message informing me that I had "negative one cent" on my card, as I roamed the aisles of Wal-Mart, waiting for the money to appear.


I had foolishly gone over there fifty cents short of bus fare, knowing that Murphy's Law of Plasma Donation was in effect. There were already plenty of skeezers around the parking lot, and so I didn't even consider asking anyone for fifty cents. I would just wait until the money appeared on the card, but in the meantime, would ride over to Howards and skeeze the bus fare off him.

Jacob offered, at one point to come and get me in his vehicle. He asked me if it was hard to get to where I was.

I would place the difficulty level of that particular trip at nine and a half on a scale of ten.

It involves getting on the bridge by negotiating a krazy straw of streets around the area of the Greyhound station, with some of them being one way ones that can send a driver off to another krazy straw of oblivion of streets somewhere else.

Then poor Jacob, who is a novice driver, would have to exit at a specific ramp on the other side of the river, and then get over a couple lanes quickly, in an attempt to "blend in with" the traffic -child's play for an ex cab driver and pizza deliveryman like myself, but nothing that I would want to put Jacob to the task of doing, since he has only been driving for a short period of time. He avoids the Interstate, he once told me.

"It's pretty hard to get to. You have to go across the bridge, and..."

That was as much as I had had to say.  Jacob doesn't do bridges, nor Interstate highways.

He seems to be pretty "green" in a lot of life's experiences, having been sort of adopted, or taken in as a foster kid, by a guy about my age named "Bob," who is apparently a devout Christian, and who even does a religious show on 800 AM (The Word, or The Light, or something) radio here in New Orleans.

Jacob seems to have grown up in a pretty sheltered environment, through Bob's agency. He has, along with just started driving, just tried kratom, and marijuana for the first time.
I guess he is now also branching out into interacting with buskers such as myself.

I Apply For A Job

I have applied for a job as a "writer" through CraigsList New Orleans. I sent a "sample" of my writing, as instructed, culled from this blog. It is a little essay about ammonia. Don't call us; we'll call you, seems to be their modus operandus.

All I Might Need Is A Rabbit

Well, I have sent off an mp3 of a song that I did in my studio to Jacob Scardino, who is planning upon collaborating on it.

Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival

I left a 2 and a half minute gap in the middle of it, where he can place a solo of some sort. He is a huge Frank Zappa fan, and the song is one I attempted to write in his style.

The words actually came from the blurb in a Hustler magazine that introduced the photos of "Madelyn," who was posing in a bathtub full of suds.

It's called "Sensuous Bubble Baths," and is going to be a copy write infringement nightmare should I ever try to publish it, because it is plagiarized shamelessly.

But, I look forward to hearing what kind of part he adds to it.

Then I can always go back and fix my parts. Each part I played was only the 3rd or 4th run through for me. But I had the advantage of already having written and recorded it 30 years ago. It was strange listening to the "finished product" as I walked around my apartment, sort of like it would be if someone had found the old cassette and mailed it to me.

I guess the good news it that I have regained the level of musicianship that I had back then.

I think I was making my best recordings in the late 1980's, after I had become a practicing fool, and before pot smoking caught up with me.

Just as I did in college -determined that I couldn't do calculus stoned but could make great grades in my poetry class and, so, dropped all my math courses and switched to an English major- I kind of did with music, with 12 chord classical progressions being the calculus in the equation, with Grateful Dead songs being analogous to the poetry.

The Road To Massachusetts Paved With Platelets
So, I can go tomorrow to hopefully grab another fifty bucks from the plasma place. I could have gone today but was still feeling the aftereffects of Friday's donation. I am 55 years old. Even though that is the new 35, one more day of recovery can't hurt.

As far as busking, yeah, the opportunity is there and I suppose I could go out there and put in a couple Sunday night hours. It promises to be quite dead out there. The Essence Festival has wrapped up, and as I recall, last year nobody stayed around to enjoy any post festival activities. But, one never knows.

The fifty bucks that I got on Friday went towards catching up on Harold the cat's feeding, with the purchase of a 3.15 pound bag of dry food, with a couple cans of what seems to be one of his favorite delicacy, Fancy Feast Salmon Florentine thrown in as a way of making up for that one terrible night when all I had to feed him was canned tuna.

All the while I was reading about the dust bowl, the Grapes of Wrath era, and could get a sense of how exasperated parents must have felt back then to have to send their children to bed hungry.

Batteries for my spotlight, a new harmonica and strings should come out of the next fifty bucks, and then it will be time to think about how I'm going to travel.

I'm hoping that I can catch the traveling bug through the experience and then start spending a lot more time away from New Orleans, coming here only when the getting is good and marking my calendar with other places and events to hit at various times of the year.

Perhaps, after I have spent some time in Massachusetts, instead of returning here, I could go to Burlington, Vermont during August, after mailing some money to my neighbor, Wayne, for cat food and contacting Tim my caseworker to let him know that I haven't gone for good and to please not clean my apartment out and rent it to someone else.

He mentioned something like nine months as being the maximum amount of time that I would want to be away before any kind of action like that might be pondered.

Making enough out there to stay in hotels, like Colin Mitchell does, would be "killer." He talked about making three hundred bucks in a few hours in Central Park, New York.

When I was homeless in Mobile, Alabama I went to nearby Fairhope when they had their annual Artwalk and made 85 bucks in one afternoon. That is in March, but there are similar events that can be Googled. Perhaps I can come up with an itinerary.
Having success at one location might grease the wheels and allow me to travel quite comfortably, and I might wonder why I hadn't done that kind of thing sooner.
I even know a few good busking spots in California, where all I might need is a rabbit to make good money...
,

Plasma Friday

I went to the plasma place over in Gretna on Thursday.

I always go there with tempered optimism, as, it seems like the endeavor is an accursed one.

There are so many things that can go wrong.

I am learning, this late in life to be more like my friend Donna Parrow, whom I used to live with when I was in Florida.

Donna was always very quick to get on the phone to allay any apprehensions that she have, over almost anything.

When she got a letter from her daughter's school, for example, which informed her of when and where the girl would meet the bus every morning, she immediately dialed the "if you have any questions" number listed at the bottom of the letter.

It seemed pretty cut and dried to me. At ten minutes before eight, the bus would stop at the junction of Amanda Lane and I forget the name of the other street. It was, of course advised that she be there fifteen minutes ahead of that time, just in case the bus was early? I wondered. When was a school bus ever early, anywhere, unless the driver had been speeding?

But, she got right on the phone, just to make sure that there had been no misprinted information, I guess. I had thought that she was being a bit paranoid, I remember.

She would do the same thing when the electric bill came: "So, I need to pay at least the $58.73 to keep the service on, right?"
A smart ass utility employee might have been thinking: "Well, what does the letter that you're holding in your hand say?"

To which she may have replied: "I just wanted to make sure...and don't get smart with me, or I'll send my husband down there to give you a piece of my mind," or something.

This is understandable, in hind-sight, as her daughter's catching the bus was important, as otherwise she would be stranded and one of them would have to leave work to come back and give her a ride to school.

And, having the electricity snap off right in the middle of Star Search would have been unacceptable.

So, in this spirit, I called the Octapharma plasma donation center.
I knew that I hadn't been there in a long time, not since the last slow busking season.

I was indeed informed, after giving the lady my name, and the last four digits of my "social," that, since it had been more than six months since the last time I was there, I would have to start over from scratch, as a new donor.

My heart sank.

I remembered that first time, and the five hours of watching videos, filling out forms, answering a battery of questions, the wrong answer to any one of which giving them cause to "defer" me from donating.

"Oh, OK, I guess I'll see you a little later," I said, adding "but I highly doubt it," to the empty room after she had hung up.

I was broke and could use the 15 dollars, which is what I was getting for my first visit of any given week, followed by 25 dollars for the second visit within a 7 day period. What a way to drain you of your vital plasma, a carrot in front of your nose...plus, for 6+ visits per month, there is a bonus. -hey, if you give us a whole gallon of plasma, we'll throw you a fifty, plus give you an Octapharma coffee mug, what do ya say? type of thing.

But, the thought of spending almost a whole day there, having to deal with being the only white guy there, and wondering how much of the waiting has to do with that, having to answer all the questions again.

No way, I would rather take my chances busking for 15 bucks, even though we are in the middle of Essence Fest, a time when I stand just as much chance of a young black kid grabbing my tip jar and running off, as I do of making that much, as, the last time that that happened was during the same festival, when NOLA is invaded by fans of the likes of Beyonce, who happen to be almost all black, with the remainder being big boned, plain looking white women, usually in sandals or flip-flops.

It was either play for a bunch of African Americans at the Lilly Pad, or be the only white guy at the plasma donation place; choose my poison, I thought.
But, then it dawned on me: If I have to start over again as if I were a new donor, then, wouldn't I get paid, er, rewarded (a designation that allows them to maintain the title of being a donation center, and not a plasma buy, sell, trade place) like a new donor?

I called back and confirmed that I would get 50 dollars for each of my "first" 5 visits.

I decided to gamble my last couple bucks that I had on bus fare to get over there, and cautiously optimistic, headed that way.

I had had the experience of being sent away the first time I ever went there, when I arrived at about 1:30 PM, and was told that the process for a first time donor could run up to 7 hours (should I be a slow question answer-er, or if I should answer questions in a way that made them have to call my doctor or something to verify something, and/or if I was a slow bleeder) and that they weren't taking any more for that day.

That was my first taste of having to return empty handed from Gretna. There would be plenty more.

I think I blogged about the foibles; just missing every connection of streetcars and buses and jogging from the last stop to the place in time to hear the door lock clicking in my face, having the money not appear on my debit card that they use for the purpose after I had questioned one of the employees there and his supervisor had to correct him, whereupon he went into the computer and "corrected" my deposit, being skipped over a lot, etc.
Murphy's Laws, Plasma Donation Clause
So, Thursday, I tried to be there as early as possible.

The first matter was whether or not to take my bike. It would save me time getting there, unless the bus arrived with 2 bikes already on its rack, and then the next on, 45 minutes later, and then the next one...

Would I lock the bike up nearby and then hop on the bus? No, there are skeezers who linger around the bus stops with bolt cutters, waiting for just that opportunity.

I would just plan upon going the next day if that happened. That would give me a chance to busk that night, giving me more money to go with the 50 bucks, that I would get if everything went OK then.

Plus, I had the ace in the hole of Howard Westra on that side of the river, an easy bike ride away from the plasma place, should I be deferred for any reason (and there are a ton of them -"you look a little tire, why don't you go home and rest, and come back tomorrow?" "I'm not tired, I was meditating, and I don't have the bus fare to go home").

If worst came to worst, again, then I could always crash at Howard's place, and then make the 3 mile ride back the next day, I thought.

I got there at about 11 AM. As I pushed the door to the place open, I let in the sound of a loud clap of thunder. "Thunderstorms," my smartphone was saying.
I couldn't help having the negative thought of being deferred for some reason, and then leaving there penniless, only to become drenched, along with my laptop, as I took the 3 mile ride to Howard's, seeing only soaked cigarette butts on the sidewalks.

I had brought my laptop, because of all the potential waiting that I might have to do, in between watching videos instructing me in a process that I had gone through about fifty times, just not within the past six months.

What if the nurse finds unacceptable levels of ammonia in my system?
I got to the desk where new donors are required to sign in.

There was the little placard with the information that new donors must provide proof of address, along with their social security cards. I didn't have either, and out the door I went.

When I had called back to find out that I would indeed get 50 dollars, for starting from scratch, just like a new donor, the lady had neglected to inform me that, like a new donor, I had to bring those things.

"Isn't my address already in the system, along with my social security number?"
"Yeah, but, since it's been more than six months..."

"Yeah, yeah..." Out the door I went, as the thunderheads gathered overhead.
I had a decision to make. Either become angry, tell them: "You people suck," or take the high road, which I did.

I smiled and said: "I guess I'll just come back tomorrow." Any hopes of them letting me slide on the requirements lay in my being as nice as possible, I thought. Also, not appearing desperate for the fifty bucks, as someone who might be selling their plasma for a drug fix might.

I rode to Howard's, stopping first at the Wal-Mart to use my food stamp card to purchase a nice cantaloupe, to give him as a gift.

Howard had just left "five minutes ago," when I arrived, I was informed.
Friday morning, I managed to borrow some change to complement what I had found, literally, under the couch cushions in my parlor, and I repeated to journey, arriving a bit earlier.

They stationed me in front of one of the bolted to the table tablets, where I attempted to watch the video. The headphones didn't work. Of course the headphones didn't work. How was I to watch the video giving me information that I already knew if the headphones weren't working.

Then, I think the gods smiled upon me, and the staff there, let me skip watching the video. They recognized me as someone who had been there plenty of times, and figured I probably already knew everything on it. Phew!

Thank God, I thought as I walked out of there with a brand new Octapharma debit card, that I was actually able to activate with my smartphone and upon which the balance of fifty dollars had actually appeared.

Harold the cat was going to eat good food that night, after a night when I had broken open a can of sardines and another one of tuna which I had purchased off my food stamp card, which he had eaten only a little of, before scratching at the door to go outside, leading me to believe that he has some other food source out there, perhaps another cat's dish in the neighborhood that he can raid.

I was famished in a way that eclipsed what I had felt even during the water only fast, and grabbed a green veggie drink, a peach and a packet of nut butter protein at the Wal-Mart, while getting Harold some of the salmon Florentine Fancy Feast stuff that seems to be near the top of his list of foods.

I canceled the 3 mile ride to Howard's. I hadn't slept much the past day and felt pretty light-headed.

As soon as I got back to the apartment, and was watching Harold ravenously attack the salmon Florentine, I got a text from Jacob Scardino, informing me that he was at the Uxi Duxi.

I had to text him back, telling him that I had undergone a "blood-draining" day, which had begun early that morning, and that I needed to take a nap. I looked pretty drained in my bathroom mirror.

Plus, after a week without kratom, and the discovery that my ability to write hadn't deserted me when I was off the stuff, I had a good mind to just give it up.
The strong cup of coffee that I was sipping when Jacob texted me wasn't waking me up, only putting me in something like a half dream state, and so I just worked on a Frank Zappa inspired song that I had written in 1987, and then slept, moving between couch and bed, flipping on the radio for a while, letting Harold outside...
 
But, I had gotten the fifty dollars, and can go back and get another as early as tomorrow (Sunday). Any thoughts of busking for the Essence Festival crowd dissipated with the knowledge that I could do this.

The trip to Gretna, where I was the only white man, took its toll on me. There was another cashier at the Wal-Mart, who seemed to only want to fulfill her minimum requirement to tell me the amount of my purchase and say "Thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart," and then to stare at me dumbly with a "I don't have to talk to you," look on her face when I tried to make small talk.

It is very possible that she doesn't understand my language. You would think, though, that her teachers, should she have gone to school up until some grade level, would have used the queen's English, and that she would have understood me after I had said: "I got lucky, as soon as I went in the plasma place it started pouring, then it stopped, and then as soon as I came in here it started raining again. So far, I haven't gotten a drop on me," I said this as I was swiping the Octapharma card, which I'm sure she recognized, since she works at a Wal-Mart a half mile away from the place.

All I got from her was the "I'm not required to talk to no white people except to tell them the amount of their purchase, and then to say 'Thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart'" look.

"No, English, huh?"

Another dumb stare.

"Fucking colored people!" I said, after I lost my cool and walked away.

The all black staff at the plasma place had actually been pretty nice to me. Most of them, I recognized from last year, when I had gone there a lot. They may think I'm sent there from headquarters, to spy on them to see if they are doing their jobs right, as they might believe that everyone there, making the big bucks, would be white.

But, if Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney are right, there is good and bad, in everyone; and these are at least somewhat educated blacks.

The black bus driver who had driven the bus over the river, me being the only white guy on it, had given me a dumb stare, when I had said something to him, just to be friendly, as I was putting my money in the machine. It is usually a hassle sliding the bills in, and I think I said something like: "It sure will be nice when they do away with this paper money and put bar codes on our retinas..."
Nothing but a dumb stare from him.

His face then contorted into an annoyed expression, as if he was thinking: "My job is to drive the damned bus, I'm not required to interact with no white people. That is probably a joke that a white bus driver would be more prone to smile at, possibly, rejoining with: "The day is coming!," or something.

Still, I had to suppress my urge to say: "Well then go to hell, nigger!"

I think that is what he wanted me to do, so that he could kick me off the bus: "I don't have to stand for being talked to like that!" Suddenly, he would have found a voice.

As I had walked the aisle to an empty seat, all I saw were hateful looks on all the faces that weren't staring at phones.

At least a couple of them would be saying: "There you go, get the hell off da bus!," and their days would have been brightened to a degree.
To Busk Or Not To Busk  
So, here it is Saturday night. I feel no pressure to go out and busk, as I can go and get another fifty bucks tomorrow, and staying out late to do so might even jeopardize that.

Besides, I could go to Howard's to partake of the Sunday dinner that Berta is famous for, and then kill two birds with one stone by hitting the plasma place later, having followed their instructions to "eat a good meal," before going there, so that my plasma would be nice and hearty.

I think I will be able to make my trip up north, funded by the five visits to the plasma place that will net me $250, plus whatever I can get from the meager busking proceeds that are half the reason I am splitting.
 

I Mostly Just Listen To Kenny Rogers And Meatloaf

I am in the Sacred Heart Apartment computer room, using the plug into the wall connection, which goes through

the office, and which is "administered" (read: neglected) by someone in there, who has attempted to put controls on the thing, perhaps, with the end result being that there are all kinds of problems with cookies, and such.

The computers originally plugged in were stolen by residents, probably so that they could take their downloaded porn videos back to their rooms, and because someone turned their back on the room.

I guess what I'm saying is make sure your worm repellent and anti-virus program is running, because this post is coming straight out of Sacred Heart, LOL

Computer technology makes me feel like I did when I first started driving, and had bought a fancy turbo-charged sports car (which mostly sat in the parking lot of Wang Labs, while I was inside working 65 hours per week, you know, to pay for the car, so I would have it to get to work in so I could pay for it, type of thing) and when the car eventually stalled, I popped the hood, and looked at the motor, and had the epiphany that I had no idea what I was looking for.

In that instance, I took up a study of the gas motor, asking many questions of many mechanics, until, I could eventually tell, just by listening, if it was time for me to replace the cam shaft pulley on my Mazda.

My computer studies are largely aimed towards a similar goal.

How come I can circumvent the little exercise of proving I'm not a robot, sparing me from having to denote which pictures in a grid of them are food items or street signs, and post my comments? I'm the guy standing in front of a car with the hood open, wiggling wires and squeezing hoses, on that front, people...

And, does this mean robots can comment on this blog without having to prove that they aren't?

And, perhaps most disturbingly, has Alex in California been a robot all this time, being run by Chuck Croll in Menendez, California, the guy who once had this blog removed from Blogger; and who called me a troll, online?

By the way; I haven't read the comment(s) on yesterdays post, so as to not bias this one in any way...

An Amazing Discovery?
Recent years have seen me doing some things, in this, my middle age, for the first time in my life.

For example, while I have still never purchased a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk (for my own use, anyway) in my life, I have, within the past couple years purchased my first dozen eggs, first stick of butter, and about a year ago now, I made the outrageous acquisition of a 3 pound bag of sugar.

I felt like I was putting a Playboy magazine down on the counter when I did that, feeling compelled to apologize to the Walgreen's cashier: "Enough of this will make anything I bake delicious, I guess, ha ha..."

If the stuff hadn't been so darned cheap, $1.67 for 3 pounds, I may have just stuck with honey, excuse the pun. But, they say that is what helped foment the crack cocaine epidemic -that it was so darned cheap and available, but, I digress.

Sucrose proved to be disastrous to me as, within a couple of weeks, I was putting it in my coffee, sprinkling it on cereal which was already sweetened, like Raisin Bran and, of course, creating another bane to my existence with the introduction of the giant pancake.

Those behemoths began as a foray into the "art" of baking, after I looked at the oven that I had in my apartment, and it came to me as almost like a revelation that that is one of the things that people use ovens for. Wasn't that what my sister was doing with her Quick Bake when she was 6, and I was 5?

Baking! Why not? It had been placed right there in front of me at such an early age. But, then I had relegated it to something that only mothers know how to do.

I started to ponder all those barrels in the Whole Foods store, full of wholesome and healthy grains -quinoa, amaranth, millet, barley, rice flour, garbanzo bean flour...

I started to think of this as a great way to add these life giving, and vegetarian! fuels to my diet. But then...there were the recipes.

Most of them called for, along with the eggs and butter, which had never been part of the I Thought You Were In Your Late 20's Diet, sugar -sometimes brown, sometimes white, it made the cupcakes better. So would nine dollar per quart honey, but, sometimes it was slow out there at the Lilly Pad, and I was on a sugar budget.

The sucrose insinuated its way into my cakes, and my life, and before long, I found myself pedaling determinedly home a lot of nights with an imaginary cartoon cloud floating over my head with a stack of pancakes on a plate, slathered in butter, topped with jam and with syrup running down their sides, in it.

Wasn't it the diet of fish, lightly fried and smoked over a red oak wood fire in olive oil, with sauteed garlic and mushrooms and steamed broccoli or kale; with three quarters of a bottle of red wine almost every night for about 33 years what I always mentioned to anyone who had ever said anything to me along the way like: "You don't look 50, I thought you were in your late 20's"?

Sure it was.

And didn't any stint of more than a couple weeks in any jail, eating what they served in there have those same people saying: "You don't look 50, I thought your were about 65" in the weeks after you came out?

Yes it did.

I rationalized (though it was the sugar talking) that it was in my genes, the youthful appearance; it's "hereditary."And that baking is an art form and I was being even more of an artist.

But, this is what lead to my embarking upon the last water-only fast.

That was generally an unsuccessful attempt to rid myself of a laundry list of items: caffeine, nicotine, kratom and marijuana, with heavily sugared pancakes made with bleached white flour heading the list. I might be able to live a jailhouse lifestyle of sitting up all night reading and drinking coffee, but subsisting on a jailhouse diet and expecting the results to be different is insanity...

This is why I hate to have to resort to going to the food bank when I run out of money, because the food that they give you, bless their hearts, is the reason we have so many doctors and hospitals and why it is just assumed that elderly people are going to need "their medications."

But, that being said, it is now about 18 hours before my food stamp card will be loaded with $136. I have a Betty Crocker cake mix sitting in my cabinet right now -the last remnant of the box of food that I got from the St. Jude Community Center "Second Harvest" food bank a couple weeks ago.

I have the 3 large eggs and the half cup of vegetable oil required to make it, too.

The last few hundred words I have written have stemmed from an internal debate concerning the fact that the cake mix is calling my name.

But, where was I? Oh, yeah.

An Amazing Discovery?

I went to the dollar store Sunday night, after having witnessed Dom locking the door to the Uxi Duxi, which had been darkened inside well before its normal closing time, and hearing him tell me that it will be closed until further notice.

I almost felt bad for all its other patrons, as I suspected that God himself had taken that drastic action that I could not bring myself to, by physically removing kratom from my life. It was a weird coincidence that Dom was turning the key right as I rode up.

"Um, we're closed," he said.

It could possibly be related to the fact that June 30th is the last day of the fiscal quarter for most businesses, and I suppose that if the Uxi Duxi had failed to meet some obligation that they had until the end of said quarter to do, then that would be the day that the rug would be pulled out from under them. That, and the fact that God wanted to help Daniel to go a while without his daily shot of kratom, so he could experience what that would be like, you other customers, sorry.

If Dom couldn't help suppressing a smug expression the previous time I was there, when he was refusing to let me get a half shot of kratom since I was 9 cents short of the amount for one, then I could certainly understand the grin on his face as he informed me: "We're closed." Maybe that was some consolation for his being out of a job until further notice. He always has the gay pole dancing to fall back on.

But, having the 4 bucks at my disposal that I would have spent on a shot, I bent my path towards the Family Dollar, where I picked up a can of cat food, a Monster Zero drink, and then went into the household cleaners aisle.

I had run out of the chlorine based cleaner that I had been using to clean things at home.

I noticed that many of the products almost boasted that they were "ammonia free." This was probably due to the stupidity of people who disregard warning labels and kill themselves by mixing ammonia with bleach in a non-ventilated environment. Better to just produce ammonia free cleansers and avoid any potential litigation, they probably think.

But, there they were, one gallon bottles of pure ammonium hydroxide. At only one dollar per gallon, they seemed as cheap as crack cocaine or sugar.
Why not? I thought.

I had just that day been thinking about chlorine,  and about how red and swollen my eyes always get after swimming in chlorinated pools.

Something (probably in the James A. Michener book that I'm reading) had evoked a memory.

It was of when I was in sixth grade and one of the girls in our class invited the whole class to a pool party, to be thrown at her house, right around the end of the year, when the early June temperatures facilitated it.

This had been great, as us boys were starting to become girl crazy and the thought of seeing all the girls in our class in bathing suits made her party a must attend" event.

Wayne Rameau, Peter Capute and I were the most popular boys in our class of 30, in no small part due to us singing the best when the record player came out for an hour after lunch each day, and 45 RPM records would spin out songs like "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," by Elton John, and "Spiders and Snakes," by Jim Stafford.

We would take turns selecting the next record to be played, which us boys would sing. It became a competition of sorts. None of the girls sang, now that I think of it; perhaps because the only female vocalist we had in stock was Marie Osmond singing "Paper Roses." B-sides became popular after I, already showing signs of being a deviant, surprised everyone who was primed to hear "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," upon seeing the familiar MCA rainbow on the label, by flipping it over and playing "Harmony" instead. Boy, could I sing that one...but so could Peter Capute.

The record player would sit on a table, made by positioning the desks of us three most popular boys to abut those of the three most popular girls, who were Debbie Richard, Christine David, and Patty Donolin.

It was evident to us all that Christine was the cutest girl, and Wayne the cutest boy and so it just happened by natural order that they would "like" each other, while I was content with liking Debbie Richard, and she seemed to feel the same; given that we were each second cutest, and not wanting to disturb the balance of nature.
Peter Capute and Robert Cormier would kind of crowd their desks in to share potato sticks with Patty Donolin, but there weren't many sparks flying between them. They were more into being around the popular kids, I suspect. note: Robert had a big honker of a nose, and sounded like it when he sang.

There is one overriding memory, which I only yesterday came to appreciate as having been a Life Lesson, that I took away from that sixth grade pool party.

We were all too naive at the time to see it as an attempt by the father of Brenda Basillio, the girl who hosted it, to show off her family's wealth -their house was bigger than any of ours, and had a built-in swimming pool in the back yard- so as to raise the stock of the girl, him being worldly enough to know that there are other ways, in life, to gain a spot at the table with the record player and the potato sticks, other than by being cute and singing well. That was a secondary Life Lesson -my introduction to "class-based society."

But, I got to the party and was greeted by a bikini clad Debbie Richard, while Wayne Rameau was showing off for Christine David.

It was wonderful to have the attention of Debbie. She was a little more brown skinned than the average girl and, little did I know at the time was my first foray into a lifelong infatuation with Latina girls, as that was what her brown-eyed self was.

But, after we had all splashed about in the pool, I noticed a definite cooling off towards me from Debbie, who soon joined Christine in giving more attention to Wayne than to me. It was unsettling, and only when I went to use the bathroom and looked in the mirror did I figure it out.

My eyes had become bloodshot as all hell and almost swollen shut. Like they continued to do every time I swam in a chlorinated pool after that.

Fast forward the the Family Dollar in New Orleans 44 years later.

I think I'm going to try ammonia instead of chlorine bleach as a household cleaner this time... 

I was especially encouraged to do this after reading the back of the bottle to discover the many applications for ammonium hydroxide.
Refrigerators, counter tops, and bathrooms could be cleaned by mixing it with just hot water.

Add dishes and laundry, plus, if you set a bowl of it in the oven overnight at full concentration, your baked-on mess will wipe clean in the morning!
Where has ammonia been all my life (besides in the clouds of Jupiter), I wondered.

The deal was sealed, prompting me to venture a $1.05, when I read that for "special woodwork" one could mix ammonia, vinegar and baking soda into a concoction. How cool is that?!? I couldn't wait to try it; I had those other ingredients at home, right next to the eggs and oil and cake mix.

I was cautious when I opened the bottle, my last experience with the stuff having been through the "smelling salts" that my high school track coach had held under my nose after I had bounced off the high jump mat and thumped my head 
on the ground.

He had probably had the stuff in the first aid kit forever and might have been wondering if he would ever get a chance to employ it, and so, jumped at the chance, excuse the pun.

The fall hadn't really fazed me, I was only a bit groggy. I'm sure I suffered more brain damage from my head jerking back reflexively away from the smelling salts.

After turning on the kitchen fan, I opened the bottle. A bit of the fumes hit my nose...oh yeah, it's ammonia...but, I was soon wiping down my counter with it. Then, my refrigerator, then the walls, then underneath the refrigerator...I couldn't stop.

It was like a wake up call from beyond the veil.
My apartment is now sparkling clean, from the bathroom mirrors to the shelves in my kitchen cabinets, and especially the wooden floors.

The vinegar and baking soda trick has my floors looking cleaner than they ever did using pine solvent or chlorine bleach based stuff.

I felt like I was cleaning a house as if getting ready to sell it, and to show it to prospective buyers.

I wondered if I intuit that I'm going to make a trip to Massachusetts and want to be able to know that I have a sparkling clean place waiting for me when I got back.

I wondered if having a bit of ammonia in the air is something that I have always lacked but had never been keen enough to realize.

Or if Debbie Richard, who is my age, had just recently passed away, and was trying teach me, from the Great Beyond, that poignant lesson that she had been commissioned to while on the physical plane, using everything then at her disposal, to wit: a cute Latina in a bikini, a lesson that I had failed to grasp..

I wondered if her soul is back on Jupiter, waiting for me to join her...

One irony is that most Latina women that I've met swear by chlorine bleach. You can tell by looking on the shelves of the Ideal Market that it is a big seller.
Karrie used to buy it in quantities surpassed only by the amounts of liquor she bought, and would use it everywhere: full strength around the campsite in a circle to keep snakes away, to wash all kinds of things, and yes, even to whiten clothes.

The bowl of ammonia sat in my oven a whole day. Half of it evaporated, but, as advertised, none of the baked on crud was proof against a pad of steel wool and a wet sponge. It is as clean as new, ready to bake a Betty Crocker pineapple cake.

Or not.

I felt great when I woke up today. I didn't want a cigarette, and was not in the mood for the dopey feeling from smoking pot. It is as if breathing very low amounts of ammonia vapor is therapeutic. I almost want to tell Wayne, my neighbor who has emphysema, and who often opens his door leading to the hall to let in fresh air, to try some ammonia.

I guess I should first rule out being 4 days off of kratom as the reason I feel good. 

Walking over the wooden floors, that I had cleaned using the foaming concoction as directed, wearing only stockings, has seemed to cure a corn that was threatening to develop into a Plantar wart on one of my feet. My feet even seem to grip the floor better. I could go on and on...
Harold the cat is still alive too, so no problem there...

Boy, would I love to take a rocket trip to Jupiter just to see those breathtakingly immense clouds of frozen....OK, I suppose you readers get the picture.

Lilly Puts Brakes On New England Trip

Lilly texted me on the last day of June, with a terse: "Don't go to Boston, I'll talk to you tomorrow." I had told her that July 1st was my tentative departure date.

So, as it stands, I am staying put.

If I disappear for any length of time, she will know that I disobeyed her, and I'm afraid of what might await me when I get back; she might give my spot away.

Given all that she has done for me, both seen and unseen -all the protection that I have gotten just through being seen associating with her etc., my response just has to be "Yes, Ma'am, I won't go to Boston."

Not that I won't beg her to please let me go.

What I'm really hoping is that she is planning to go to Martha's Vineyard to look at property that she has been talking about buying there, for the past 3 years and will offer to give me a ride to Boston. I tend to think that it is something like that, or that she wants me to stay here and do her some kind of favor. She is very pro "go see your family" and most of her concerns are with pitfalls and dangers. She might just want to ascertain that I really am not planning to hop freight trains to get there.

"Tomorrow" came and I didn't talk to her, but there is always today.

Ammonia vapors sure haven't made me write less. LOL
 
I have been refraining from busking in order to safeguard my current sobriety against having money in my pocket; to protect myself from myself. I want to have a good money night, to get funds for a possible trip, but not so I can run to another kratom bar that I've heard talked about which is in the Bywater, stopping for a pack of cigarettes on my way there, type of thing.

My food stamp money comes in 14 hours. A small bottle of prune juice and a gallon of Simply Apple juice is at the top of my shopping list right now.

I am thinking of going to sell plasma; haven't done that since last summer's dead season. 

Slow Moving

• Uxi Duxi Shut Down
• Response To Comment
• Time To Sell Plasma?

As I arrived at the Uxi Duxi at about 4 PM this past Sunday, Dom was just locking the place up.
Oh, what great timing, he's just leaving to take his one hour break, or to run home to grab a different shirt, I thought. 
The store was dark inside, all the lights having been turned off, even the little lit up pyramids that sat on the tables. It was as dark as an octopus' ink in there.

Dom informed me that the Uxi Duxi was closing at that minute and would remain closed, "for the next couple days," he said.

He wouldn't elaborate, and I wouldn't really expect them to have given him any of the details, for some reason. "It has to do with the office..." was as close as Dom could come to explaining anything.

My initial guess was that it had something to do with legalese, perhaps someone had gotten in using a fake ID, or some minor had been sent in by the law to illegally purchase CBD dabs, or that some medical advice had been dispensed by one of the barista's which turned out to be bad advise, and now the person is suing the place... 
The selfish side of me thinks that it is God's way of forcing me off of kratom, which He has suceeded in doing these past 3 days. I do feel a bit less depressed these past couple of them...

I would have posted, and answered a comment yesterday, one which I received a few days ago, but the wireless at the Rouses Market started to malfunction. I still sat there and wrote offline.
On the subject of the wi-fi at Rouses:

There is a problem with the wi-fi here, at the Rouses Market.

I can't help think that someone who has access to the router button shut the connection off, upon seeing only myself in the place.
Paranoia, on my part? Possibly, but...
That particular Rouses Market is run by an almost all black staff. 

I have been able to sit for a while, using their wi-fi, but those were only times when there were black people in there using it at the same time.

This is the third time that I have been booted off, and each time, "It" was only my white self in there, to use a common corruption of the language.

What's to stop some racist night manager from going into the office behind the customer service desk and accidentally flipping the router off?

So, right now, I am testing them, in a way, by typing this entry into my text editor, offline.

Black people can be incredibly obtuse; witness the two thugs whom I encountered in Mobile, Alabama, who were standing nearby where I was busking, near the end of a night when I had done pretty well and had, what probably looked like a fortune to them, in my guitar case.
"He leaving!!" I heard one of them say, his voice quite audible, just as I began to put my guitar in its case.
Of course this raised a red flag, and "he" left by an alternate, and much safer route than "he" would have, had "he" not heard that blurted out.
I wondered if their folly was even evident to them -if the other one said (yelled) at him later, "You need to learn when to keep your voice down, [insert street name here], I think he heard you and that why he went that other way!"- or if they were just that obtuse, and wondered how their plans went awry.

So, in this spirit, I felt that, if I kept pecking away at my keyboard, as if there was nothing wrong, I would elicit some tell-tale reaction from someone in a Rouses uniform, perhaps perplexed expressions, perhaps the big guy going back into the office as if to see if he had hit the right button, or, should they be as obtuse as the fellows in Alabama, one of them saying to another: "It should be shut off!" with easy to read lips, or perhaps even audibly to me from where I sat 75 feet away, or at least them staring straight at me in tandem with twin "Huh?" looks on their faces. ...we shut it off, wht he doin'?


As I have seen nobody sitting around grinning, apparently enjoying seeing my distress as I repeatedly fail to connect to the Internet, now I am just waiting for a black person to hurry up and arrive to use the wi-fi, so that they might snap it back on.


It is plausible that they would know nothing about working offline, if poking a smartphone with their thumbs is the extent of their experience with computers.


So, I will answer the comment today...Tue, July 3red, 2018

Comment:


You really think a book written by James Michener was written, in secret, perhaps, by Robert Michum?

You really think "conscience" and "conscious" are the same thing?

By the way, where's your damn dog? 

@Alex In California

The spell checker probably gave me the spelling of the word "conscious," because of the way I misspelled "conscience." That shot in the dark, may have fallen closer to the first word.

Sure, Blame It On The Keyboard...
 
And that might have been the fault of my keyboard, with its half dozen keys that are useless, and its others that stick at random times, as if the cockroaches that have crawled inside from my apartment keep shifting their positions and will ultimately wind up camped in the z and x key area where they will be bothered a lot less than in the area under the e key, but will be further away from the cooling breeze of the fan...

Then, in my haste to get the laptop folded up and be on my way, I accepted the "correction," thinking that I had just misspelled a word and that the computer would fix it; without stopping to looking at what context it was in.

I've seen a lot of "Frequently Misspelled Words" lists, so that I can document how many attendants were in attendance and what they attended to, but, that one might have slipped past my consciousness.
 

Maybe I can write a patch to the Google spell checker module to make sure that a user is warned when he has misspelled a homophone (words that are pronounced the same but have different spellings).

Homographs: words spelled the same as each other but pronounced differently.

Examples:

Wind -Stand out in the wind and wind your watch.

Lead -"I will lead you to the lead mine."

Address -I will address the assembly at the following address, perhaps wearing a dress.

Homophones: words spelled differently but pronounced the same. Example: Pleas, and Please

Homonyms: words that are both spelled and pronounced the same as each other, yet have different meanings.

Example: bank -the edge of a river, a building where money is kept, to carom a basketball off the backboard, etc. 

We have entered the smartphone era, where even the next possible word in a sentence you might be composing in a text message is suggested to the writer.

If I were to compose a text with a sentence that started: "Tonight I hope to be at the" my smartphone will offer me the opportunity to insert "Lilly Pad" as the next word, based upon a data-base of words I've used before, which is taking up 24 killobytes of my phones storage.

I don't think many other Galaxy users would see that suggestion. Unless they are frogs that have learned to text with their webbed toes.

So, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I suppose, since I might one day proffer this blog as some sort of resume in hopes of landing a professional writing gig, I could be more careful, and maybe proof-read posts twice.
I Was Tired  
But, I had been up all night reading the Michum, er, Michener book and was tired.

Preface to remark:

I usually don't pay much attention to the name of any writer, unless the book is so well written that I stop at some point and give it a closer look; maybe even flip to the jacket to read more about the guy, once I have come to respect him.
Respectus: Latin. The act of looking back.
I hadn't quite done that, and when I Googled the name of the book, and saw the following page, well, must be the guy, I thought.

By the way, I have found three typos, five hundred pages into the Michener -or whomever, book; and he had a professional editorial staff behind him...

Easy to see where I guy might get confused...

Sometimes I am using Archie Bunker style humor, like when I wrote something like "Everyone will be watching that damned Merryweather and McClinsky fight tonight, nobody will be on the street."


This is intended to convey the apathy that I have concerning the thing -that I hadn't paid enough attention to get the names right.

Kind of like Alex in California mentioning my friends "The Chumsley's" in London.

This will no longer be the case when I refer to James A. Michener, whose writing I now hold in high enough esteem to have actually studied the front cover of his book, and memorized the name.
Just like Archie, I'm sure, wouldn't fumble over the syllables of "Donald John Trump." LOL!