Go To Computer Lab

A Deep Foreboding

Yesterday afternoon, I was ready to come here to blog in the computer lab, and then thought I would go to the Goodwill Store later, but I put the Goodwill trip first, and never made it here, and a third day went by without a post.

I guess the good news is that I will tomorrow get more "data" on my government phone and, if I use it wisely, should be able to post from my room a lot more frequently. Maybe for the whole month, if I avoid sitting and watching streaming videos on Youtube. I believe that might be what really chews up the 2 gigabytes of data that I get free every month.

I had somehow gotten about 40 dollars ahead through this past weekend, out of which Friday night had been rained out.

Right: Charlottesville, a great busking location that I lived in for two years before I ever considered busking...

That pretty much means that I made about 55 bucks. I think I only spent ten bucks on cartridges for my VUSE nicotine vaporizer and the rest on Harold the cat's food and a bag of litter.

Perhaps the biggest thing in the grand scope of this blog might be the fact that, since getting the vaporizer, about two weeks ago now, I have pretty much switched over to it, and have stopped smoking tobacco.

At first, I would still crave a puff of real tobacco and would walk up to the corner bar, vaporizer in hand, and try to buy a single cigarette off someone.
I brought the vaporizer to make it look like what it was, and not like I was a bum who didn't even have a cigarette as a reflection of how little I actually contribute to society.

So, maybe the more life-changing process of me quitting smoking is underway and overshadows the fact that, otherwise, things are moving much too slowly.

Lilly texted me yesterday, wondering where I have been. I have been getting there progressively later with each passing week, it seems, and now I might even be playing my first notes after Lilly has fallen asleep.

It is going to be in the high sixties, temperature-wise tonight, and there is no excuse for me not to be out there.
I am getting that same kind of feeling I had the last time I decided to play in the afternoon after not doing so for years, and went there to discover that Lilly now has a daytime busker that she has taken under her wing -the horn player from Paris, named Santo.

I think that, on such a beautiful night, Lilly is going to come out to sit, and it would be really nice, and make me feel like her and I are on solid ground, if I were there playing.

I need to quit smoking weed in the daytime. It saps my ambition, makes me feel insecure, focuses me in upon what is right around me, causing me to lose sight of "the big picture" and long term goals and causes me to forget about things like getting a new key card for the Sacred Heart building, so I don't have to knock on the door at 2 AM and make whomever is behind the security desk get up and let me in.
It is typical for me to smoke some of Bobby's weed and then not be able to decide between getting the key card, or going to get a power cable for the new computer I got, as I sit there with "couch paralysis" until it's too late to do either. It is a general feeling of being overwhelmed.

Then, that evening, I might come home and feel bad about having to knock on the door to disturb the guard, and then might have to unplug one thing to move the cord over to the new computer, and then might smoke some more weed and voila! oh shit -there is now a third thing that comes to my attention that needs to be done, along with the key card and the power cord, etc...

And it is all tied in with the medicinal grade bud that I unwittingly smoked while at Bobby's, earlier this afternoon.

What ensued was pretty much predictable.

I went back to my apartment, where I sat for about 45 minutes on the couch.
Should I turn on the radio? Should I listen back to the music that I recorded last night? I felt a deep sadness, as if, if I didn't go out to busk on such a beautiful evening, I would be disappointing Lilly, and losing some of her support.
I am also just a few bucks short of being able to get an ounce of kratom.

But, then I remembered the fact that I have not been doing a good job of posting to this blog "at least something" every day, as there has been another lapse of 4 days, this time.

So, I guess I go back to the apartment and maybe do one of the self help dialogue things, and basically wait to come down off of the bud that I smoked enough, so that I can make the concrete decision to get out to the Lilly Pad, early enough so that if Lilly wants to sit by me for a while, it would still be close enough to dinner hour to frame the experience in a different light than if she was hanging out with me at midnight.

I haven't had such a strong, almost psychic, pull towards the Lilly Pad in a while.
It's as if Lilly is standing there right now, in the company of another busker whom she has made the acquaintance of, telling he or she that she had texted me about why she hasn't seen me there much at all, and that, if I didn't show up by sundown, in response to her, than that other busker can go ahead and play and have the spot and, if I were to show up, to tell me that she gave the spot to them because I am never there....

It is 6:30 PM right now. I guess it couldn't hurt to pack up my gear and at least ride by the spot -it's just a 14 minute bike ride- just to see if my premonition is right.

I think at some point in the near future, if I get a gig inside a bar somewhere, I might tell Lilly to go ahead and let someone else play there, as it wouldn't be fair for my to tie it up when I am hardly ever there.

The Zen Of Skeezing

Thursday, The Fourth

I am home from busking.

A guy who hung out, named Blake, who was from Georgia gave me a 20 dollar tip on an otherwise 3 dollar Wednesday late night.

It was after midnight when I got there, having hung around the apartment, slowly waking up and getting ready to go out there.

I still have an internal clock that wakes me up right around the time that I used to hop on the street car each night.

Wednesday, I had slept from some time in the afternoon until I woke up when it was time to busk.

But, having a cup of coffee, letting Harold the cat in and feeding him, finding my stuff and packing up my backpack all conspired to have me at the Lilly Pad around midnight.

Friday, The Fifth

I am so busy with things that I can't even afford to stuff my face with a bunch of junk food and then just sleep it off for half the next day before crapping it out.

I have to wake up in the morning and not smoke weed, as it will scatter my energies in every direction but no direction in particular.

Just now, I was sitting on my couch, realizing that if I had enough energy to sit there and read a John Grisham novel entitled: The Confession, then I could divert that inertia into coming here to the computer room to do this blog post. I can go back and fall asleep with the book in my lap afterwards.

But, not for long. I need to keep pace with Jacob and his "Energizer Bunny" level of activity; such as I had when I was 34 years old.

Actually, when I was Jacob's age, I was still a sickly young man with pasty colored skin and prone to outbreaks of eczema, who just went to a store and bought food that looked good and ate it, unaware that it takes my body a long time to break down soybean oil and that eating it every day was taxing my detoxification system, leading to a sickly young man with pasty skin.

Back then, I thought the only way I was going to get a girl to fall in love with such a guy was for me to have material things to offer.

What a long strange trip it's been. After forsaking all that and living as a homeless troubadour for years, I suddenly find myself getting computers and TV's and DJ turntable systems, and more laptops, and bikes and more TV's and a new smartphone, and a guy in building C wanting to buy me an electric guitar.

The zen of skeezing.

"It's Far"

Monday, the first of April was a

I'm sure it still gives him nightmares.

sunny and cool day, cool enough to offset the heat worked up through pedaling a bike, and so, at just a bit after noon, after weighing all my options for enjoying the sunlight, I set off on my bike in order to see just how long a ride it would be to Jacob's house in Kenner.

The first person who seemed likely to know where Kenner was, told me that it was "far" from where I asked him, a few blocks from the apartment, how I could get there on my bike.
I figured that there had to be basically just one road that would take me all the way there, and there basically was.
There was Metarie Road, which took me through the city that Kenner is on the other side of, and then there was Airline Road, which took me to the vicinity of the airport which unleashed the planes that fly about 500 feet over Jacob's back yard.
I had discounted the information that Kenner was far away as coming from a typically wussy millenial. I figured that his screen staring self probably thought anything that took more than five minutes to get to in a car would be far.

But, it turned out to be an hour and fifteen minutes of averaging only about 12 miles per hour because of bumpy sidewalks and the like.

Then, the question of whether I was going to reverse the process to get home became mute after Bob offered me a TV which he had acquired and was getting rid of, along with taking Jacob and I to the Salvage Store, where I just about tapped out my food card with the purchase of about 40 bucks worth of food, all at unheard of discounted prices, and then we went to pick up a computer which someone was giving to Bob, I guess to give to someone like me, or maybe me specifically.
So, I returned with Jacob to the apartment where we unloaded from Bob's SUV, all of the groceries, the computer, the TV, and my bike.
Forgetting only the antenna that went with the TV, and a piece of paper upon which was written the password to get into the computer.

I was so tired that I didn't go out to busk.

The computer is going to be dedicated to perhaps music alone, where I could conceivably fill it with about a month's worth of music before a song repeats.

Or I could put a version of Audacity on it and use it for the dedicated recording studio.
For being one of the least materialistic people I know, I sure seem to be acquiring a lot of stuff, lately. It's that zen kind of thing: As soon as I have learned to be content in a room with just four walls and a ceiling, it becomes full of cool stuff.
This afternoon, Bobby (who fell off his bike and broke his collarbone and can't play it right now) let me use his electric guitar, which I plugged into Jacob's amplifier that he left at my place after that last time we jammed, and I wish I could have seen myself from the perspective of a year ago, when I would be sitting in an empty place with a laptop and a guitar and not much else.
"Where did all that stuff come from?" I would wonder.

5 Pictures Worth Of Words At Least, Lost

ↇ There was supposed to be a post [here] that I spent about 4 hours working on, Tuesday morning, and into the afternoon.

It was a pretty good one, I thought. I had had a rough 24 hours, but had finally caught a normal "early to bed; early to rise" night of sleep.

Right: Harold is faced with the classic dilemma of fight or flee.

I was up with the sun, well rested, and with a pot of coffee.

The next 5 hours or so were spent embellishing the themes that I had laid out which could be divided into:

A: The South Korean guy who came by the Lilly Pad.

B: I Am Cruel To Harold the cat (ancillary to unleashing the stuffed horse head on a stick against him).

C: An essay on war, with the question posed of: Is the human race a kinder and gentler race because all the conscientious objectors from the Vietnam Era have reproduced a half million times over, while the war mongers who signed up for war fighting and killing, for whatever reasons, took their militant mind-sets to the shallow graves with them.

D: The 5 dollar night, despite the South Korean guy hanging out and shooting video for about 45 minutes (he tipped me first a dollar, and then another one after he felt compelled to after shooting video of about 3 songs and about 3 "interviews" in between) while I played my ass off (to a large degree because I was "on TV").

E: How much I have piled upon my plate with the undertaking of the study of 2 new computer disciplines, the renewal of my learning of the Ethiopian language, which I can hone at The Unique Grocery on Royal Street.

F: I bought another 2-pack of cartridges for my electronic cigarette, for just under 10 bucks, and the first one has lasted me for going on 3 days. The math works out to me probably saving about 18 bucks on each purchase of a 2-pack of them; they come in about a half dozen flavors, with me sticking to the "original" one for now, as I circle my wagons and try to regroup and seek some modicum of stability in my life, and it not being a good time to gamble on some flavor of cartridge that might have me scrambling back to American Spirit cigarettes at 8 bucks a pack...

And, sure, a couple days have gone by while I wondered if I could re-write the 5,000 words, maybe even make them better, while potential new material piles up around me with each experience I live through.
I decided that the most important things, I will remember.

Crash!

I learned a valuable lesson about the FocusWriter application that is a free open-source one available through Ubuntu Linux. The lesson was that it has no autosave function.

After I had taken a well needed rest from typing for 5 hours, I went to do something "completely different," which was to work on Audacity on some music files that are also on the pile of things to do which, when taken together might have me spending the next 12 years on their completion.

Audacity crashed. It crashed so hard that the whole laptop rebooted.

When it came back up, the blog post was no longer in FocusWriter, the free open source application.

I like FocusWriter because of a few features.

Mainly it is the one that produces the sound of an old fashioned typewriter, complete with the zip-thwack!! of the carriage returning to the virtual far left whenever the "enter" key is pressed at the end of a paragraph. I love that, as the tic-tic-tic is very soothing and encourages the "automatic" writing that makes me feel like I am tapped in to some consciousness of a greater scope of my own.

It also allows one to set daily goals as far as how many words one wants to write.

Stephen King puts in something like 9 hours a day "set in concrete," according to his memoir "On Writing." From 9 AM until 6 PM, right after his morning jog and swim, or whatever. Everyone in his life has their own life set in concrete around this schedule, too. I guess when you are the golden goose, then people take very seriously whatever considerations and accommodations they must make to insure a steady production of eggs...

So, I have taken the suggestion of Alex In California about posting something every day, even if it is short. Soon, another 2 gigabytes of data will be added to my government phone (April 10th) and, I think that if I use it a lot more wisely than I did last month, downloading videos of Evel Kneivel jumping over buses on a motorcycle, for example.

I need to let go of the dream. I'm 56 years old, don't own a motorcycle, even, and with each passing year the doubts seem to gain momentum, whispering: What if you just keep putting it off and never wind up breaking the record of 168 feet for a ramp to ramp motorcycle jump? You can do anything you set your mind to, but
you need to take practical steps like trying to get a motorcycle then construct ramps and find a place to practice; some lot nearby a hospital, perhaps...

Twice Bitten

...or flee

I think I was in denial of the fact that it was the 3 gabapentin pills that Bobby gave to me that led to me being in the mood to be cruel to Harold the cat.

I was smart enough to not take all 3 like I did the last time, but, there is no more likely explanation for why I got mad at Harold and chased him and tried to kick him.

I had been up for 24 hours, had only made about 5 bucks busking the night before; had taken a half of a gabapentin on successive nights, which made my playing more fluid the first 2 nights, but then seemed to ramp me up just a tad too much on the third night so that I was able to play at 190 miles per hour, but was still trying to go 210 mph...type of thing.

Then, I came home and stayed up until well into the day.

Gabapentin Crash

Jacob called about coming over later that day and I had to admit that I wouldn't be in any shape to do much except fall asleep and any kratom shot I might have done would be ineffective and any music I played, like-wise.

But, then Harold the cat went to use his litter box and wound up pooping on the hardwood floor. No big deal because I have plenty of ammonia.
But, how it happened was, he squatted in the box and did his business, but he didn't pinch the "loaf" off and it didn't fall into the box, but was still protruding out of his rectum as he spun around and began to search for the poop with his eyes and nose that he could swear he just eliminated.

This could, and should, have been funny to me. But, in my frame of mind, it made me think that he was more stupid than I might otherwise have thought.
After it fell on the floor, he started to rake non-existent litter towards it, another display of stupidity, and I kind of lost patience with him and, as he was walking away from the poop, as if he was just going to leave it there, I told him to "clean yourself!" which is language that I thought he understood.

He had been pissing me off by seeking attention the whole time he is indoors, crawling on top of any book I might be reading, etc.

He does not ever step on the open and running laptop on the certain table I place it on, though. This was after the one and only time that I had gone ballistic on him after finding him laying on the keyboard with the computer going haywire with the screen doing all kinds of herky-jerky motions, due to the combination of keys he was laying on.

That time, I yelled at him and he ran under the bed. I pulled him out from there and brought him over to the computer and whacked his nose, whereupon he ran back under the bed. He was a kitten and I had just gotten him and so he was extra scared. He was trapped in an apartment with someone who was whacking his nose. He has never again even touched the laptop. One time when I was holding him by the window to show him a thunderstorm outside, in order to change his mind about scratching at the door to go out, and there was a loud clap of thunder, it frightened him enough to cause him to bolt from my arms, jumping in any direction away from the window, but not before taking a quick panic stricken look at the computer table, then recalculating and jumping to the hardwood floor, another 3 feet of free-fall, instead of to that table.

Even startled by a clap of thunder he was more afraid of the computer table than Mother Nature..

So, this time, as he seemed to be walking away from the poop after having raked nothing at all for a minute onto it, I smacked my snare drum and yelled "Harold, clean yourself!!" which has had the intended effect when said in a coaxing tone, while I was dumping a small pile of litter next to his business, so that he could do it himself, so as to not put him out of balance with his instincts, type of thing.

But, the snare shot sent him like an arrow under the bed in the bedroom, where he failed to respond to repeated requests that he clean himself.

So, I lost my cool and went and threw the bed up so hard that it smacked the wall, knocking things over and breaking things. Then I grabbed him by the scuff of his neck and brought him back to the poop.

He was just to frightened to think straight, and I was too addled because of everything to think straight, and it was a bad thing that I wish I could take back. I can understand why some people kill themselves after abusing a person who they love when they really can't understand what had gotten into them and why they did it, and will it ever happen again? Not if they blow their brains out, it won't, type of thing....

I just have been trying to be extra nice to him and have settled the matter on whether I can eat a half tablet of gabapentin to reduce my anxiety and make things flow smoothly, instead of eating 3 at a time like I had done the first time Bobby handed me a handful of the things.

Maybe a guy has to show his cat "who is boss" every once in a while, but I really felt like shit after that.

Harold counts on me as like an oasis of security in a sea of crack-head derelict blacks who don't give a shit about anyone or any thing, and I let him down.

Being white comes with certain responsibilities like showing the rest of the species (and I know that we actually are the same species because the Ethiopians who came from there are fully alive and fully human beautiful people, from whom a lot of what wound up in the Christian dogma had its origins, which proves that the potential exists, and that African Americans are damaged people and maybe beyond hope of redemption.

Warning; the next few paragraphs might be offensive to some.

The following may sound racist, but it is actually "culture-ist."

We had a weapon of mass destruction back in 1945. We could have pressed our hand and brought to world under our order, but we didn't.
We took the high road.

If the shoe had been on the other foot and the Africans had taken whites as slaves; do you think there would have come a black Abraham Lincoln, who would have freed us?

Look around at the boxer short clad asses and the flip flop clad feet being dragged across the ground and see the lines of hatred that have become etched into the faces and peer into the soul-less animal eyes of the black man on the street before you answer...just saying.

And, by the way, I know that Lincoln was under enormous pressure and wasn't acting out of pure magnanimity.

Come to think of it, I think the chosen people of God needed to part the Red Sea in order to get away from those beautiful, fully human people...

Many of the colored people at Sacred Heart sit and watch Huey P. Newton and his ilk on video and they are truly waiting for some kind of race war to start. "We are at war with the United States," I have overheard one preaching to a group of them as they drank alcohol together.

That kind of puts the fact that black ladies will reproduce with any number of baby daddy's -the more the merrier- and the fact that black men are taking advantage of white girls who may have been brainwashed by a culture which just wants to market to black folk music, cellphones, cars, jewelry, etc and that erroneously glorifies their materialistic culture, into perspective. They are going to have to build up their numbers before the street fighting starts...

I guess we whites need to apply ourselves to studying sickle-cell anemia and reverse-engineersome sort of deadly virus that will only attack blacks. Just to keep it in a vault somewhere, out of Trump's hands, of course....Maybe we should fight fair, though, and only bring baseball bats to the front lines...to even the playing field...

Be careful what you ask for, Aksin' Jackson, I say.

So, there is the last of my hostility, I hope. Redirected away from Harold the cat
and towards those that should perhaps know better.

I had not slept since returning from busking at about 3 AM, Monday morning, nor during the 24 or so hours before that.

I had only made 5 dollars, but had had the priceless experience of meeting and interesting young man from South Korea, who shot a lot of video of me on his phone, after asking my permission to do so.

I had told about that in about 800 words.

S.P.C.A. -Hole

Right: Utter dejection over having been supplanted by a new pet on a stick...


Then I wrote about my having been cruel to Harold the cat, for something that really wasn’t his fault, because, how can you place blame with a creature that has no will?

As I started to get upset, about losing the post, I remembered one of the more recent mantras that I have fashioned, which goes something like: “Everything is repeatable.”

This is pertinent to music and represented a certain milestone where I stopped believing in any kind of magic in the music making process.

A guitar solo is not a panic stricken flailing of the fingers, done in the hope that the player will stumble upon a great solo; a classic even; and one more precious given that the guitarist can safely say that he could never play that solo again in a million years.

The guy from the band Foreigner once said in a Guitar Player Magazine interview that the solo he played on one of their flagship songs, “Hot Blooded,” he could never play again, because he was just going for it and it had come out like it did.

I read that as the guy does not know what he is doing. As that solo ends, you can actually hear the guy run out of talent, and the last few feeble notes are a desperate attempt to preserve the really cool sounding double-stopped notes that that are the bread and butter of that solo. The last notes contain that are arguably, mistakes. Did he intend to let that string go, or did he fumble it? If he fumbled it on the beat, then it was a happy coincidence for a guy who had run out of ideas.

The point is that, perhaps the whole lesson that I was drawn to New Orleans to learn came from the most accomplished musicians that I met, and was something that, at first annoyed me.

I had always thought of music as a way that a person might rise above his incarnation and channel something from the anti-world or from heaven, or something.

After hearing Tanya Huang play something that might have given me goosebumps, for example, I asked her something pertaining to the song, like: “When you closed your eyes in the middle of your solo, were you being transported through time and space to another dimension; you know, where there were mirrors on the ceilings and pink champagne on ice, or something?

After she had replied in the flattest of emotional tones “I was just trying to play something that would sound good,” my initial thought was that she was perhaps “starving at the banquet of life,” and I felt sorry for her in the sense that it made it sound like she was just a music machine, cranking out phrases acquired through rote learning.

I eventually learned that if you practice enough, then you can crank out musical phrases in the same manner Tanya was talking about. For, if you practice enough, then your practice sessions will actually start sounding good, just due to speed and accuracy.

A lot of the amazing violin runs that Paganini did in his “24 Caprices For Violin,” when seen on paper are just major or minor scales that run through 2 or 3 octaves.

But run they do, at a presto tempo, and when played evenly and fluidly, they sound like the guy is really flying.

It’s impressive. But Paganini, I’m sure, didn’t have to be in just the right mood for tearing through some notes. He could probably wake up in the morning grumpy and having no coffee and, after warming up some, deliver of himself that same crescendo that might put some people in the mind of doing the downhill slalom at 65 miles per hour.

And it is tempting to think a person is religious or close to God in some way if they can play “so beautifully.”

Surely they have seen the Kingdom of God and are bearing witness to it through music.

Not true again.

25 Dollar Thursday “You’re good at what you do.”

This creepy feeling existed, surely back in the time of Paganini, who was accused by some of being either possessed by, or in cahoots with, the devil, because no mortal man could otherwise ever play the violin “like that.” This was back in a time when most composers would make “sacred” music by setting bible verses to their music, in order to play it safe.

It would be interesting to do a study upon the history of them to see if there were any who professed atheism at some point in their lives, and then to see what kind of “sacred” music they actually penned.

There was one time, back in 1988, when I endeavored to change the lyrics to “Terrapin Station,” by the Grateful Dead, and present it to the Bethany Baptist Church choir that I sang with most Sunday mornings.That was because I questioned my ability, at the time, to compose an original song which had a chord progression as beautiful as that song.

When the Grateful Dead sang “Terapin!,” the Bethany choir would sing “Kingdom come!,” or something. The rest of it was going to be a patchwork of biblical stuff that rhymed.

But, again, the Paganini and Chopin sheet music shows, in many places, just a lot of regular scales that start low and zoom up into the stratosphere, where a held and vibrated note out of a violin becomes awe inspiring.

They just play them so fast that they become slight of hand artists, in the sense that the hand is quicker than the ear, type of thing...

So, as I continue to improve upon the guitar, my speed has not increased since my twenties, but my ability to know what I had just played and be able to do it again, has.

This is helpful on nights when I am not in the mood to play and my guitar seems to mock me as it leans against a wall in my apartment, a “good time” instrument for a guy who only wants to write a dirge at the time.

Coming Next: Jacob, my friend, is prescribed Prozac by a mental health care professional. Will it sap his desire to be a musician, or will it work like it's supposed to, and just drain his money into the coffers of the mental health care industry? Stay tuned....

Plate Piled High

It is Monday evening and it was raining this afternoon, but now there are very still puddles pooled in the low spots; mirror-like and reflective of the calm after the storm.

Sunday night was a goose egg as far as busking. I didn’t get to the Lilly Pad until about quarter past midnight.

I was told by one of the regular skeezers of that block that “it was crowded earlier.”

This crowd would have been comprised of the same tourists who are in town for something other than tipping buskers, apparently.

They seem to be pale-skinned, undernourished, twitchy, almost totally covered in tattoos and piercings, wearing very form fitting clothing like leg tights, tie-dyed when not in all black, and pretty f***ing weird, from my perspective.
The way the generation before me looked at "us" hippies in the late 60's is probably the way I look at these people. I need to see what the big attraction in town was to try to pin down who and where they came from. They acted similar to the homosexuals that invade the city during Southern Decadence every August, in that they seemed to be birds of the same feather in their speech and mannerisms, etc.
It seemed like throwing me a tip never crossed their minds. Maybe I need to write a tipping "app" that would put the fun into tipping for them and their ilk. "I like that song, so I just tipped the guy five bucks," one of them might say with a "how cool is that?" deportment, as he returns his phone to his pocket...
A To Z
A: Apartment:
I have extended an offer to Geo and Mindy Lee to crash at my apartment for what might amount to about 10 bucks per day, times ten days.

Geo and Mindy Lee are from Cincinnati, Ohio and I met them about a year ago.

They were the ones who came to town laden with LSD in blotter form, and who wanted me to play “They Loved Each Other,” by the Grateful Dead at their wedding, which was to take place in Jackson Square.

I took this request with a grain of salt as, they were tripping on acid and I was playing a Grateful Dead song, and it was one that they had, just prior to coming upon me at the Lilly Pad, determined among themselves to be the song that they wanted to be the “first dance” song at the ceremony.

“We were just talking about what should be our first dance song and had just agreed on “They Loved Each Other;” then we were walking down Bourbon and started to hear your harmonica and then when we got closer, we were like: Is that “They Loved Each Other?”

And it was. And it is one of the more practiced-up songs that I do, and so I was nailing it.

It is no far stretch of the imagination to believe that, in that state of mind of being dosed on acid, this coincidence was magnified to biblical proportions and, hence, the offer was made to pay me “the going rate” for first dance wedding songs, which a quick skimming of “The Tipper’s Guide” revealed to be somewhere between $250 and $300 “per song.”

Perhaps a long one like "Stairway to Heaven" would fetch the latter, while “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” by Neil Young, in all its 2 minute and 28 seconds of glory, the former.

But, I was laying my chips upon them somehow messing up while running around the quarter dosed on, and selling, acid and only gave the wedding about a 25% chance of ever taking place.

There was the commensurate recklessness about their exploits that led me to think that them pulling it all together and organizing the event would be beyond them.

The wedding was indeed postponed after certain key relatives, like the mother of the groom, informed them that they wouldn’t be able to make the trek to New Orleans to witness the union of Geo and Mindy Lee, which was unfortunate and kind of sad (I would have liked to have the $300).

I got the feeling that the relatives had become accustomed to the capriciousness of their kin and that dropping everything and heading to New Orleans to get married in Jackson Square was probably just the flavor of the week for the couple and before booking reservations in the city, the relatives would wait to see if the next dose of acid might bring a change of mind; perhaps after they come upon a busker singing a different song.

But now they are back and Mindy Lee is pregnant with twins. They have rented some place until the end of March, but after that, I might let them stay at my place for at least the 10 days that I’m allowed to have “overnight” guests per month.

Depending upon how well the arrangement works out, I could even allow them to stay longer, based upon what has regularly been inefficient record keeping by the front desk security officers.

It’s their job to keep track of the number of days a guest has accrued.
It’s also their job to stay awake and to be vigilant of bike thieves, for that matter.

B: Bike- The bike that was stolen two stolen bikes ago and which is now in the rack with a flat back tire and no lock on it; I am thinking of grabbing and pulling into my apartment; doing whatever repairs to, and then listing for sale on Craigslist New Orleans.

I bought the bike off of Ester, my Israelite friend for 40 bucks -a good deal because it is a $100 bike when in good working order- and so I feel like I own it.

The person who might see it disappear from the rack might never have to know that I took it. If I could depart on it from Sacred Heart, without being observed, and then meet with the person who wants to buy it through Craigslist, and sell it to her, then the thing would have disappeared without a trace from the thief, the same way it had for me.

One of the leading suspects in the theft of it was a guy named "White Cloud" who is reportedly in the hospital with fading health, and returning the bike might be the type of thing a dying man does to make peace with his maker, type of thing...

C through Z: will get to later, I guess...

Wow, OK

So, as I sit here in the computer lab it is Sunday night.

For March 24th, the weather is nice, a kind of almost foggy high 60's.

I only made a dollar last night after determining that the tourists were dominated by a huge group of non tippers and leaving after an hour.

I remembered times that I stayed out after only making a dollar the first hour and wound up coming home with a lot of cash; but, I was struggling with my emotions and revisited by the "you bunch of non tipping pieces of shit!" mentality that I thought I had seen the last of long ago.

I have gotten a couple new computer books, in AJAX and PHP and MySQL...they were 50 cents each at the Goodwill.
I just saw the bike that was stolen two stolen bikes ago in the rack outside the building. It had been poorly disguised and bore certain tell-tale signs, as in things that I had done to the thing that were unique. It has a flat rear tire and no lock securing it. It is almost as if the thief is done with it and giving it back. Or, perhaps he stole it from the person he sold it to after stealing it from me.

I made 25 bucks Friday night, before making the dollar, and was able to pay Jacob some to defray the cost of the kratom that he has been leaving at my place.

I have big things planned, but find myself constantly running up against the clock when it is time to busk; like right now.

My food stamps, which had been shut off the day a letter came warning me that they would be shut off were I not to respond to itself the previous day, have finally been restored.

The lady had told me that it would take "7 to 21" days for them to turn them back on. I waited the whole 21 days before going to the office to learn that they had never been properly dealt with and would have never come back on had I not gone down there.

That exact scenario crossed my mind, but I was kind of trying to float myself off of my busking income to include food, knowing that I was ultimately just saving the food stamp money as if it were in a bank.
So, I got the 192 bucks with only half a month to go before getting another installment.

I didn't rush out to get food right away and, in fact, considered going on a long fast. I probably should have because after emerging from the Dollar General with just about as much food as I can carry on my bike, after having gone in there for "one or two things," I kind of overate last night. Peanut butter and Coco Roos cereal in coconut milk with a side order of Cliff Bars smeared in more peanut butter and....it just got worse. I lay there in the morning, along with Harold the cat, who had also overeaten, and we slept it off, until I got up around 6 PM, called my mother because I hadn't in a couple months, and then came here where it is almost 11 PM.

I have new guitar strings, courtesey of Bobby in Building C, and am ready to go...

Bare With Me

It is almost 10:30 PM, I have had a shot of kratom and the Lilly Pad bekons me.
I only made about 12 bucks last night, but, once again there were still people walking around as I was packing up and leaving at about 1:30 AM.

The strings on the guitar are one day older. The next 8 bucks I make will have to go for a new pair; and then I will have to stop putting the cart before the horse and bump having new strings up on the priority list.
Keep new strings and harmonicas and new strings and harmonicas will keep you, I always say....

Oh,and I have not yet begun to mess with the appearance of this blog, as I keep in the back of my mind a plan to either migrate to Wordpress or to buy a domain and keep using Blogger....

Filles De Killamanjaro

Well, this blog has suffered since the service ran out on the new phone...

But, I have discovered that, when I plug the thing into the laptop via USB, then I can get at all the files stored on the phone, such as pictures (left) and music, except I have no music on it, I hadn't gotten that far in my exploits of using it.

The reason I didn't reduce my "plan" from 60 dollars down to 30 is that I wouldn't be able to use it as a hotspot, and sit in my room with an internet connection.

I have to meet life half way and reduce the amount of inhibition I feel about coming to the computer lab at Sacred Heart, so it can become at least a daily habit.

There are some who might say that this blog "suffers" even more when I post up my writing on it...

Busking

Busking has been running at an idle lately, with me winding up with just enough money in the mornings for either a pack of cigarettes, or food for myself and my cat.
There have been nights, like last night, when the ideal tourists came along and, after telling me that I wasn't really in the right spot, for what I was doing, tipped me 10 bucks, after I explained that I played at the Lilly Pad in order to cater to people who might want a more private performance, or to converse with a real live street musician, type of thing.

The movie deal that the guy named Daniel talked about (me composing/performing music for it) will probably fall through after Daniel realizes that I am not homeless. The goal of this film project or whatever it is. is to employ homeless people in the making of it. Creating a good film, well, I guess he will cross that bridge when he gets to it.
I suppose that, at the end of the movie, as the credit rolls, some project will be mentioned, and the information will be given that all of the actors and musicians etc. were literally taken off the street. He might be fishing for the type of publicity that such a thing might garner. It has "PBS segment" written all over it.

"Some of these homeless people were in despair, but seeing themselves on the big screen gave them a sense of worth, and they soon became productive members of society..." type of thing....

So, last night, I busked and made 12 bucks, 10 of which came from the one couple that hung out and listened, with the female at one point showing me scars on her wrist from a failed suicide attempt and telling me that it was just "this kind of thing (hanging out with a street musician)" that they were hoping would give her a new lease on life.

That was a 12 dollar Saturday night, otherwise, and put me in the situation of having 11 bucks -enough to get a 32.5 gram packet of kratom at the Unique Grocery.

Or a pack of American Spirit cigarettes and a Bang energy drink at Unique Grocery.

Or a can of cat food, and returning home with nothing except $10.18 still intact.

In the morning, my plan was to ride up to Rouses Market and spend $2.08 on a Bang energy drink, then ride up to near the Uxi Duxi, where I would wait until I espied a familiar face from when I hung out there almost every night, which person I would slip a five dollar bill to and ask them to go in and "buy for me," like I was an under-aged kid hiding on the side of a liquor store.

Then, I remembered that Jacob had ordered something like 3 ounces of Yellow Borneo, which he probably still had some of, and I got the idea of riding my bike over to Kenner, where he lives with Bob, his legal guardian, and just giving him the 4 dollars for a scoop of kratom.

I still have the Vuseʳ Vibeʳ nicotine vaporizer, and it has curtailed my use of cigarettes, at least the purchasing of them.

Jacob came by and brought me some kratom, apologized for not being able to hang out longer than a few minutes, promised to hang out longer on Tuesday, and then accepted the 4 dollars from me.

I know the value of me pulling my own weight as much as possible, just in the karmic sense.

Friday night, Jacob and I hung out at my place and recorded us jamming along with an obscure (but my favorite) Miles Davis album called "Filles De Killamanjaro."
It was cold outside and raining every time I looked out the window waiting for it to stop so I could go out and busk. I eventually just chalked it up to being an act of God that my busking would be cancelled.

I think Thursday night was a 13 dollar one, and Tuesday before it was about the same, I didn't play Monday, after having had the 34 dollar Sunday...

There is more money out there if I want to go out in the 50 degree air and play for the St. Patrick's Day crowd. The potential for making money is too much to resist and I will soon layer up with clothing and chug down my kratom drink and go out there with old strings on the guitar...

I got a hit of acid from my old acquaintances, Geo and Mindy Lee, from Cincinnati, Ohio. It is just sitting on the table like an insurance policy against a boring night.

Is Vaping Safe?
The link above is to the article that someone sent me who read the one I posted last week and informed me that I had posted old information.
It is from Herbonaut, incorporated...

The Only Source Of Light

• 9 Dollar Monday
• 15 Dollar Tuesday

Add caption

Today's topic: Using plant lights as your only lighting in the home. Is it bad for your eyes?
I can see what looks like Elle Fanning, dressed as in one of the photos from her Vogue magazine appearance in the jigsaw puzzle that I have glued together and hanging on a wall when I illuminate it with plant light (She is in the front center) which is an interesting illusion...
I actually got a response from the article that I linked to which was about vaping and was one that I had grabbed from somewhere around the 12th result of my search on the subject of them.

My theory in crawling down the list is that I am suspicious of whatever means are being used to propel the top listed results to where they are.
Are the top few results more prone to be propaganda, at the top of the list because some internet marketing specialists were paid to enact that.
So, I went down the list, past sites which were labelled as advertisements and found the article on vaping.
I will soon embed here the article that I was directed to by a person who has more current information than what I found a dozen spots down the list of results...
The site is on my phone, but doesn't appear in my gmail box on the laptop.

Using a plant light as the sole source of indoor lighting (because the thing is so bright that I wouldn't see much of a difference if I turned on any other lights) has, besides having an effect on my webcam, which seems to render the purplish pink light as, well, I guess purplish pink.
I just dont want to damage my retina or anything...

Like shoddy wiring starting an electrical fire is the effect of using a plant light as the only source of light in a room...

So, I AM Thinking...

I went out upon the Monday night into Tuesday morning that it was at the Lilly Pad.
I tuned up to the free tuning application that I downloaded onto the cheaper government phone.
The application came like a trojan horse bringing so many advertisements and pop ups that sometimes I have to take a quick survey before tuning the next string on the guitar, type of thing.
I played from about 11:40 PM until 1:15 AM and netted $33.50 which, divided by the 95 minutes that I "put in," comes to $21.15 an hour -a slow Monday into Tuesday morning hour, at that.
 
So, the idea of going to work for someone for an hourly wage seems ludicrous, unless it is going to work for someone who owns a little Irish pub or something and the job is making an ass of oneself on stage for a set, and guaranteed amount from the bar, and then the tip jar.

I need to not delude myself into thinking that any music that I do at the Lilly Pad should not be subjected to the test of being amplified mightily so that the audience can hear all the subtleties which the pounding of mule hooves might obscure at the Lilly Pad.

There might be a danger in that the standards for a guy sitting on the sidewalk are commensurately lowered to factor in his situation, and he is apt to be doing pretty good for a guy just sitting on the sidewalk.

But, put the guy onstage at an Irish pub, and all of a sudden it's: "Who's this guy supposed to be?" type of thing.

Recent explosion of spending upon energy drinks sparks concern...

I've blogged about that before.

This brings up an irony in the fact that it's the guy who just sets up somewhere and starts playing who probably deserves the "who's this guy supposed to be?" and that is what I hear the most from those 2% of the population that I talk to when I'm busking, the ones who compliment me upon my bravery, saying that they themselves couldn't just set up somewhere and start playing.

I think their fears are based in insecurity about their musical ability. They feel like they would be putting upon display a lack of skill. This, I can understand.
The next time someone say's that to me I will have to ask her: "What if you could play like Jimi Hendrix, then would you be able to just set up somewhere and start playing; uninvited?"

So, I am thinking that, at $21.15 per hour, I should, someday, really try to buckle down; pretend that I am 19 years old and back in basic training, maybe, and busk for 40 hours in a given week. That would be just about $850 take home.

$850 that is safe from the thieving hand of the tax collector (He will get his 6% whenever I purchase food and general merchandise; and his 10% whenever I buy kratom.)

And, given a 40 hour busking schedule, and adding the commuting time of about an hour each day, then the time leftover for the wonton throwing around of money is usurped away, and the rest of the time is spent sleeping. So, there is likely to be an almost full pile of $850 on the coffee table after a week spent working and sleeping.

One More Truth

5 Truths You Need to Know About Vaping: Smoking electronic cigarettes is often considered safer than regular smoking. Learn why vaping is still harmful, and why you should rethink taking it up.

Good Morning, blog readers.

The thing at the top is supposed to be a link.

I have been unable to figure out, so far, how to make links appear as such by being underlined or a different color without the user having to hover the mouse over it to reveal it as such.

This blog has been somewhat neglected lately.

I am thinking of starting a second blog, a "secret" one, which I could make a whole lot more interesting by including detailed gossip about the characters in my life, many of which might read this at any given time.

The other blog, I could create using the g-mail account which I got when Bobby in building C bought me the LG Aristo 3 phone, which I have already let the service go off on.
I am right now using the free "Obama phone" which I had gotten when I was homeless.
I have already blogged about how I am pretty sure that the government was using those free phones in order to assist the census taking people in counting the homeless.

All you needed to get the phone was to be on food stamps.

The phone was presented to me as being a way to help insure that my human rights were not violated; that I would be able to call 911 in an emergency, and would be able to join the human race in walking around staring at a screen all the time, etc.

But, yeah, having a cellphone is a human right, according to the "Lifeline" program that I am signed up under.

And, I can use this free thing as a hotspot, which was the major reason that I had considered paying for the LG one.

I busked last (Sunday) night, and made only 8 bucks. I was hoping that the hour that the clocks had been set ahead would make people still feel like partying an hour later than usual.

But, by 2 AM it was starting to look like a regular Monday morning.

Saturday night, I had stayed in reading a John Grisham novel all night.

Friday had been a 9 dollar outing.

The hotspot went out on the government phone, perhaps because I had run out of data on it, or because I hadn't made a call in over a month because I had the new one, but, whatever, it's back on now. Now I am sitting in my room where it feels more comfortable to write blog posts.

Bobby in building C gave me a "vape" thing, or electronic cigarette.

For Mankind, it took about 100 years between the invention of the telephone, with Alexander Graham Bell famously yelling "Watson, come here, I need you!," and the first cellular telephone. Then only another 50 years between that and the newest i-phone.

It seems feasible that some kind of chemical that will take away the urge to smoke tobacco will come along soon if it doesn't already exist.

I am hitting the vape thing (shown) but am still wanting to run up to the bar on the corner to try to buy one American Spirit cigarette off them. Something about the actual fire that speaks to something deep in my subconscious....

A Time To Reap

• Soundcloud And The Damned Autoplay
• 45 Dollar Monday
• Bobby Acting Crazy As A Loon

I was playing pretty well but definitely feeling the effects of the cold, as one point having to shift the position of the pick in my fingers to better utilize the gripping muscles that might have been compromised by the temperature in the low 40's.

I played about 80 minutes for the 45 bucks that I made on the strength of one 20 dollar bill from a person. I was fishing for the deadhead tips by playing a dead song; that might have been where that bill came from.

There is no doubt that, should I ever desire to get a "job" I need look no further than investing in equipment and then taking my place alongside the rest of the Royal Street musicians and playing, say, 28 hours a week should I be thinking more one the lines of a part time job, or 40 hours a week like Tanya Huang, if I want to consider myself employed "full time."

A key to that will be taking a suggestion from Craig Nelson, blog reader, and putting together a "set" of music, one that will include a set list of songs, to be performed in order and that will insure that I am out there for however long it takes to run through the set.

If I were to leave before doing all my songs, then that would be blatant slothfulness that I might never lower myself to. So, I might be able to achieve the 30 hour per week goal that way. I just use the opposite side of the brain from the one that stores a list of all the songs that I know how to play but haven't been able to bring to mind in the heat of battle.

So, one goal on this week after Mardi Gras has ended, is to compile that list from A to Z.

I am not sure if the auto play "feature" can be turned off when embedding Soundcloud's player in a blog. I am not always in the mood to hear The Carcass Song blasting out of my speakers whenever I go to my blog, and I might have to resort to taking the extra time to post songs on Youtube and then throw up a still picture or two to meet the requirement that they be "videos."

My next project will be to put the best possible guitar parts that I can to the songs that I posted last week and then send those and the vocal to Jacob, who can use his synthesizer to add bass and drums to them.

At some point they will migrate to the sidebar of the blog to serve as a portfolio of sorts.

A guy who had the same name as myself of Daniel, came up and asked me if I would be interested in writing music for a film production of some sort.

That's about all at 3:16 AM, Wednesday. I guess I will listen to some music. If not the Mass in B minor by Bach again, then maybe I'll check out some Edgar Vérese.

In other news: Bobby in building C is acting crazy as a loon. I suspect he has been going through intense withdrawals from Gabapentin.

The Big Three: Wheat, Cheese And Tomato

So, it doesn’t get any better than sitting and listening to Bach after having made 71 bucks in an hour and a half of busking.
Except that my new smartphone now has no service and so, I guess I shouldn’t be pissed off that I have to spend half of what I made last night on the phone; I should be glad that I have the opportunity to pay off the phone and still put 35 bucks in my pocket.
I might try to get a cheap TV antennae for the TV that I have now, the medium sized one.
I threw away the big huge one that Jacob and I scooped off the side of the road in the city of Kenner, where he lives, after we saw it sitting there with a “Free. It works” sign on it.

I thought the joke on us was that the thing "worked," as in it came on, but it wouldn’t grab any stations. Maybe someone had found a very clever way of ridding themselves of an old, 100 pound TV without having to haul it to the dump (themselves).

But, then after hooking the antenna up to yet another TV that I came by and still no luck picking up any stations, a closer look at the antenna revealed that the cable had been sliced through with a razor blade, or something.

It was cut right where it goes into the jack, so repairing it would probably be easiest by just cutting the jack off, soldering the wires together and then using a piece of that rubber crimping tubing that shrinks when you blast it with a high heat source.

Trouble is, I don’t have a heat gun or a soldering iron, or solder, or wire strippers for that matter. A five dollar Goodwill Store antenna would be a nice find.

Also, the antenna was working when I first got it. It almost looks like it was sabotaged.

Could Travis Blaine, who stayed with me for almost twice the amount of days allotted to guests, ostensibly in exchange for 20 dollars a day, but who turned into a cheapskate who tried to "barter down" his rent by showering me with things like a 3 pound bag of cat food that his cat also ate off of, a pocketful of McDonald’s sugar packets -that was classic Travis Blaine, there: “I figured you’d probably like some sugar for your coffee...” he had said.

How can you ask 20 dollars a day of someone who is so considerate and doing so much to help out in other ways?

Plus, I got some things that he no longer had a use for, like his cleaning supplies, because the place he was moving into was going to have a cleaning lady come by every week.

When my TV went on the blink, Travis was almost smug when he said something like “I know a few tricks when it comes to electronics. I’ll take a look at it. I’m sure I can fix it.”
He flashed a smile that exuded confidence; or was it a smirk?
I quickly surmised though, that since the guy didn't ask me if I had any tools at all, or a volt-o-meter or oscilloscope, his “tricks” must have been of the low tech variety, like pressing the reset button on the back of the thing, or maybe taking the batteries out of the remote then putting them back in, type of stuff.

Tricks in the bag of the likes of Travis Blaine, the self styled "genius with a photographic memory," who was reading a Wallace Stegner

book while he was here plotting how he could chintz out on the most rent money.

Yes, Wallace Stegner, whose novels -at least the one I read- were illustrative of the beauty of the human spirit and the better side of human nature, the power of love and the triumph of good over evil, type of thing.
Blaine must have been recording the words in his memory so he could add the book to the list of what he is “well read” in.

So, to cut to the chase, I think Blaine might have made the almost invisible incision in my TV antenna so that he could “fix” the TV, then use it as an implicit bartering chip when it came time to chintz out on what he had promised up front.

He’s a genius with a photographic memory who graduated at the top of a small class at some exclusive academy in New York, who now sits behind a laptop smoking pot and doing piece work for Amazon, averaging about 8 bucks an hour.

Enough about Travis Blaine.

Bobby in building C suggested that I see a psychiatrist after I told him about those suspicions.

He had done the same thing after I suggested that someone at Sacred Heart Apartments was shutting the hot water off every other Friday or so, and since the thing can never be “looked at untill Monday,” perhaps cutting the monthly energy bill down and perhaps pocketing the difference.

Bobby came around on that issue after a couple more cold water weekends occurred.

Yes, Bobby could benefit from being just a little more paranoid.

71 Dollar Friday
With old strings, which are hanging on by a thread, the last of the batteries for the spotlight, and zero dollars to start out with, I managed to make the above amount in less than 2 hours of busking Friday night.

Lafitt’s Blacksmith Shop Tavern (shown in the photo now inserted over the title of the blog at the top) has been blasting loud hip-hop music out of speakers aimed at the street the past few nights, and they will likely be doing so all the way through Fat Tuesday, turning the gold that Lilly Pad during Mardi Gras might produce into straw, and forcing me to move down one block to near the Quartermaster.

It is only by the grace of knowing the people that work at that store, and having seen and waved to and chatted with the residents of the block at one time or other during the past 8 years that I am able to set up and play on the corner, which is across the street from the house of a lady who came out shortly after midnight when I was playing there about 4 years ago and said “Come on, it’s after midnight!” and ran me off.

She appeared at her door shortly after midnight, looked out and me and then retreated back inside. I guess she gave me a break. It was then that I made about 45 of the 71 dollars for the night.

Tanya Huang seems to be playing marathon sets. She was still at her spot at about 2:30 AM when I rode past. She starts at 11:30 AM.
She will grab 5 hours of sleep and then be back out for another 15 hour day.
Jacob said he saw somewhere that Tanya lives in some kind of artistic community, like a rooming house for local musicians or something.
Has losing her partnership with Dorise Blackmon meant that she sold her house?
Something that Alex in California, blog reader said makes more sense now, that Tanya might be supporting a lot of people, maybe back in China. Maybe putting relatives children through college, because they would do the same for her if she was the one stuck in a rice paddy and they were lucky enough to be able to busk in New Orleans.

The phone, I will probably hook up, provided they can reduce my charge from 52 to 30 bucks a month, and provided that I haven’t been hit with any kind of late charge for having let the phone get cut off yesterday.

I suppose I’ll find out if I go down there before sleeping, which I’m about to do.
Using the phone for a hotspot is worth the 30 bucks a month because, as Alex also pointed out, I was probably spending 80 bucks a month on kratom so I could sit at Uxi Duxi and use their wi-fi (and so I could reap the benefits of kratom).

It’s possible for me to buy kratom online at probably what Uxi Duxi pays wholesale, because it is approximately half the price of what they sell ounces for.

I think, as a guideline, businesses usually sell merchandise at double what their cost was.

A car dealer friend of mine once told me that “any” used car lot could sell you a car for half of what is frosted onto the window “and they would still make a little money.”

It is Saturday, we are in the midst of Mardi Gras.
If ever I was going to try to busk for something like 8 hours, now would be the time to do it. There are people everywhere in the Quarter around the clock now.

I’m really thinking about getting a bottle of tequila and going out to play on no sleep at all over the past 24 hours.

What am I saying, I need to get new strings somehow..and I quit drinking 1,129 days ago.
But, I bet that would have me out at the Lilly Pad jamming away.

And..

8 Dollar Sunday

The temperature dropped from the 60 degrees of late afternoon to a very chilly and windy condition which two tee shirts with a button up shirt over them was not proof against, as Jacob and I, along with his friend Patrick, stopped at a park in Metarie and smoked a blunt.

We had planned upon playing a certain marimba which is set up there kind of like a playground toy, but I had to return to the car to be out of the wind.
Jacob banged out a couple notes on the thing, which I could hear from the car. He said it is tuned to some “weird chord.” It might make an interesting insert into a music video, a cameo for a playground instrument...

I had no idea that the wind chill factor accounted for so much of the discomfort out there, probably making 55 feel like 38 when the gusts hit you.
I found out that the reason that it didn’t feel so bad at all as I rode towards the Lilly Pad was that I was riding in the same direction of about a 25 mile per hour breeze.

On the way home, as I inched forward into it, all I wanted to do was to get inside the warm apartment. With 6 of the 8 dollars that I made in about an hour of busking still on me.
From The Sacred Heart Cookbook
I bought a thing of string cheese which I melted into some farina, which I then added tomatoes and herbs to, aiming for a pizza-like flavor experience.

Pizza is just another food that utilizes the big three of wheat, tomato and cheese.
Lasagna, of course being basically a rearranged version as spaghetti with tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese over the top.
The difference maker is the way the wheat is prepared, since the tomato and cheese are pretty much stable.
When the wheat is made into bread is when the pizza emerges.
I think there is such a gravity towards those three ingredients that it makes people do things like putting ketchup on a cheeseburger, so they will have a pizza with a meat topping in disguise.

I used to like to dip grilled cheese sandwiches into my tomato soup. There you go again, minus the meat topping, unless it's a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, it's the same basic meal.

Since my dad was Irish, when I was growing up we would see the potato represented in about 6 suppers a week.
Boiled potatoes with ham and cabbage a lot of times.
Scalloped potatoes, baked potatoes, mashed or fried potatoes, and potatoes in shepherd’s pie, and in beef stew. It was like having something different for supper every night, though.

Wednesday or Thursday was spaghetti night. I think I recall that it was not Wednesday becauase we weren’t Italian and didn’t feel a need to adhere to their tradition.

Friday night, to give my mom a break from cooking at the end of the week, dad brought home two large pizzas. Two large pepperoni pizzas. Always from the same place, Thunderbird Pizza on River Street in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and always flat and heavy in the box and greasy.

I grew up thinking that pizza was just OK, nothing to throw a party over -the pizza from the cafeteria at school doing nothing to change this perception- not realizing that it was only the oily, spicy pepperoni that I thought was just OK.
My first slice of pizza that had just cheese, ground beef and onions was an epiphany. Plus, it was from a place that made their dough rise a bit more than Thunderbird's did.

But, upon getting home from making 8 bucks in the cold, I mixed farina with cheese, tomatoes, basil and oregano and had a near-pizza experience for under 3 bucks...

The next two days, to include fat Tuesday will be pivotal as far as my short-term finances are concerned.

A lot of tourists will be tipping “on the way out” on fat Tuesday, if the trend continues.
Exactly four years ago I posted the uncanny "71 dollars in less than 2 hours" which is an exact quotation from yesterday's post.