So Far, So Good

So this is it.

I can develop the technique of whacking the space bar on this keyboard. It's almost like playing a musical part where, at the end of each phrase there is a heavy accent.

The space bar(whack!) has to be hit like a rim shot snare after each word, but it is actually workable, thanks in part to Steveland Morris and the album pictured. I can type in time with an album that I was aware of, back when it came out.

I was 11 and had just won a radio station contest with the prize being that the top 15 albums on the Boston charts, in the summer of '73, would be delivered to the doorstep of our ranch style home in what wound up being 2 separate brown-paper-bag type paper wrapped (excuse me)

quadrangle shaped packages in the approximate dimensions of the box to the left with the name of such a shape defined...

The first package arrived just a few days before our family was to leave on a 2 week vacation on Cape Cod. It contained a typed note under an official WBZ-FM letterhead, explaining that some of the top 15 albums had plumb sold out, even in that behemoth of a city 50 miles, or exactly one hour, usually, away.
In my 11 year old mind the city was about 9 times larger than I eventually realized it to be after I was much older. But I imagined there must have been at least 25 record stores there in which to search for the top 15 albums on the Boston chart.

The Boston part turned out to be significant in that I got "Aerosmith," by Aerosmith, sometimes called their "self titled" one, which hadn't done well enough to make any top 15 lists outside of Boston. They were "the bad boy's from beantown," with that image underscored, I guess, by having the band on the cover looking like they might play you some rock and roll or maybe kick your ass.
I always thought of that as "the pendulum" swinging back from the Woodstock era, which had ushered long hair in as a fashion for young men -It was because enough girls liked to run their hands through it that, why would you want to cut it and wind up looking like a baby killer, so freshly back from killing that your killing crew cut hadn't grown out yet, type of thing.

Stevie Wonder's "Songs In The Key Of Life" is a true masterpiece that wasn't in the top 15 of the Boston rock and roll charts, at least not by the time I would have gotten it. It was probably bumped out by The J. Geils Band's "Bloodshot" album,which came on red slightly translucent vinyl.that was one of the more flexible records. I remembered the older records, some of which actually said "Unbreakable" on them. They were very stiff and hard to break but they would shatter...

The note in the first package promised that the remaining 7 albums would be sent as soon as they arrived in Boston. I thought about writing back to them asking: "Well, you play these albums on your station, so you must have at least one of each; could you just send me those..?" I would have thought they might have a direct pipeline to the record company's marketing people.I'm sure they would have air mailed the station a brand new Paul McCartney's "Red Rose Speedway," had they left their copy on a sunny window ledge or something...

So this keyboard with the stuck space bar key, might actually have ties to Alex Carter, whom I believe mailed it to me back in 2015.

At the time, my laptop had some keys that didn't function. I actually had all the characters I couldn't produce in a small text file that I would copy and paste into whatever I was writing if I needed one. An external USB keyboard hadn't occurred to me; I must have thought I would have to download and install some driver specific to whatever brand of keyboard it was.

I tried to liberate the key the other day and wound up making a comment somewhere that's body was like 27 pages of spaces. I began to imagine a message of 27 pages of spaces being part of some diagnostic that the keepers of the algorithm use,which, when sent resets that person's profile, overwriting it with nothing. I will know if the Ellen Alverdyan ads stop popping up everywhere...

In Which I Play A Song And Sing

@easystick

In Bed By Nine Thirty

 I'm kind of still pretty busy but fighting the urge to lay back and listen to about 11 albums in stereophonic high fidelity...

So, I'm leaving the Horsehead Nebula to babysit you all while I'm going to do the Wim Hof deep breathing method for about a half hour.

Don't give the nebula a hard time, and do what it say's...

Ready To "Be Safe Out There."

I guess I could be the one to write the groundbreaking book on the subject of: How to wean yourself off of screen staring.

Perhaps my spending "way too much time" on YouTube, and the feeling of being powerless over it is just an obstacle to mindful living and, once I get over the hurdle, I will be in a position to give advice to others.

It's like a palette of the seven deadly sins, along with every vice, is available on every DEvice...

I guess I should thank my lucky stars that I don't have a porn addiction, and don't have 3 thousand videos of it saved somewhere, unwilling to delete any one of them because, like, where am I ever going to find another birthmark on a girl's ass exactly like that if the video is removed from the server?

But, besides "lust," there is the "envy" that might creep in from watching videos of virtuoso musical performances, inspiring me to buckle down and start practicing with a metronome for 2 hours every morning, before doing anything else, only to wind up watching 2 hours of videos every morning before doing anything else...

Then there are the "anger" videos, depicting white people just like me being senselessly attacked or pushed in front of trains by what look like Democrats of color. Then, often the "highlighted" comment would be something like: "Good, white boy deserved that for bringing me over as a slave!" left by a 20 something year old...

I've heard a lot of people talking about how they are uncomfortable out in public now, unsure of what to talk about, or how loud to do it..

This little girl, who was a "prodigy," on the bass guitar, has had a channel on YouTube that started with a video of her playing her dad's bass for the first time at the age of 4 or 5.

She was using an app called Yousician, which makes learning like playing a video game. Instead of the boring polka dots on the sheet music I learned from, it's more like following a bouncing ball on the screen and using the bass like a joystick to hit all the right notes on time, with onscreen feedback rewarding you for nailing it with some kind of splash like a mini firework.

Now, she is about 11 years old and posts videos almost daily of her playing along note for note with bass players who are considered the best in the world. And she seems to be filming from the music room in her house which is chock full of bass guitars of all kinds, a drum kit, keyboards, and a full digital recording studio. Her dad has been running the channel, and I guess the talent of the girl has done most of the work, drawing the attention of those very same best bass players in the world, and she now seems to be living the life of the rich and famous; wearing new and expensive looking things, unboxing brand new thousand dollar guitars and other musical toys almost daily.

Her channel has something like 800k subscribers, and it is linked to a Patreon so people can send money, and she even has a store which sells hoodies and hats with her brand on them....

And I'm not jealous over the overt display of material wealth.

It's actually eye-opening to "how things should be done," these days. Get a good little video camera and then go to work making content, every single day if you can. Find a niche and even if your stuff is only fit for the likes of one in a thousand people; if you do the math that might equate to 10,000 followers, who might Patreon you an average of just 7 dollars a year; but -there you go; there's a career doing what you love, 70 grand a year for making a video almost every day. That could be life changing, because you will soon figure things like: If I get a really good night's sleep and eat only superfoods and get up every morning and meditate before going for a 3 mile run, my videos come out much more easily almost every day and they are better.

So, I'm grateful to Ellen for that awakening, at the very least -for being a textbook example of how things should be done in 2424... This isn't going into a studio to cut a demo and then mailing an EP on vinyl to the local rock station, hoping they will play it during their "home grown rock" segment, and it will start being requested, and then....

The emotion I get from being a follower of Ellen's channel is I keep fantasizing about saving her from drowning after she falls through the ice when she's skating; or shooting the gun out of the hand of someone who is attempting to abduct her away from her father (In Pirate's Alley in the French Quarter, for that one -I don't know where the imaginary frozen pond is) or her having type AB negative blood, which the hospital has none of and I encounter her distraught parents outside the hospital in tears because the nearest unit of that type that could be found is a 5 hour flight away, and it would be too late, and I ask them what's wrong and they tell me, and I say: "I'm type AB negative, where's the blood lab?" type of thing and I save Ellen's life, so she can keep playing bass as well as almost anyone else on the planet.

But, yeah, it's starting to bug me almost; saving the girl over and over in my mind in every imaginable way. But rather than look at that as a curse, maybe it's a golden opportunity for me to explore what the hell is going on in my own head that might only be surfacing now...

They are probably making about $15K a month, and, more power to them. I wonder if Ellen's talent has done most of the heavy lifting, or if her dad has some kind of education in "online marketing." Both could be true in this case...

The sun is coming up and I'm about to take a walk to Winn Dixie where I might just get the ingredients to do a week's long water fast. To wit: water.

Maybe I can sort through my thoughts and emotions along the way and figure out why I'm haunted by dreams about saving the life of a girl who seems to be doing just fine, thank you, on her own...

 

 

The Idiot's Guide To Useful Idiots

I am under the throes of video addiction at a level that concerns me.

I went to the blog of Alex Carter, something I do less and less of these days, as in maybe once a month, since the quality of his writing has diminished, commensurate with his having taken up drinking again.

He has astounded me by being a text book, central casting version of the California progressive liberal, or whatever is the label stuck to "them."

I am starting to think that some globalist actor, or at least some group of U-Cal Berkley drop outs whose job it is to maintain the code for the Google algorithm, has as a goal to divide the people of this country into roughly two equal halves, and then pit the one against the other.

And at this point in history, with AI in its infancy, and with the smartphone having been calibrated to be a mind control tool, the person with a hand on the algorithm's lever has probably surpassed in power those that grip the fossil fuel lever. The tech people have become richer, overnight, than the oil moguls that took a generation or two to accumulate their wealth; and I think fossil fuels have become your grandfather's means of controlling populations.

Was not one of the objectives of the "world-wide" lockdowns to take just about every car off the road, to put a squeeze on the people with all that oil money? Maybe even to devalue the money that they already have? That Arabian Sheikh who would show up at the casino with the murmurings about him being a billionaire, "with a 'b,'" having circulated with people trying to picture what a thousand million dollars would look like, and all that. Yeah, like him.

Fast forward, and it's the Google algorithm that has erupted like black gold from the earth, and the power shifted to where a Zuckerberg is worth 100 times as much as that sheikh, and then this pandemic happens, and all the cars are taken off the streets, worldwide. An easy task, when you have the complicity of the media that everyone is staring at the programming of, all day every day. Then of course, pipelines are shut down or blown up, and it begins to look more like a war between new and old money.

And the pandemic also has the feature that, every time a citizen gets a "free 'immunization,'" CVS bills the treasury about $23 bucks, and sends it to Big Pharma, while Fauci is appearing on bought-off "mainstream" media telling everyone to get six of them. 

And yeah, in all the confusion a guy with dementia gets installed in the Whitehouse, and the war machine cranks right up.

And there are people like Alex Carter in California taking PBS and NPR and the other 70 outlets owned by the same corporate interests, as gospel.

To me, it's like those logic puzzles I used to love to do.

They would describe a party for example. There would be 6 red chairs, 6 blue and 6 green. A party of 6 would show up, 3 of them would be wearing red carnations, 3 of them yellow. And then information would be given like, only one person with a red carnation is sitting in a green chair; three people are wearing hats; one of them is sitting in a blue chair; and he does not have a yellow carnation. Two people with red carnations arrived before anyone wearing brown shoes...etc

Then, at some point you have enough information to answer some question, like so who is the one that showed up last? Or something....

I look at the 72 outlets all broadcasting the exact same message, so that you could flip through all 72 "news" channels and hear: "Biggest threat to Democracy since the civil war..." 72 times. Quite unlikely that each anchor chose those same words. 

Yet, there are those like Alex who just think that that is the voice of truth; always has been...

I remember as a kid, thinking that the news was true. And, since Walter Cronkite probably believed that whatever he was reciting was factual, there was the added deception that his sincerity afforded, and I remember thinking that was "the way it is."

So, with the last person who was involved in the Kennedy assassination having recently passed away, I would vote for Trump/Kennedy just to get that burning lingering curiosity satisfied (the releasing of classified documents pertaining to the event).

In the not so far future I think there may be no geographic borders; the only station that anyone could hold of any import will merely be if they are online or offline. It won't matter from where.

Armies won't be fighting for any red white and blue or any other color flags, war will probably default to the simplest division of the race into two roughly equal halves. It seemed like it was shaping up to be all "people of color" against the Caucasians; that would have been a pretty even sided battle. I think the sticking point was that Asians and maybe even Indians could not be persuaded to join the "of color" side. Maybe the algorithm hasn't learned how to control their minds because of some language barrier; or maybe the Chinese, for one, are actually smart to insulate their citizenry from western decadence.

So, it think that perhaps Marxist's vs. everyone else might be the dielectric that keeps the population in a sustainable polarity.

It's interesting how, as a whatever I am, I can observe the mainstream media in lock-step and hear Judy Woodruff bare ass lying, and pulling a "report" out of her butt hole about Trump asking Netanyahu to prolong the killing until after the election lest it boost the Kamala Hilarious campaign. It's down to bold-faced lying because the group that the algorithm has cordoned off into the half that Alex Carter is a poster boy for* has been captured and in Orwellian style is ready to accept that war is peace and ignorance is strength, type of thing.

Never suspicious that all 72 media outlets are parroting the same Hitler-esque big enough lies repeated enough times; type of thing, and though us "right wing" people can notice, and wonder aloud just why it's so important, to the people with their hand on the algorithm lever, to keep Trump out of office and out of these wars. 

Us "conservatives" can figure out what color chair the man who gave the woman wearing a black carnation a piece of cake to is sitting in. But people living in places that have become crime infested shit holes like California have been trained to not even consider any other side to any story. I wonder if they even have access to a RFK Jr. speech or if the telecom companies throttle that data. Carter has said that the Internet is "spotty" out there in San Jose. Spotty like it is in Iran, he might mean. Seems to me they can't be stupid enough to believe that RFK Jr. is a radical lunatic just because the radical lunatics they see all day every day on their phones say he his...

A Trump administration would be a catastrophe; even though we had 4 years of one and it wasn't. It takes 8 years to impose a dictatorship, I guess, and Donald was just getting warmed up...

*Alex, who was a fist pumping supporter of the BLM scam, should be right there alongside those holding the "Free Palestine" signs. He IS them in every other ideological way, with the Trump Derangement Syndrome being paramount. But, since he sent his saliva to 23 And Me, and it came back that he is like 0.4% "Jewish," well, that's a whole different kettle of fish. He has skin in the game and on the matter of Israel he is a MAGA sympathizer. How feckless. I hope none of his far left radical progressive Marxist neighbors attack him when they see him coming out of a synagogue. He might be bludgeoned to death while yelling "I'm with you, I think George Floyd should replace Washington on the dollar bill!" 

He's not a very useful idiot, his blog having no followers that I know of, for example...

I think Jesus warned believers about not being "lukewarm."

Anyways; I've resolved not to be a useful idiot myself, and I just pray for the will to never again click on another: "Watch Host Go Silent After Guest Say's The Quiet Part Out Loud!" type of video...

And I guess Woodruff wouldn't be bare ass lying if there weren't the gullible Alex Carter's out there.

Hopefully he has lost the link to this blog and I can start writing here without his snarky comments appearing as "anonymous" any more....

The Elusive Daily Blog

Posting in mid-decision between posting something here, or going right to the Audacity music studio..
This particular song has been in the works for like 2 months now. This is a complete departure from my previous method that involved more "catching lightning in a bottle." Hoping to play something in alignment with the moon and stars and my biorhythms, not to mention the tide.

Sometimes things got played that I thought I could never replicate. 

But, even such phrases, as the transcriptions of Frank Zappa solos by Steve Vai prove, can be expressed in "mathematical" terms. 

I think of it in mechanical terms.

So, even stuff that might have been "accidentally" produced by a string getting caught in a fingernail, or something can still be notated and then played again. 

But, I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Vai could transcribe any of it.
So, I'm now writing parts that are only intended to be played one way.

 
Just as two different concert violinists will sound pretty much the same, playing a Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, whatever I compose should be able to be rendered in polka dots on a page of "staves." 

Keeping the same "symphony" in my head for weeks on end, instead of changing it nightly, to something that can't be remembered the next morning is, I believe optimal; and perhaps even a stroke of genius type of thing.

It might take a couple weeks of mulling over a tune before the thought of a choir of Maria Callas samples singing in harmony comes to mind. I think you have to really live with a song; take it out for walks, have it in your head off and on every day; maybe even incessantly and nervously hum it to yourself every waking hour...
Maria Callas was very amazing, both for her vocal chord gymnastics, and for the fact that she smoked cigarettes.

Artist's Date 1

In the Artist's Way book by Julia Cameron she wasn't kidding about the "artist date" being something that you will I not always be in the mood for,  when the time comes...

But it is "non-negotiable."

It's literally taking the artist within out to do something -just the two of you.

My first one is to Bayou St. John.

I/we are going to sit under a tree and play the guitar that has four strings.

I'm leaving only 4 strings on it and approaching it like it was a banjo or a cello, to try to gain a new perspective on music through not having the bottom four strings to have to either do something with, or avoid.

The tree I have sat under before is already being sat under by three people with little chairs and a cooler.

I'll just go down a couple more trees. This does feel like a waste of time, as Julia said it sometimes would. I could probably do the very same thing in the quarter and make a few bucks.

The next tree was a fire ant fest, with hills around the trees and swarms of them all over a Popeye's Chicken box.

This tree has no ants, just a ferret or possum hole...

Consider And Never Underestimate The Lillies Of The Field

Well, the situation is that Lilly, whom I told yesterday that I had gotten off the plasma bus nearby the Quarter, because I had been told I had to come back the next day by them, instead of them buying 690 milliliters of my plasma, said she would buy me a set of guitar strings.

I had decided to walk around the Quarter, picking up money, tobacco, weed and drinks off of, what turned out to be the most successfully, Royal Street.

So, she basically culled from me that I was going to buy a bag of superfood powder to powder over the next few days, out of whatever plasma money I got, along with guitar strings, to answer her question of why I don't play in front of her house.

It used to be that I would have about even odds of making the same $55 that a 3 hour excursion to the plasma place would yield (minus the $2.50 bus fare) with 3 hours of playing in front of her house, but things have been "different" since about a year ago, now. 

My Venmo card, which had been injected with $50 by a friend named John, who's in Green Bay, whom I met at the Lilly Pad, probably during the latter years of The Drinking Age, perhaps 2013-2014, has had its balance whittled down via a roll of toilet paper here, and a lighter there..

I only vaguely remember the night, but I'm sure that, at the mention of Wisconsin, I related how, Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan are about the only states that all the people I've met from were really cool people. Granted, it's a small sample, but, even when driving a cab in Phoenix in 1999, I remember bringing a couple, who were from Iowa, to the Bank One Ballpark, or as I called it, the 3 hour nap in an 72 degree environment chamber.

I would pay for one of the cheapest, highest up seats, in a spot where, even if a fouled off ball reached it would have already popped so high as to be almost it its apogee, so it would land, if it did, like a feather on my head, and hardly disturb me as I slept. 

I would park my cab in the 113 degree parking lot then go to the window and ask for "a four dollar ticket."

And that would place me somewhere along the very top row. The roof would be closed overhead, and it would be 72 degrees, which would, probably not surprisingly feel nice and cool after coming in from the desert.

It got so the sound of the crack of a bat and a crowd cheering became like a lullaby; and it was easy to imagine being back in childhood and having fallen asleep while your dad is watching the Red Sox on TV. That can be quality sleep. 

There were times, though, that I actually became intrigued by the game and would keep my eyes peeled for empty seats further down. As the game started, it was often possible to move down halfway to the field and sit in the $25 seat of someone who got a flat tire, or something, type of thing....

But, driving the cab during the 110 degree season, you have to have the windows rolled up and the A/C running constantly. You even should park in the shade while you are in between fares, as you will notice a few degrees difference. The 3 hours in the ballpark was a nice break from the constantly running cab.

Even the cave that I was living in, in the hills of Dobbins Peak would exhibit the phenomenon of heating up like a brick oven about 2 hours after the sun went down during this season.

My theory about that: There was a rock about the size of a Winnebago "protecting" me from the sun. My cave was in the shadow of that rock, plus two that were stacked upon it like a doughnut ring, one about the size of a jeep and a rowboat sized one on top of that, and what was happening was the rock was absorbing heat from the sun on the other side of it, but it took that wave of heat a few hours to make its way through the rock to the wall of my cave, which would start radiating heat from around 11:30 through midnight. 

I would crawl outside and sit under the stars at these times. 

There were mice everywhere, finding God knows what, to eat. The couple of candles I kept lit inside the cave kept them out.

There was also about a 4 foot diamondback rattlesnake that liked to go under a certain rock that I became aware of one night when walking too close to it on my return from the store.

Once I knew it was under there, I thought about how, as soon as darkness falls, which happens abruptly -there being little moisture in the air to reflect the sun, making for almost no dusk (nor dawn) just darkness as soon as the sun disappears, the mice immediately appear. 

It was already so dark that I had to strain to see them, so, just as a marker, I once dropped a corn chip, which I could see. 

I saw it instantly begin moving off in a certain direction. The next dozen or so chips I dropped also "got legs" as soon as they hit the ground. 

So, I thought about this and waited until right before dark and dropped a handful of chips in front of the rock, and sure enough, in the waning light I learned that diamondback rattlesnakes don't hesitate -they don't sit there, coiled up and think, what is that little greyish white thing that just scurried to within a foot of me? I wondered if the mouse would have to be there long enough for its body heat to be picked up by the pits in that particular viper. Maybe they see them glowing infra red with their eyes, also...(will have to Google that).

But, yeah the diamondback ate well and was never coiled up and rattling in my cave whenever I crawled in, and it was a beautiful experience. I was 350 feet above the city, by my calculations. Six miles in front of me, were all the tall building of the downtown area. At night I could see the planes coming in to land at Sky Harbour and they would all be in a row, zeroed in by auto-correct, no doubt, but it looked like a string of pearls, each set of lights separated by probably about 6 miles..

During the day I would be surrounded by squirrels, as I always kept my backpack stocked with a large bag of unsalted, un-roasted peanuts.

But, back to the point, I remember that particular couple from Cedar Rapids (I think they said) being avid conversationalists and disarming enough in their happy-go-lucky demeanor that I was able to tell them stories about living in the cave, and driving a cab with a shirt and tie on. They were typical of all the other people I've met from Iowa.

At the mention of Green Bay, I might have told John about how I once worked with a guy in Ponte Vedra Beach, who was from Wisconsin, and who had found himself there after having done a database search on U.S. cities and weighed the data on wages, quality of life, is there public transportation, a pro football team there? etc. 

And, I had just arrived there after living in Charlottesville for about a year, after having found it the same way. Ethnic mixture, is there a college, is there a gym, how clean is the water, is there a symphony orchestra...a pro sports team?

So, I guess that ties it back to John, who sent me $50 that has been toilet papered and lighter-ed down a bit, as I am still negotiating the trip up north to see family and friends, waiting for my brother and his family to return from Disneyland, and knowing that after such an arduous round trip, the discussion of them spending more money on a ticket to get me there becomes more strained, perhaps. Or, he could be just rolling in money, I don't know....

Call It Legacy Tender, Or Something...

Hello. 

I am sitting on Lily's steps after having walked around in the quarter, which seemed like coming back to old haunts and made me feel nostalgic and out of time. It has changed that much, and exudes the aura of "you can never go back, the past is gone.." Had I shown up today with nothing but a guitar and a backpack, rather than in 2010, I can't see how I could have had anywhere near the same adventure.

I've never seen so many unhappy looking tourists, and so many threatening looking -I used to call them skeezers- locals.

There are young black kids all along Bourbon Street banging on plastic buckets and turning what used to be an eclectic mixture of the 2 or 3 bands from the nearest 2 or 3 clubs, into utter chaos.

The club personnel that I saw were visibly perturbed, but I think they are afraid it could be considered racist to tell any of them to take their 5 gallon plastic buckets and their drumsticks and take a hike.

I will say that the quarter has enough  happening in the present moment (to be vigilant of) that it isn't merely like strolling down Memory Lane... there is clear and present idiocy.

So,  I walked down to Lily's as far as Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Tavern (I'll provide a link) and I found one Grenade with some left in it outside of that establishment.

And then Lily informed me that she will be able to buy me a set of strings tomorrow; ostensibly so I won't go to the plasma place as, I went there today and was told I have to go back tomorrow -which is pretty much the way that place operates.

So now, I walk home and see about trying to get up early enough in the morning to meet Lily to go to the music store, and that's all for now from this "walking down bourbon" mobile post.

Oh, The Clover Grill has a sign that says "no cash" and that's like a really scary, surrealistic sign of things changing too fast. Like; why not keep honoring cash for Christ's sake? Call it "legacy tender," or something...

Return To The Cradle

Well, I turned the air conditioner off so it would be quiet when I went to record some acoustic guitar tracks. It is quiet and about 82 degrees in here.

I'm planning upon having a productive week, this upcoming one. This might be the time when everything comes together and runs like a Swiss watch...

But, I've been sleeping in shorter naps rather than 8 hour stretches and it is about time to fall asleep to Beethoven's 6th symphony and let the needle automatically return itself to its cradle when the side is done...

Bird Calls

 It's pretty weird how so much of our identity is linked to just the sound of our names; sort of like bird calls.

Whatever the bird is it will likely have a song. The term "song" is used loosely in the case of the crow and the black caped night heron, but the same can be said of the band The Ramones, I guess.

The point being that someone will point to some radom person and say: "That's Stuart Smith!" The sound is supposed to mean something to you.

I often sit on my couch in my apartment and imagine being visited by certain of the most random figures I can conjure up.

I envision my front door opening and; in they walk.

It's kind of a skill to imagine whomever would be the most bizarre personage to see sitting in one of my extra chairs.

Their own discomfiture over being in my apartment always factors into the equation. I would want to get Elton John something to drink, at least, for example...

And, I would fumble for the right ice-breaking comment to put Charles Dickens at ease, or maybe give Gale Sayers a firm handshake, in the fantasy...

But, I think one of my propensities would be to keep repeating their name over and again in my head. That's friggin Judy Rankin, the first women's U.S. Open golf champion!!!

Sitting in my fold out chair...jeez, what kind of music should I put on..?

But I think it would be hard for the person's name to not be echoing through my brain.

Once you know a person's name, you know who they are. "I didn't know who the hell the guy was; but it turns out he's Stuart Smith," type of thing.

"No, not that Stuart Smith, another one..."

"Oh."

I think the person's name, like the call of whatever bird they are would repeat in my mind, as in: "I can't believe Donny Osmond is using my bathroom right now..."

I guess one would have to sometimes imagine being visited by certain of the most random people imaginable to understand....

I think I'm about to walk the mile to the Winn Dixie grocery store, where I will let the muse guide me to what I should eat. I might bring a divining rod in there and put myself in a trance and flow aimlessly through the aisles with my eyes closed. 

I might start blogging again; this wasn't that bad. I can always move the entire content over to another platform that isn't going to shadow ban it because I suggested that Biden was a bumbling fool, back in 2020.

I guess that comment, unlike the subject of it; aged well.

Just Came Here To Use The Word "Muck," Dear Reader

But I kind of want the blog to be stories about me catching turtles in a pond in New Hampshire when I was about 12, and such.

Those painted turtles dove fast. As fast as turtle doves do dive...

You needed one kid, leaning precariously over the bow of the canoe; fishing net poised for a plunge into the black waters, or more accurately; the waters that always looked black because there was black shit at the bottom. The pond was surrounded by hills, forested with the kind of trees that shed their leaves every fall. 

They sink to the bottom and turn into the black "muck" that you can smell if you are swimming and get a nose-full of water and can taste a little bit of in the perch and pickerel and occasional "rock" bass that came out of there.

So, we couldn't see the bottom, and whatever depths of water the turtles were diving to, after dipping hastily off the bogs they had hitherto been sunning on, could have been 30 feet, for all we knew, because all you could see was black, when you looked down.

The canoe would be set at a slow drift towards the sunning turtles, with us sitting motionless, until such a time that the encroachment of a large aluminum object that must have looked like The Titanic to a painted turtle, created enough alarm in them -their alarms seemingly all set at the same sensitivity level, or perhaps they were following the cue of an alpha tortoise, if there's such a thing; or maybe the most skittish turtle was enough to spook the others by being the first to dive- that dive, they did. And pretty fast.

At that point, the sitting perfectly still part is pointless, and the kid in the rear starts to paddle as hard as he can, full steam ahead, With a good enough surge of speed, the turtles can be reached before they are more than the length of a kids arm plus the handle on a fishing net down into the blackness that looked like it was over your head, and always gave me the impression of us hunting turtles in octopus' ink...

So, if I come up with stories such as the turtle one, where I might be able to kindle the same excitement and adrenaline rush in the readers, as they vicariously plunge their nets into the blackness, aiming for a quickly diving turtle. 

And then, we would take them back to the little camp-house and race them against each other. That's a lame sport, by the way. 

There seems to be no way to motivate a turtle to either run towards some goal or away from some danger. They're probably not thinking so much about the lettuce and strawberries at the finish line but; is it worth sticking your neck out for, type of thing. They were recently snatched right out of the water, then swallowed by one huge-ass sardine, so; they're not always ready to race in that circumstance...

But the turtle is also not going to stick his head out to try to outrun any threat. Outrunning is probably not one of their go-to survival strategies. Not in their wheelhouse. 

Instead, it's going to pull its head in as a defense; and doesn't it suck if that's the turtle you have an ice cream sandwich riding on?

New Post, Here We Go...

What Would Jesus Do?

Oh, yeah, he would walk around preaching and performing miracles; I guess I'll do that...

Maybe my life w

S

ill end the same way as His did? 

I mean the going to heaven part. 

I think he descended into hell for the 3 days -he didn't go to heaven as soon as they stuck a fork in Him on the cross; I think he went to hell over the 3 days of physical "non-responsiveness." I believe he had some ass to kick down there; I'm not sure.

He would have been a first ballot inductee into heaven. He would have gone "straight to heaven," to echo speech that I heard growing up Catholic.

I think the alternative refers to those of us that might have to endure a stint in Purgatory before ascending.

This consciousness here, might be that Purgatory.

I was required to read Dante's Inferno  in Catholic high school, which I did. 

But, since I wasn't required to think about it critically to attempt to reconcile what Dante was trying to say with my own understanding of human consciousness i.e. my own life, that's all I did.

In my immature mind, I remember just coming away with an image of Paul McCartney as like a Las Vegas showgirl with ribbons on her (his) nipples and it would be his to eternally girate his body in a circular kind of vertical Hoola Hoop aspect, so that the ribbons affixed to the tips of her (his) nipples would keep going in mesmerizing circles. I was pretty sure that that was what awaited Paul in Purgatory, should Purgatory be like what Dante had in mind....

But about the resurrection of Jesus (and then I'll get back to some more topical subject matters) I think it notable that he "ascended"into heaven, after showing himself to be resurrected for probably 3 days, walking up to people in other bodies maybe, because they couldn't recognize him....

How much longer would He have lived after the resurrection? Would He resume walking around preaching and performing miracles?

He was 33, reportedly, when he was killed by the State and so, after being dead for 3 days, He showed himself to a few people but then went up into the clouds, instead of walking up the the guy's who were nailing him to the cross and freaking them the fuck out!

Anyways, I digress.

Standup Comedy

I've been having a good run with my second vocation of musician -no complaints here.

But I will soon be hitting the open mic standup comedy events around here and I guess it's time for that train to leave the station. I've been preparing all my life albeit without my knowledge.

I'm home brewing wine. 

And I have started a few half gallons of grape juice by putting a good amount of sugar and some yeast in the juice and then affixing a condom over the top of the bottle to allow the gasses to escape slowly through a pin hole made with a needle and to prevent any air from getting in. Fermentation of sugar in anaerobic which means no air (Alex Carter).

Ok, here we go, the joke is about how I use a flavored condom as the airlock to prevent air getting in and let CO2 (that's carbon dioxide, Californians) out.

But I have to put a pinhole in the condom or otherwise it would explode about 2 days into fermentation.

"Some of you are probably here because of a pinhole in a condom" is one joke that takes about 4 seconds. 

So I just have to fill another 59 minutes and 20 seconds and I'll have a Netflix special.

I found a 60 dollar bottle of wine on my way the the store.

I Take A Cab To The Grocery Store was going to be the blog post title with the "cab" being the bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon that I found on a step as if "free to a good home," something that is SO New Orleans, but I digress. I found the wine because I decided to walk instead of taking a cab to the store. But I picked up the wine bottle and continued on to the store, taking a cab(ernet) with me to the store but not taking a cab to get there. I have over-explained that; a sure sign that I might be rambling. A 60 dollar bottle of wine is a manifestation of the "you get what you pay for" thing. People will fork out that kind of money (and maybe reconsider breaking their 7 years of sobriety and deciding to leave the bottle on the front step "free to a good home" instead of drinking it) only because it is just a little better than anything cheaper. It has the difference that makes the difference. 

So, whatever. I'm going to blog now I think ...again after 3 days of being literally in hades, and kicking some ass I humbly add.