Doing this on my phoneand n
ot
very
well the laptop keeps trying to restart itself might be the power adapter
ot
very
well the laptop keeps trying to restart itself might be the power adapter
Wednesday, June 20, 2018
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
The Scardino Sessions
So, Jacob Scardino, a friend of mine whom I met at the Uxi Duxi,
back when he had the long and shaggy look of someone who might be into the esoteric goods inside the store; a look that, in retrospect, and after having visited his studio, was most likely his attempt to look like the Frank Zappa in the posters that were prominently displayed there- brought me to his studio, Monday afternoon.
The haircut in the photo to the left, he had undergone, in order to help him get a job, which he did, at the Uxi Duxi.
He quit during his third day of training, though. This did make me wonder how devoted a band-mate he might be in the future.
He showed up in a SUV type vehicle, to follow me to Sacred Heart Apartments where I rode my bike to drop it, and a bag of kitty litter off, while grabbing my gear.
It seemed like about a 30 mile ride.
Jacob wasn't sure if he should take the Interstate, being somewhat of a novice behind the wheel of a vehicle. He wasn't sure if he should allow me to smoke in that vehicle, which he told me he had only had for 2 days.
Bob, his "guardian" was a stickler about certain things.
Jacob declined to smoke a bit of weed, because of an undefined fear of Bob, also.
We got to the house, in Kenner, Louisianna, where they both lived.
I guess he has been under Bob's stewardship since the age of 14, and now he is about 20, and it's about time he get a job, hence the Uxi Duxi experiment.
The house wound up being "right up the same alley" with the house that I grew up in, you could have slipped it somewhere into my childhood neighborhood and it would have blended in. A ranch style brick house it was, although it could have just been brick-faced.
It would have been Mr. Mattson's house, up the street a few houses from ours.
Mr. Mattson might have been the "Bob" of our neighborhood.
Bob is Jacobs guardian, he is seventy years old, but looked 44, as he sat at a desk piled up so high with stuff that it probably blocked the view of the computer he was almost certainly on, because why else would a fellow sit there at a desk for at least the whole 2 hours that Jacob and I jammed in his studio.
Bob, "He,'s not a hoarder, but..." collected things.
Behind him, the wall was one whole bookshelf, with The Bible being the one book that's spine jumped out at me, it being in set in at least 4 times the font-size of any other book that was on that shelf. I thought that was a nice touch.
Jacob had notified me that his guardian was some kind of strict Christian.
The middle class people in our neighborhood had caught a nice wave, in that the values of their houses increasing over time, outpacing the increases in the cost of living, so that the monthly mortgage payments became a smaller and smaller slice of their income pies, as the years passed, and us kids grew into spoiled brats, totally unaware of the rude awakenings that awaited us.
Monthly payments, over the last ten years of the life of the mortgage became only a fraction of what it would cost to rent the same house, at the current market rates.
For example, when my parents remitted their final $228 to the bank, in 1987, you would have to pay more than twice that to rent a one-bedroom in a decent neighborhood. While they then owned outright a ranch style house, with a yard and a fence around the back one.
They had paid almost 3 times the selling price of the house, but, 40 years later, (after they had been living in it "all paid off" for 15 years, to boot) it sold for 14 times that amount.
Plus, as the "cost of living" went up, so did salaries.
So, by paying a mortgage, beginning in 1960, and ending in 1990, life was good.
This meant summer vacations, second cars, kids going to good colleges, and in the case of Mr. Mattson or Bob, being able to turn your house into a museum, crammed to the gills with collectibles, to include thousands of DVD's, books, and a whole hallway lined with autographed photos of famous people. There has to be at least a six-pack of Billy Beer somewhere in that house.
And, of course (it seems) they had Vietnamese neighbors...
Jacobs contribution to the collection (not horde) of stuff seemed to be the Frank Zappa paraphernalia, and alongside it the Elvis stuff. Jacob seems to be into that odd pair of entertainers.
"He,'s not a hoarder, but..." Jacob had said to me during our ride over there, as a way to prepare me for what I was about to see, I guess.
Behind Bob, the wall was one whole bookshelf, with The Bible being the one book that's spine jumped out at me, it being in set in at least 4 times the font-size of any other book that was on that shelf. I thought that was a nice touch.
Jacob had notified me that his guardian was some kind of strict Christian, as a way of preparing me for the sight of that, I also guess.
There were 3 organs, along with a bunch of collectible toys, such as Star Wars dolls, in a small room, that Jacob called "the toy room."
He had called the house: "The M.O.C." -for museum of crap.
I had to compete with a drum kit for a spot on the floor to put my feet as I sat down with my guitar and harmonica in front of a microphone that was protruding towards me from out of a pile of Hans Solo figurines or something.
Jacob had the Audacity program on his laptop.
He clicked through its menus so frenetically that it seemed like he was abusing the machine. In situations where 3 clicks may be required to complete an operation, he would rattle all three of them off, like a rattlesnake striking, and the display on the screen would jerk and twitch, and I was fascinated by how in the space of a generation Man has become so adroit with a mouse.
I guess an old fogy was learning from a millenial how to save time, a millisecond at a time...
I wasn't sure what our recording session might yield. Jacob had seemed kind of tentative when he had asked me if I ever wanted to jam with a keyboard player. My ego driven thought was that he might have apprehensions about his ability to complement my music; that, perhaps I was in my own universe, immersed so deep that, No, I'm just a solo artist, dude... had crossed his mind.
Myself, I have been in the pickle of having decided to live in the present moment and not to even identify with thoughts of any "future," but at the same time, what did I have to lose, the guy at least had a keyboard and a drumkit, I gathered.
Jacob turned the microphone on, which was running through a USB mixer and into his laptop and began recording me just playing incomplete bits of some of my songs.
This was OK, it appears, because any verse that is missing can be inserted just using the repeat effect to make a prior one repeat.
These, Jacob will take, and, using the one Roland synthesizer that I had counted among the "3 organs" in the studio, will be able to add what I expect to be incredible musical parts to it.
He is a very competent keyboard player, the music of his that he played for me sounded amazingly like Frank Zappa, he had even used the pitch shifting effect that Audacity has to achieve a sound that I have heard on a lot of Zappa's stuff.
Jacob is kind of the Anti-Blaine, to me, referring, of course to Travis Blaine, once roommate of mine for nineteen days..
The Anti Travis
While Travis lived a sheltered existence, having probably had more contact with software than with human minds, he unfortunately came into contact with a small sample of humanity, in whose company he was apparently seen as a genius, having risen to the top of that hapless society.
The exclusive, highly competitive, famous and esteemed school that Travis was the valedictorian of, was probably peopled by the moronic children of other parents who attempted to shield their kids from the evils of the public school system by cloistering them there.
Travis; Claims to be a gifted musician, who almost toured with a band that almost went on a tour once. Upon picking up my guitar and approximating the chords to a Perl Jam song, he replaced it on my couch with a smug air of: "So, you can see, I know my shit when it comes to music."
Jacob: Expressed some doubts that he would even be able to contribute to my musical project, lamenting that he doesn't know how to read music. He picked up his guitar, and within a minute was playing a lead melody over one of my original songs.
Travis: Claimed to be "pretty good at chess." He then opened a game against me, a game that would never be finished because I decided not to waste my time, methodically defeating him after he had revealed himself to be an idiot when it came to playing chess with his very first mo(906587%*)ve, by playing a4.
There is probably no chess match between any players in any tournament where either player, with a U.S.C.F. rating of 400 (like I had when I was 12 years old and played against a chess computer that could rate a player's game) or better has started a game with that move.
There is, however a "gotcha!" type of "trick" series of moves that begins with that one. I think I may have fallen for it the very first time, when I was ten years old. Travis might have made some hay with that particular series of moves back at St. Mark's Academy for gifted geniuses in New York, but, you've got to be kidding me...should I play into his hands and make the ignorant blunder moves on my side to facilitate his ploy, and then pull the rug out from under him right before he gets to move that knight from out of nowhere to it's spot where he can check my king and then take my queen? was my response.
The GIMP Editor
I want to go back to fooling with the GIMP image editor.
Jacob: No data, we didn't play chess.
Just in demonstrating the Roland synthesizer keyboard to me, Jacob showed that, unlike Travis, the small sample of the human race that he came into contact with, having been similarly guarded over by Bob, was undoubtedly of a much higher caliber than the St. Mark's kids.
He can play like someone, who is at least on the same planet as Chopin was, on the keyboard, but has the diametrically opposed to Travis opinion that he isn't very good, because he can't read music.
I'll bet Travis can not just read music, but can read Gregorian chant notation, too! Enough so that he can say that he can, that is...
The haircut in the photo to the left, he had undergone, in order to help him get a job, which he did, at the Uxi Duxi.
He quit during his third day of training, though. This did make me wonder how devoted a band-mate he might be in the future.
He showed up in a SUV type vehicle, to follow me to Sacred Heart Apartments where I rode my bike to drop it, and a bag of kitty litter off, while grabbing my gear.
It seemed like about a 30 mile ride.
Jacob wasn't sure if he should take the Interstate, being somewhat of a novice behind the wheel of a vehicle. He wasn't sure if he should allow me to smoke in that vehicle, which he told me he had only had for 2 days.
Bob, his "guardian" was a stickler about certain things.
Jacob declined to smoke a bit of weed, because of an undefined fear of Bob, also.
We got to the house, in Kenner, Louisianna, where they both lived.
I guess he has been under Bob's stewardship since the age of 14, and now he is about 20, and it's about time he get a job, hence the Uxi Duxi experiment.
The house wound up being "right up the same alley" with the house that I grew up in, you could have slipped it somewhere into my childhood neighborhood and it would have blended in. A ranch style brick house it was, although it could have just been brick-faced.
It would have been Mr. Mattson's house, up the street a few houses from ours.
Mr. Mattson might have been the "Bob" of our neighborhood.
Bob is Jacobs guardian, he is seventy years old, but looked 44, as he sat at a desk piled up so high with stuff that it probably blocked the view of the computer he was almost certainly on, because why else would a fellow sit there at a desk for at least the whole 2 hours that Jacob and I jammed in his studio.
Bob, "He,'s not a hoarder, but..." collected things.
Behind him, the wall was one whole bookshelf, with The Bible being the one book that's spine jumped out at me, it being in set in at least 4 times the font-size of any other book that was on that shelf. I thought that was a nice touch.
Jacob had notified me that his guardian was some kind of strict Christian.
The middle class people in our neighborhood had caught a nice wave, in that the values of their houses increasing over time, outpacing the increases in the cost of living, so that the monthly mortgage payments became a smaller and smaller slice of their income pies, as the years passed, and us kids grew into spoiled brats, totally unaware of the rude awakenings that awaited us.
Monthly payments, over the last ten years of the life of the mortgage became only a fraction of what it would cost to rent the same house, at the current market rates.
For example, when my parents remitted their final $228 to the bank, in 1987, you would have to pay more than twice that to rent a one-bedroom in a decent neighborhood. While they then owned outright a ranch style house, with a yard and a fence around the back one.
They had paid almost 3 times the selling price of the house, but, 40 years later, (after they had been living in it "all paid off" for 15 years, to boot) it sold for 14 times that amount.
Plus, as the "cost of living" went up, so did salaries.
So, by paying a mortgage, beginning in 1960, and ending in 1990, life was good.
This meant summer vacations, second cars, kids going to good colleges, and in the case of Mr. Mattson or Bob, being able to turn your house into a museum, crammed to the gills with collectibles, to include thousands of DVD's, books, and a whole hallway lined with autographed photos of famous people. There has to be at least a six-pack of Billy Beer somewhere in that house.
And, of course (it seems) they had Vietnamese neighbors...
Jacobs contribution to the collection (not horde) of stuff seemed to be the Frank Zappa paraphernalia, and alongside it the Elvis stuff. Jacob seems to be into that odd pair of entertainers.
"He,'s not a hoarder, but..." Jacob had said to me during our ride over there, as a way to prepare me for what I was about to see, I guess.
Behind Bob, the wall was one whole bookshelf, with The Bible being the one book that's spine jumped out at me, it being in set in at least 4 times the font-size of any other book that was on that shelf. I thought that was a nice touch.
Jacob had notified me that his guardian was some kind of strict Christian, as a way of preparing me for the sight of that, I also guess.
There were 3 organs, along with a bunch of collectible toys, such as Star Wars dolls, in a small room, that Jacob called "the toy room."
He had called the house: "The M.O.C." -for museum of crap.
I had to compete with a drum kit for a spot on the floor to put my feet as I sat down with my guitar and harmonica in front of a microphone that was protruding towards me from out of a pile of Hans Solo figurines or something.
Jacob had the Audacity program on his laptop.
He clicked through its menus so frenetically that it seemed like he was abusing the machine. In situations where 3 clicks may be required to complete an operation, he would rattle all three of them off, like a rattlesnake striking, and the display on the screen would jerk and twitch, and I was fascinated by how in the space of a generation Man has become so adroit with a mouse.
I guess an old fogy was learning from a millenial how to save time, a millisecond at a time...
I wasn't sure what our recording session might yield. Jacob had seemed kind of tentative when he had asked me if I ever wanted to jam with a keyboard player. My ego driven thought was that he might have apprehensions about his ability to complement my music; that, perhaps I was in my own universe, immersed so deep that, No, I'm just a solo artist, dude... had crossed his mind.
Myself, I have been in the pickle of having decided to live in the present moment and not to even identify with thoughts of any "future," but at the same time, what did I have to lose, the guy at least had a keyboard and a drumkit, I gathered.
Jacob turned the microphone on, which was running through a USB mixer and into his laptop and began recording me just playing incomplete bits of some of my songs.
This was OK, it appears, because any verse that is missing can be inserted just using the repeat effect to make a prior one repeat.
These, Jacob will take, and, using the one Roland synthesizer that I had counted among the "3 organs" in the studio, will be able to add what I expect to be incredible musical parts to it.
He is a very competent keyboard player, the music of his that he played for me sounded amazingly like Frank Zappa, he had even used the pitch shifting effect that Audacity has to achieve a sound that I have heard on a lot of Zappa's stuff.
Jacob is kind of the Anti-Blaine, to me, referring, of course to Travis Blaine, once roommate of mine for nineteen days..
The Anti Travis
The exclusive, highly competitive, famous and esteemed school that Travis was the valedictorian of, was probably peopled by the moronic children of other parents who attempted to shield their kids from the evils of the public school system by cloistering them there.
Travis; Claims to be a gifted musician, who almost toured with a band that almost went on a tour once. Upon picking up my guitar and approximating the chords to a Perl Jam song, he replaced it on my couch with a smug air of: "So, you can see, I know my shit when it comes to music."
Jacob: Expressed some doubts that he would even be able to contribute to my musical project, lamenting that he doesn't know how to read music. He picked up his guitar, and within a minute was playing a lead melody over one of my original songs.
Travis: Claimed to be "pretty good at chess." He then opened a game against me, a game that would never be finished because I decided not to waste my time, methodically defeating him after he had revealed himself to be an idiot when it came to playing chess with his very first mo(906587%*)ve, by playing a4.
There is probably no chess match between any players in any tournament where either player, with a U.S.C.F. rating of 400 (like I had when I was 12 years old and played against a chess computer that could rate a player's game) or better has started a game with that move.
The GIMP Editor
I want to go back to fooling with the GIMP image editor.
Jacob: No data, we didn't play chess.
Just in demonstrating the Roland synthesizer keyboard to me, Jacob showed that, unlike Travis, the small sample of the human race that he came into contact with, having been similarly guarded over by Bob, was undoubtedly of a much higher caliber than the St. Mark's kids.
He can play like someone, who is at least on the same planet as Chopin was, on the keyboard, but has the diametrically opposed to Travis opinion that he isn't very good, because he can't read music.
I'll bet Travis can not just read music, but can read Gregorian chant notation, too! Enough so that he can say that he can, that is...
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Harold Hooked Up With 3.15 Pounds Of Food
Well, I just finished writing a pretty amusing post of maybe 4 thousand words only to see it vanish when my laptop, running on the battery after I unplugged it inside the Uxi Duxi and then moved it to one of the outside tables, automatically restarted itself, for no apparent reason.
The post was basically about how I had a second 24 dollar night, Saturday, having gotten to the Lilly Pad 45 minutes earlier than the previous night, then I talked about the older black skeezer who graciously moved to the other stoop when I arrived, and about how some of the older skeezers "get it" that Lilly's block is a racket for the well behaved skeezer, with a high pedigree of tourist.
I left the Uxi Duxi and then went to my new grocery store, the Winn-Dixie, across the street from the Rouses Market from where I had always unthinkingly gone in the past.
That store has been lucky for me, as I have found the Spider energy drinks there for half the price of every other energy drink under the sun, and one-third the price, if you're a Monster Energy drinker.
Harold Hooked Up
I was in the cat food aisle and lamenting over the fact that, while the Winn-Dixie is "all that an more" with regards to the Rouses, they didn't have Harold's favorite flavor of "Surf and Turf," dry food in the 2 dollar boxes.
For $5, though, I could get a little over 3 times as much.
Harold's food, like death and taxes, is an inevitable purchase for me, and since I had made 24 bucks the night before, I was considering buying the bigger bag.
And then, of course, for just 3 dollars more than that, I could get a ten pound bag, which had Massachusetts trip written all over it.
Another fly in the ointment was the fact that there was a brand new flavor, next to the Surf and Turf, which touted "gravy centers."
Harold loves gravy in any wet food form at all. It doesn't seem to matter if the flavor is turkey or fish or beef, if it is "in gravy," then Harold inhales it. It seemed a lock that Harold would love the "gravy centers," but a five dollar investment on a bag that he might not...
Up walked a heavyset older guy wearing a bikers vest who had long strands of gray hair coming out from under his hat and was sporting a patch over one eye.
"You got cats?" he asked.
"One," I said.
He handed me five dollars, saying "I have five of them!"
I started to stammer, the way recipients of charity will do, out of relief and gratitude, but tinged with a bit of shame over how I could have gotten myself into a situation in which I would accept the money.
I felt like the guy who asks for a cigarette and then after being given one will start to relate a sob story such as: "Yeah, this guy we worked for a couple days this week was supposed to pay us after he ran to the bank and did a couple other things, but he isn't answering his phone," type of stuff.
I was going to tell him, in reference to how I "hated" to take the money that I had unhesitatingly snatched from his hand, that I had been debating whether or not to spend five bucks on a bag of food that my cat might not like, but didn't get very far before he walked off, leaving me with a slight wave and smile that said: "You don't have to explain anything to me, I've got five of them!"
I went out and made 24 bucks Saturday night, matching Friday night's take.
It is now about 9:20 PM, Sunday night.
I missed another opportunity to go to Howard Westra's house for Berta's Sunday afternoon dinner. I'm thinking of writing the guy a letter to let him know I'm still thinking about him, even though Saturday nights have been leading to my staying up too late into the morning to think about trying to get over there on minimal sleep.
I have further broken the fast by having fried a bunch of potatoes in grape seed oil last night. Salt, pepper, powdered garlic and some packets of Taco Bell hot and mild sauces turned those spuds into a pretty appetizing meal...
The post was basically about how I had a second 24 dollar night, Saturday, having gotten to the Lilly Pad 45 minutes earlier than the previous night, then I talked about the older black skeezer who graciously moved to the other stoop when I arrived, and about how some of the older skeezers "get it" that Lilly's block is a racket for the well behaved skeezer, with a high pedigree of tourist.
I left the Uxi Duxi and then went to my new grocery store, the Winn-Dixie, across the street from the Rouses Market from where I had always unthinkingly gone in the past.
That store has been lucky for me, as I have found the Spider energy drinks there for half the price of every other energy drink under the sun, and one-third the price, if you're a Monster Energy drinker.
Harold Hooked Up
I was in the cat food aisle and lamenting over the fact that, while the Winn-Dixie is "all that an more" with regards to the Rouses, they didn't have Harold's favorite flavor of "Surf and Turf," dry food in the 2 dollar boxes.
For $5, though, I could get a little over 3 times as much.
Harold's food, like death and taxes, is an inevitable purchase for me, and since I had made 24 bucks the night before, I was considering buying the bigger bag.
And then, of course, for just 3 dollars more than that, I could get a ten pound bag, which had Massachusetts trip written all over it.
Another fly in the ointment was the fact that there was a brand new flavor, next to the Surf and Turf, which touted "gravy centers."
Harold loves gravy in any wet food form at all. It doesn't seem to matter if the flavor is turkey or fish or beef, if it is "in gravy," then Harold inhales it. It seemed a lock that Harold would love the "gravy centers," but a five dollar investment on a bag that he might not...
Up walked a heavyset older guy wearing a bikers vest who had long strands of gray hair coming out from under his hat and was sporting a patch over one eye.
"You got cats?" he asked.
"One," I said.
He handed me five dollars, saying "I have five of them!"
I started to stammer, the way recipients of charity will do, out of relief and gratitude, but tinged with a bit of shame over how I could have gotten myself into a situation in which I would accept the money.
I felt like the guy who asks for a cigarette and then after being given one will start to relate a sob story such as: "Yeah, this guy we worked for a couple days this week was supposed to pay us after he ran to the bank and did a couple other things, but he isn't answering his phone," type of stuff.
I was going to tell him, in reference to how I "hated" to take the money that I had unhesitatingly snatched from his hand, that I had been debating whether or not to spend five bucks on a bag of food that my cat might not like, but didn't get very far before he walked off, leaving me with a slight wave and smile that said: "You don't have to explain anything to me, I've got five of them!"
I went out and made 24 bucks Saturday night, matching Friday night's take.
It is now about 9:20 PM, Sunday night.
I missed another opportunity to go to Howard Westra's house for Berta's Sunday afternoon dinner. I'm thinking of writing the guy a letter to let him know I'm still thinking about him, even though Saturday nights have been leading to my staying up too late into the morning to think about trying to get over there on minimal sleep.
I have further broken the fast by having fried a bunch of potatoes in grape seed oil last night. Salt, pepper, powdered garlic and some packets of Taco Bell hot and mild sauces turned those spuds into a pretty appetizing meal...
Saturday, June 16, 2018
"Do You Need Anything; Are You Alright?"
Star Date: Saturday, June 16, 2018...
I went out and played last night, after having been frustrated by the clock, which seemed to have been racing incredibly fast.
Leaving the Uxi Duxi right as it closed at 8 PM, gave me the feeling that I might be at the Lilly Pad nice and early... 9:30 PM?
Try 11:15 PM.
I had 2 dollars and change, left from the 4 dollars that Bobby had given me the previous night, after I had politely declined the goat cheese, the pastrami and the hummus from him. He had been in one of his "Do you need anything; are you alright?" moods.
He would have given me a bud of weed, except: "I've got one little bud the size of a pea -enough for my tune-up bowl," I told him.
To: "Do you need money?" I answered "I just need to get a can of cat food for 70 cents, whereupon he gave me the 4 dollars.
This made me decide to stay in on that Thursday night, six days into a juice/water fast, and, after hitting the Family Dollar before it closed at 10 PM for said can of cat food, I returned home to do just that.
It occurred to me that 4 dollars just about amounts to a shot of kratom.
Bobby is the type of guy who, (in a well meaning way) will pry into my finances, asking me how much I made the previous night, for example, and then being able to figure out from listening to me talk, where the money probably went, and how much I most likely have left, etc.
He doesn't want me taking advantage of his generosity, like taking free buds of weed from him when I have a pocket full of money, type of thing, and I guess he likes to know that his help is indeed appreciated.
It bothered me when, after I first met him, he immediately asked me about the "voucher" that I get through the Catholic Social Services people. "How much is your rent every month?," he had asked.
I hesitated in answering him, after having had the experiences with people whom I let stay at my place, in exchange for what turned out to be nothing, once they found out that my rent was free to me. "If you aren't paying anything, then I ain't giving you shit!," seemed to be the sentiment. This is part of an institutionalized mentality that is prevalent among the "entitled" set.
At least Johnny B. had given me the promised amplifier, and had thrown in a Beatles "Complete Scores" book turning his inability to read music into a blessing for me. "I can't use this," he had said.
Louise Hellman, standing in my parlor and cussing me out, telling me that she deserved my apartment more than I did, because she too would be a veteran, had she not been kept out of the service due to varicose veins, I think it was, and that the government should have given her disabled veteran status based solely upon her willingness to have gone overseas to kill "women abusing camel jockeys," but, no, they had given it to "a stupid alcoholic" (who sealed the deal by leaving a soup bone simmering on the stove until it began to smoke, but not even enough to set off the detector) instead, someone to whom she wasn't going to give shit, comes to mind on that head.
Bobby probably figured correctly that, since I had fasted for six days, and had not gone out to play, that I was pretty much broke.
And, he also figured, kind of correctly, that it was probably the shot of kratom that I missed the most, of all the things that I couldn't buy -It certainly wasn't goat cheese- and, hence, the gift of 4 dollars.
I didn't think of it as a shot of kratom when it went into my hand, but only as food for Harold. Then, being able to take the night off, presented itself.
When I was on my way back from the dollar store with $3.30 left, was when it dawned upon me that I would only have to find a bit of change under the couch cushion to be able to go to the Uxi Duxi the next day, Friday.
Friday Afternoon
I wound up bagging up a handful of pennies, sending them through the machine at Rouses Market, and turning them into a paper dollar -much more spendable than zinc- and, while I was there, buying another grapefruit off my food stamp card. Fasting helps preserve the balance on a food stamp card, but, even with starving for one week out of a month, it doesn't last the whole of it.
It was after leaving the Uxi Duxi and hitting the Winn-Dixie for a wholesome drink of juice and veggies, forgetting to get the cat food, then going into Wal-Green's, where I discovered that they had gone up on price on it, then returning to the big market, saving almost 40 cents, but burning time, that I returned home and was shocked to see that it was already 9:30 PM.
Making coffee, changing a couple strings on the guitar, drying out some pot leaves that I had clipped off my houseplant on the stove, feeding Harold the food, picking out an outfit etc. all conspired to shock me once again when I saw that it was 10:30 PM on the clock in the lobby at Sacred Heart Apartments on my way out.
I played from 11:15 until almost 2 hours had passed and made 22 dollars, with a couple of five dollar bills having been my saving grace.
It was difficult to play, in a physical sense. It seemed like my strings were rusty and hard to slide over, and that I had to press extra hard to make chords sound, and that I was consciously thinking about things that I hadn't had to in the past.
It all added up to my feeling like I had worked really hard for the 22 dollars, and thinking that I am going to try to find a job somewhere. Or to make a concerted effort to find more songs that can be lazily strummed, like "American Pie," by Don McLean, for example.
 |
| A great way to break |
| a six day fast! |
I went out and played last night, after having been frustrated by the clock, which seemed to have been racing incredibly fast.
Leaving the Uxi Duxi right as it closed at 8 PM, gave me the feeling that I might be at the Lilly Pad nice and early... 9:30 PM?
Try 11:15 PM.
I had 2 dollars and change, left from the 4 dollars that Bobby had given me the previous night, after I had politely declined the goat cheese, the pastrami and the hummus from him. He had been in one of his "Do you need anything; are you alright?" moods.
He would have given me a bud of weed, except: "I've got one little bud the size of a pea -enough for my tune-up bowl," I told him.
To: "Do you need money?" I answered "I just need to get a can of cat food for 70 cents, whereupon he gave me the 4 dollars.
This made me decide to stay in on that Thursday night, six days into a juice/water fast, and, after hitting the Family Dollar before it closed at 10 PM for said can of cat food, I returned home to do just that.
It occurred to me that 4 dollars just about amounts to a shot of kratom.
Bobby is the type of guy who, (in a well meaning way) will pry into my finances, asking me how much I made the previous night, for example, and then being able to figure out from listening to me talk, where the money probably went, and how much I most likely have left, etc.
He doesn't want me taking advantage of his generosity, like taking free buds of weed from him when I have a pocket full of money, type of thing, and I guess he likes to know that his help is indeed appreciated.
It bothered me when, after I first met him, he immediately asked me about the "voucher" that I get through the Catholic Social Services people. "How much is your rent every month?," he had asked.
I hesitated in answering him, after having had the experiences with people whom I let stay at my place, in exchange for what turned out to be nothing, once they found out that my rent was free to me. "If you aren't paying anything, then I ain't giving you shit!," seemed to be the sentiment. This is part of an institutionalized mentality that is prevalent among the "entitled" set.
At least Johnny B. had given me the promised amplifier, and had thrown in a Beatles "Complete Scores" book turning his inability to read music into a blessing for me. "I can't use this," he had said.
Louise Hellman, standing in my parlor and cussing me out, telling me that she deserved my apartment more than I did, because she too would be a veteran, had she not been kept out of the service due to varicose veins, I think it was, and that the government should have given her disabled veteran status based solely upon her willingness to have gone overseas to kill "women abusing camel jockeys," but, no, they had given it to "a stupid alcoholic" (who sealed the deal by leaving a soup bone simmering on the stove until it began to smoke, but not even enough to set off the detector) instead, someone to whom she wasn't going to give shit, comes to mind on that head.
Bobby probably figured correctly that, since I had fasted for six days, and had not gone out to play, that I was pretty much broke.
And, he also figured, kind of correctly, that it was probably the shot of kratom that I missed the most, of all the things that I couldn't buy -It certainly wasn't goat cheese- and, hence, the gift of 4 dollars.
I didn't think of it as a shot of kratom when it went into my hand, but only as food for Harold. Then, being able to take the night off, presented itself.
When I was on my way back from the dollar store with $3.30 left, was when it dawned upon me that I would only have to find a bit of change under the couch cushion to be able to go to the Uxi Duxi the next day, Friday.
Friday Afternoon
I wound up bagging up a handful of pennies, sending them through the machine at Rouses Market, and turning them into a paper dollar -much more spendable than zinc- and, while I was there, buying another grapefruit off my food stamp card. Fasting helps preserve the balance on a food stamp card, but, even with starving for one week out of a month, it doesn't last the whole of it.
It was after leaving the Uxi Duxi and hitting the Winn-Dixie for a wholesome drink of juice and veggies, forgetting to get the cat food, then going into Wal-Green's, where I discovered that they had gone up on price on it, then returning to the big market, saving almost 40 cents, but burning time, that I returned home and was shocked to see that it was already 9:30 PM.
Making coffee, changing a couple strings on the guitar, drying out some pot leaves that I had clipped off my houseplant on the stove, feeding Harold the food, picking out an outfit etc. all conspired to shock me once again when I saw that it was 10:30 PM on the clock in the lobby at Sacred Heart Apartments on my way out.
I played from 11:15 until almost 2 hours had passed and made 22 dollars, with a couple of five dollar bills having been my saving grace.
It was difficult to play, in a physical sense. It seemed like my strings were rusty and hard to slide over, and that I had to press extra hard to make chords sound, and that I was consciously thinking about things that I hadn't had to in the past.
It all added up to my feeling like I had worked really hard for the 22 dollars, and thinking that I am going to try to find a job somewhere. Or to make a concerted effort to find more songs that can be lazily strummed, like "American Pie," by Don McLean, for example.
 |
| It could mean that I don't have to work |
| for 11 minutes if I don't want to.. |
My "amazing" songs, which keep a steady flow of money coming, had me sweating too much for the 12 bucks an hour that I averaged.
I thought about Tanya Huang, and how much easier the violin is to play, using only a hair of pressure on the strings to make the note sound.
But, also how freakish she is in her ability to go for 12 hours on a given day. She is playing pretty much all out, to "impress," and has no lazy equivalents to the McLean song in her set, either.
I am rethinking my previous desire to play with her. And I can understand why Dorise Blackmon used a nylon string guitar, twice as easy to play than a steel string.
I might have been feeling the six days without eating, also.
A new project for me will be to learn as much as I can of the Beatles early repertoire -the stuff they played before they "made it."
And Now, For Something Completely Different...
Bobby feels like I am playing Russian Roulette going out to busk, between the guys trying to grab my guitar and smash it and the ones trying to shoot me in the face with paint balls and the ones trying to take my spot.
He feels that the tourists don't recognize my worth on nights when I come home with 11 dollars or some pittance in my pocket.
Lane, who is working his last day here at the Uxi Duxi, suggested the above website to me.
It is 25 dollars per month to join The freelance writer's den (lower case intentional, I guess) and it comes with a money back guarantee.
Lane has a college degree in "Professional Writing," and is leaving the Uxi Duxi to make "4 times as much" doing some kind of writing in a corporate setting. He described it as basically proof-reading stuff before it becomes published as a manual.
Busking has just been too hard work lately.
Friday, June 15, 2018
Let's Speed It Up Some
One of my dreams is to go way up into the Yukon, hiking for days and finding spots where I could pan for gold, like this guy. He doesn't look too happy, but that might just be his "Get away from here, I found all this gold first!" expression.
I'm having my first half shot of kratom in a few days, now.
I just read on the Facebook water fasting group page that "deep healing" only begins on about the tenth day of fasting. I feel like a failure.
I figure that I can come up with a minimalist diet, maybe a salad with some brown rice, to fuel my busking over the next few nights, which will keep some money coming in, and will be better than the pancakes with butter and syrup diet that I had, by degrees, fallen into. A compromise.
How can a guy who hasn't eaten in ten days contemplate a cross country journey?
As far as everything else -coffee, kratom, tobacco, pot...I'll just have to accept the fact that I am an addict, embrace it, and hope it goes away on its own some day, I guess.
Bobby, my friend in building C, opened his refrigerator last night when I was at his place, and, saying: "Here," held out to me a chunk of goat's cheese, some hummus, and some pastrami type of meat, as well as a hunk of some other kind of cheese that looked like a white gob tightly wrapped in plastic. The dollar value of those foods didn't escape me, probably about 30 bucks worth, and a part of me wanted to take them on that head alone. "I ain't gonna eat this shit," said Bobby. It crossed my mind that the stuff -all easily concealable, and all from the same one spot in the market- had been shoplifted by one of his weed customers, who might have been cash strapped. How else would Bobby wind up with expensive items that he never would have bought himself. I can remember drug dealers that I have known in the past, who always had all kinds of interesting stuff that they had taken in trade for drugs. Why not give someone a hundred dollars worth of drugs that cost him a third of that for a thousand dollar Martin guitar that they stole from somewhere?
We Have A Winner
With 240mg caffeine, 200mg guarana, 500% B12, 400% B6, 600% of B vitamins 2, 3, and 5, and 2000mg of taurine, and at a dollar a can, I could probably haved saved myself a thousand bucks each of the past few years, had I discovered this drink sooner.
And I found it only because I decided to depart from convention and go to the Winn Dixie across the street from the Rouses Market.
I had always just unthinkingly gone to Rouses, probably because they have a branch in the French Quarter that I became familiar with.
The message is clear: There are rewards waiting along new trails, so blaze away!
Goat Cheese Story, Continued...
That is kind of what happened to my friend, Brian Hudson.
His Martin guitar went missing, but then he got a call from someone who someone else had tried to sell it to. The guy bought it for a couple hundred bucks, knowing that it was Brian's, and then re-sold it to Brian for the same amount. I guess it was a guy Brian trusted, but, the point is that drug dealers can often run such a side business; as goat cheese brokers, maybe.
I told Bobby that, even when I go back to eating, I was going to try to stick close to the healthiest possible diet, and that it might only be in a moment of weakness that I would eat cheese and pastrami.
Sure, a couple months from now, I might be making my own pizzas, using whole flour, goat's cheese and organic tomato salsa, olive oil instead of partially hydrogenated soybean, etc. but, why rush into it -except that he was offering the stuff for free? There are advisable ways to break long fasts, and the above wouldn't be too bad, but, with myself having had dairy allergies my whole life, I had to decline his offer.
Then, I mused out loud how good a Greek salad, with goat's cheese instead of feta, pepperoncini or banana peppers, black olives, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and crisp lettuce, would be.
My metabolism had pretty much shut down at that point, and it was hard to imagine even secreting the acids to break down rich, heavy, decadent cheeses..
I went back to my apartment, thinking of nothing but goat's cheese and hummus, and reconsidered knocking on his door to take the stuff from him.
Bobby seems to play the role of the tempter, at times, having given me a cup of his methadone once, to try, for example. "Here, drink this and you'll be joyfully playing for the next six hours!"
That could have led me down the road to becoming a full blown heroin addict. But, in his defense, he was high on methadone at the time and only wanting to share the love. The goat cheese and hummus is the culinary equivalent of methadone, in that regard.
It is Friday night, and my goal is to go out and play, even if that means grabbing a salad and maybe knocking on Bobby's door for the hummus, nothing else.
Music
 |
| The McCartney to my Lennon? |
Jacob Scardino, a guy who quit working at the Uxi Duxi during his third day of training, wants to jam with me.
He plays keyboards and has a drum kit, as well as the Audacity sound editor, and we are tentatively planning to jam next week. This could be a boon for me, as I know how expedient it is to jam with another person as far as the flexibility of it.
I could say: "Let's try a reggae beat here," and we could try it. If it sounded good, we could hit the record button and proceed.
Working by myself, I would have to stop and program a reggae beat into my machine, and then if it didn't sound good when I played guitar along with it, I would have wasted about twenty minutes.
"Let's speed it up some," is another example.
It bears mentioning that he likes the music of mine that he has heard, too.
Thursday, June 14, 2018
You Gotta Die Of Something!
I came to the Rouses Market to use their wire-less, this time, bringing my laptop -that I'm already worrying about, sitting with it in the almost direct sunlight of a ninety degree afternoon, when it is used to sitting in a modestly air-conditioned high seventies temperature place.
Alas, I can feel my body temperature heating up, in the same way that can make me eventually get out of a hot bath, even though, when I had slipped into the water it had felt marvelous.
So, it is into the air-conditioned little lounge with me, the one that had its two televisions taken out of it recently -too many people sitting there, watching TV all day, and not buying anything, perhaps...
...much better; and they have put one TV back -it's on "News With A Twist," right now, a local looking station.
Rouses Market is the "Louisiana Owned" supermarket, which is across the street from the huge, national chain, Winn-Dixie, so it is fitting that their TV has news with a local twist to it, on it.
And, Rouses is supposed to be friendlier and cleaner -the special attention you get at a little family-run store- than the behemoth across the street. The fact that the Rouse family owns fewer stores than the national chain and thus, the likelihood of Mr. Rouse himself showing up unannounced at any time, factors in to this.
It is still staffed by almost all African Americans, like the one who was working in the produce department who took his earplugs out, giving me a look like I was disturbing him and said the simple: "I don't know," allowing him to return the plugs to his ears and veritably get rid of me, after I had said: "There's no price on the cherries..."
I am six days into the "water" fast. I had deemed myself too physically weak to go out and play the past few nights. In the past, I had gone out in such a famished state, and had done very well, I recall. It was as if the tourists could not smell food, or the metabolism of it, on me, and became fascinated on some level. This may have had something to do with the fact that the biblical Daniel, who was a vegetarian, survived being thrown to the lions, as I think it was. To the lions, he may have smelled like he had onions on him. Even my cat Harold will turn his nose up at liver and onions, but not liver alone.
Right now, I have just spent my last cent, not counting a bunch of pennies that merchants are apt to refuse to take unless I roll them first, on cat food.
I want to be convinced that I am not deceiving myself into thinking that I need to go out to play so I will have cat food and money to use to prepare for my trip, when that might be the tobacco and kratom monster inside me, telling me: "Hey, you need to go out and play, or you won't have any of us!"
I'm not really sure about that. I'm to the point where starting to eat again would be an intellectual decision, not influenced by any gnawing cravings in my stomach. The healthiest meal in the world (a green salad with olive oil and vinegar, no dressing, no bacon bits, no croutons?) would taste delicious to me now, so that is good, and will help me revise my diet but, I'm also going cold turkey from kratom, which had become just about a daily habit, with only a couple missed days the whole previous month, and I'm going to have to see what the upshot of that is...
A fast starts out as being something that you are not doing, namely eating, and then, becomes something that you are pro-active in, namely meditating and doing stuff like yoga, relishing your freedom from all appetites, of which, hunger is at the top of the pyramid, but which extends to the emotions. It actually requires energy to be angry or judgmental and, especially confrontational. The faster finds it easier to not attach himself to such things; as if hatred needs some nourishment inside you, for it to live off of.
There is a point, during the 2nd or 3rd day usually, when it becomes the main task at hand.
Getting up from the couch to walk to the kitchen to get another glass of spring water might sound boring, but after 3 days of not eating, the light-headed and dizzy feeling and the stars you are seeing can hold your attention, as you take deep breaths, getting high on the oxygen, waiting for your head to clear.
Once sure that you aren't going to faint, you can go and get your glass of water, glad that the fast seems to at least be having an effect.
"Let Them Eat Cake"
Tuesday night, I grabbed one of the books out of my collection of about 125 of them, almost all of them gotten for free off of "books for the homeless," shelves in my various guises as the homeless man, and later off of "books for the disabled veterans" shelves at Sacred Heart.
Tim Cullen, my caseworker, deserves kudos for his involvement in procuring books, and probably even the cases that they are displayed in, by keeping tabs through Craigslist and other websites, on books (and book cases) being offered at the sole cost of hauling them away.
The book I grabbed was a Reader's Digest compilation of "Great Biographies," which I randomly opened to the fourth chapter of the story of Marie Antoinette.
This, I found interesting enough to backtrack to the beginning of, and read entirely in about 3 sittings, going through about a gallon of distilled water in the process.
The end of it had been kind of spoiled for me because, (I think it was) in "A Tale of Two Cities," by Charles Dickens, that the "historic" veracity of that story was corroborated, in part, by the inclusion of the atmosphere-setting information that just about all of Paris had turned out on a particular day to watch the beheading of that hapless ex-queen.
She did not coin the phrase: "Let them eat cake," -the phrase was already in use in France before Marie showed up- but maybe she parroted it.
First Bite In Days
I ate a grapefruit, to give me the energy to do this blog post, and am sipping on yet another new energy drink product to have hit the market, Celsius "healthy energy" drinks in the 12 ounce can.
It will soon be decision time, as to whether I go out to busk tonight, or not.
Having no money kind of forces my hand, in a sense, but this would probably mean that I have to break my strict water fast, as I'm not sure I am up to the task of toting all my gear to the Lilly Pad, in such a state as I am in.
I would be doing it for cat food and for traveling money. Or would I? I have one can of food for Harold, enough to get him through another night. I might just buy a bag of lemons and have lemon juice squeezed into my spring water with a dash of cayenne pepper added. This is another variety of "cleansing diet" that some people use.
When I do intense yoga stretches that involve deep breathing and the expansion of the lungs, I can feel the soreness in my upper chest which is undoubtedly a result of having smoked cigarettes forever. That's the next hurdle for me to get past in the cleansing process, and the hardest thing I will ever have to do in my life, it seems. To be able to one day say: "One year without a cigarette!"
Right now, I can't seem to get out of the "You gotta die of something" camp.
Alas, I can feel my body temperature heating up, in the same way that can make me eventually get out of a hot bath, even though, when I had slipped into the water it had felt marvelous.
So, it is into the air-conditioned little lounge with me, the one that had its two televisions taken out of it recently -too many people sitting there, watching TV all day, and not buying anything, perhaps...
...much better; and they have put one TV back -it's on "News With A Twist," right now, a local looking station.
Rouses Market is the "Louisiana Owned" supermarket, which is across the street from the huge, national chain, Winn-Dixie, so it is fitting that their TV has news with a local twist to it, on it.
And, Rouses is supposed to be friendlier and cleaner -the special attention you get at a little family-run store- than the behemoth across the street. The fact that the Rouse family owns fewer stores than the national chain and thus, the likelihood of Mr. Rouse himself showing up unannounced at any time, factors in to this.
It is still staffed by almost all African Americans, like the one who was working in the produce department who took his earplugs out, giving me a look like I was disturbing him and said the simple: "I don't know," allowing him to return the plugs to his ears and veritably get rid of me, after I had said: "There's no price on the cherries..."
I am six days into the "water" fast. I had deemed myself too physically weak to go out and play the past few nights. In the past, I had gone out in such a famished state, and had done very well, I recall. It was as if the tourists could not smell food, or the metabolism of it, on me, and became fascinated on some level. This may have had something to do with the fact that the biblical Daniel, who was a vegetarian, survived being thrown to the lions, as I think it was. To the lions, he may have smelled like he had onions on him. Even my cat Harold will turn his nose up at liver and onions, but not liver alone.
Right now, I have just spent my last cent, not counting a bunch of pennies that merchants are apt to refuse to take unless I roll them first, on cat food.
I want to be convinced that I am not deceiving myself into thinking that I need to go out to play so I will have cat food and money to use to prepare for my trip, when that might be the tobacco and kratom monster inside me, telling me: "Hey, you need to go out and play, or you won't have any of us!"
I'm not really sure about that. I'm to the point where starting to eat again would be an intellectual decision, not influenced by any gnawing cravings in my stomach. The healthiest meal in the world (a green salad with olive oil and vinegar, no dressing, no bacon bits, no croutons?) would taste delicious to me now, so that is good, and will help me revise my diet but, I'm also going cold turkey from kratom, which had become just about a daily habit, with only a couple missed days the whole previous month, and I'm going to have to see what the upshot of that is...
A fast starts out as being something that you are not doing, namely eating, and then, becomes something that you are pro-active in, namely meditating and doing stuff like yoga, relishing your freedom from all appetites, of which, hunger is at the top of the pyramid, but which extends to the emotions. It actually requires energy to be angry or judgmental and, especially confrontational. The faster finds it easier to not attach himself to such things; as if hatred needs some nourishment inside you, for it to live off of.
There is a point, during the 2nd or 3rd day usually, when it becomes the main task at hand.
Getting up from the couch to walk to the kitchen to get another glass of spring water might sound boring, but after 3 days of not eating, the light-headed and dizzy feeling and the stars you are seeing can hold your attention, as you take deep breaths, getting high on the oxygen, waiting for your head to clear.
Once sure that you aren't going to faint, you can go and get your glass of water, glad that the fast seems to at least be having an effect.
"Let Them Eat Cake"
Tuesday night, I grabbed one of the books out of my collection of about 125 of them, almost all of them gotten for free off of "books for the homeless," shelves in my various guises as the homeless man, and later off of "books for the disabled veterans" shelves at Sacred Heart.
Tim Cullen, my caseworker, deserves kudos for his involvement in procuring books, and probably even the cases that they are displayed in, by keeping tabs through Craigslist and other websites, on books (and book cases) being offered at the sole cost of hauling them away.
The book I grabbed was a Reader's Digest compilation of "Great Biographies," which I randomly opened to the fourth chapter of the story of Marie Antoinette.
This, I found interesting enough to backtrack to the beginning of, and read entirely in about 3 sittings, going through about a gallon of distilled water in the process.
The end of it had been kind of spoiled for me because, (I think it was) in "A Tale of Two Cities," by Charles Dickens, that the "historic" veracity of that story was corroborated, in part, by the inclusion of the atmosphere-setting information that just about all of Paris had turned out on a particular day to watch the beheading of that hapless ex-queen.
She did not coin the phrase: "Let them eat cake," -the phrase was already in use in France before Marie showed up- but maybe she parroted it.
First Bite In Days
I ate a grapefruit, to give me the energy to do this blog post, and am sipping on yet another new energy drink product to have hit the market, Celsius "healthy energy" drinks in the 12 ounce can.
It will soon be decision time, as to whether I go out to busk tonight, or not.
Having no money kind of forces my hand, in a sense, but this would probably mean that I have to break my strict water fast, as I'm not sure I am up to the task of toting all my gear to the Lilly Pad, in such a state as I am in.
I would be doing it for cat food and for traveling money. Or would I? I have one can of food for Harold, enough to get him through another night. I might just buy a bag of lemons and have lemon juice squeezed into my spring water with a dash of cayenne pepper added. This is another variety of "cleansing diet" that some people use.
When I do intense yoga stretches that involve deep breathing and the expansion of the lungs, I can feel the soreness in my upper chest which is undoubtedly a result of having smoked cigarettes forever. That's the next hurdle for me to get past in the cleansing process, and the hardest thing I will ever have to do in my life, it seems. To be able to one day say: "One year without a cigarette!"
Right now, I can't seem to get out of the "You gotta die of something" camp.
Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Monday, June 11, 2018
By Embracing Uncertainty
I know that the only thing that could do that would be myself.
If I were to start drinking again, for any reason, for example, then I might find myself without the resources to make the trip, in short order.
I am going to go, whether or not I manage to kick cigarettes, coffee, energy drinks, pot and kratom and stay off alcohol.
The thought of Uncle Daniel having to step outside every 45 minutes for a cigarette, in front of my 4 nieces whom I have yet to meet, is embarrassing.
"New Orleans is a highly stressful and competitive environment for a musician and coming up with a coping mechanism like smoking is almost inevitable," is too lame for me to contemplate, as a reason for that.
"Needing" to smoke a joint in order to get into the mood for playing is another demon-driven behavior.
As I am on my 4th day of a juice fast, now is the time when I am going to have to go to the Lilly Pad with nothing but a gallon jug of spring water by my side and try to "make it happen."
I have been there before, but that was at least a year ago.
Harold's Food
How long I plan upon being away will correlate to how much cat food I can procure to leave with my neighbor, Wayne.
I'm shooting for 3 week's worth of it.
I've just about finished a song about my friend Hubert Borg, and will next finish one written by my high school friend, and band-mate, Ted Broughey -one which he sent me his own version of, recorded in his apartment, about 7 years ago.
I feel kind of weak.
I ate a cucumber, peeled and doused in vinegar and sprinkled with salt, last night before going to sleep. I'm still having depressing dreams -ones in which I am lost, or have lost my guitar and backpack and am roaming the earth in the dream, searching for them. The water-only fasting people, in their group discussions on Facebook, advise that, if the person just feels too weak, or is called upon to do something strenuous, she can nibble on a little bit of bread here and there. This slows way down the process of the body consuming its own fat, and eventually its cancerous cells, for energy.
It being a Monday, I would be spinning the Wheel of Fortune by going out to play. It could land on 7 dollars, or on 50, but that is normal. The attitude that I go out with will ultimately control that.
My guitar strings are getting old and should start breaking any time now. I might take the brand new set off the Epiphone, which became my "second" guitar, the second I put the Grover Rotomatic 102 tuning machines on the Takamine, and switch them over to it.
I erred by not throwing 20 bucks on the green American Express Serve card when I had 23 bucks yesterday.
But, again, I'm not going to let having worn out strings and/or harmonicas keep me from traveling. There is a good chance that I might make enough money in a place like Charlottesville, Virginia (and hopefully meet John Grisham on the pedestrian mall there) to be able to go to their local music store and purchase a brand new Sukuki Harpmaster for around 30 bucks, it being conceivable that I could actually improve myself in transit, rather than sitting around here as the slow season rolls in like a thunderhead, hoping to have "just one fifty dollar night," before embarking on the trip.
Ekhart Tolle said that by embracing uncertainty, we help the blessings to flow.
I won't call Massachusetts until I am doing so from somewhere in between here and there.
Sunday, June 10, 2018
Ho Hum
I got to the Lilly Pad at 10:45 PM last (Saturday) night.
It wasn't 95 degrees, like Friday night was, but had cooled off to about 80.
I probably only made ten bucks in the hour and a half that I played, all one dollar bills.
I bought a can of cat food and a coffee, which I put cream and sugar in, and had taken a few sips off of before I remembered that I was on a juice only fast, and dumped the rest out.
I bought a 2 pack of cigars at the Unique Grocery, just in case I had an urge for tobacco on the upcoming third day of the fast (today) and then rode home; do not pass Walgreen's; do not buy food.
I went to the Goodwill Store, before coming here to the Uxi Duxi, never a good idea if I'm trying to save money because there is almost always something in that store that incredibly tempting to buy and that will most likely not be there the next day.
The store didn't disappoint.
The CD rack had an Allman Brothers "greatest hits" disc, as well as a classical music disc by Sibelius. I didn't buy them, but made a mental note to download music by those guys off of mp3juices.cc.
Then, there was a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, which was very high quality. The pieces were 3 times as thick as the ones on the puzzle that I have had laid out on a table for months, but haven't really worked on. Even the box was textured cardboard with a grainy quality to it. A 24 dollar product, if I ever saw one.
My enjoyment of putting puzzles together increases when the puzzle is high quality. When the pieces snap together definitively, leaving no doubt that you have found the right piece. But, there was no price on it. I probably should have brought it to the front, where the cashier might have said: "There's no price on it...I don't know...is 3 dollars too much?"
The image was of chocolate -assorted pieces of chocolate, all in different shades of brown and caramel, not a bad picture. I didn't buy it, mostly because I haven't been working on the one that I already started; that one has flimsy, thin pieces, though.
Then, there was a chin-up bar kind of thing, which goes in a door frame.
I have wanted exactly that for a couple years now. That was 4 dollars.
But, being on the third day of a juice fast had me feeling so weak that the thought of doing a chin-up was daunting. The thought of even toting the thing home in my backpack was daunting.
And, they had a couple sets of dumbbells, each with 20 pounds already on them, and there were other weight discs for sale at what would be 25 cents per pound. But, again, in my fasting state, they just looked too heavy.
A stack of 45 RPM records had me flipping through them for about 5 minutes, even though I don't have a turntable. Every one of them was a hit song from the past. All from the early eighties. Billy Joel's "Only The Good Die Young," with "Get It Right The First Time," on the other side, being an example.
I wanted to buy a few, just to look at the grooves and have around the apartment, but didn't.
I did buy the one thing that I had gone there for, a 2 dollar extension cord that I am going to finally hook up my woofer with.
I found a box in the dumpster at Sacred Heart that had a burned out amplifier in it, but a very good speaker. I am going to run the cord from the good amplifier that I have in the box that Harold the cat tore the foam out, from around the speaker, to the other box, and have good sounding bass for a change...
And, at fifty cents each, I grabbed a Pat Conroy book, a James A. Michener one -on the history of the Nebraska area-, a Java programming guide, and a William Faulkner book of 3 short stories. This will the third time I have possessed the same book. I lost one copy in Virginia when I was arrested when living on the land by the reservoir, and I originally had one for a class I was taking in college called "Nobel Prize Winning Literature (101?).
I continue to get more and more out of books that I have already read. I really feel like I had my head up my ass so far that it has been a 40 year ordeal, pulling it out. That was my complaint about the curriculum that I was taught in private high school. Sure, it was good to expose us to everything from Gilgamesh to the Latin language, but there was no way they could put any of it in perspective. I would get a lot more out of high school were I to go back and do it again now.
It's strange how reading John Grisham changes my attitude towards the whole world.
He writes about lawyers who leave the rat race of working for Big Law, and wind up finding meaning and purpose representing real people with real problems -the underdogs.
These -lawyers making big bucks- are the kind of people who throw me good tips and admire me for having pursued a meaningful life, rather than chasing after money. "It's cool that you play just for the love of it and aren't concerned with how much you make -so cool that, here, here's 200 bucks." type of thing.
I am hoping to really enjoy the Faulkner, now that I have lived in the deep south where he sets his stories. I might understand stuff that went over my head as a Massachusetts boy, who was reading it just because the guy won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It wasn't 95 degrees, like Friday night was, but had cooled off to about 80.
I probably only made ten bucks in the hour and a half that I played, all one dollar bills.
I bought a can of cat food and a coffee, which I put cream and sugar in, and had taken a few sips off of before I remembered that I was on a juice only fast, and dumped the rest out.
I bought a 2 pack of cigars at the Unique Grocery, just in case I had an urge for tobacco on the upcoming third day of the fast (today) and then rode home; do not pass Walgreen's; do not buy food.
I went to the Goodwill Store, before coming here to the Uxi Duxi, never a good idea if I'm trying to save money because there is almost always something in that store that incredibly tempting to buy and that will most likely not be there the next day.
The store didn't disappoint.
The CD rack had an Allman Brothers "greatest hits" disc, as well as a classical music disc by Sibelius. I didn't buy them, but made a mental note to download music by those guys off of mp3juices.cc.
Then, there was a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, which was very high quality. The pieces were 3 times as thick as the ones on the puzzle that I have had laid out on a table for months, but haven't really worked on. Even the box was textured cardboard with a grainy quality to it. A 24 dollar product, if I ever saw one.
My enjoyment of putting puzzles together increases when the puzzle is high quality. When the pieces snap together definitively, leaving no doubt that you have found the right piece. But, there was no price on it. I probably should have brought it to the front, where the cashier might have said: "There's no price on it...I don't know...is 3 dollars too much?"
The image was of chocolate -assorted pieces of chocolate, all in different shades of brown and caramel, not a bad picture. I didn't buy it, mostly because I haven't been working on the one that I already started; that one has flimsy, thin pieces, though.
Then, there was a chin-up bar kind of thing, which goes in a door frame.
I have wanted exactly that for a couple years now. That was 4 dollars.
But, being on the third day of a juice fast had me feeling so weak that the thought of doing a chin-up was daunting. The thought of even toting the thing home in my backpack was daunting.
And, they had a couple sets of dumbbells, each with 20 pounds already on them, and there were other weight discs for sale at what would be 25 cents per pound. But, again, in my fasting state, they just looked too heavy.
A stack of 45 RPM records had me flipping through them for about 5 minutes, even though I don't have a turntable. Every one of them was a hit song from the past. All from the early eighties. Billy Joel's "Only The Good Die Young," with "Get It Right The First Time," on the other side, being an example.
I wanted to buy a few, just to look at the grooves and have around the apartment, but didn't.
I did buy the one thing that I had gone there for, a 2 dollar extension cord that I am going to finally hook up my woofer with.
I found a box in the dumpster at Sacred Heart that had a burned out amplifier in it, but a very good speaker. I am going to run the cord from the good amplifier that I have in the box that Harold the cat tore the foam out, from around the speaker, to the other box, and have good sounding bass for a change...
And, at fifty cents each, I grabbed a Pat Conroy book, a James A. Michener one -on the history of the Nebraska area-, a Java programming guide, and a William Faulkner book of 3 short stories. This will the third time I have possessed the same book. I lost one copy in Virginia when I was arrested when living on the land by the reservoir, and I originally had one for a class I was taking in college called "Nobel Prize Winning Literature (101?).
I continue to get more and more out of books that I have already read. I really feel like I had my head up my ass so far that it has been a 40 year ordeal, pulling it out. That was my complaint about the curriculum that I was taught in private high school. Sure, it was good to expose us to everything from Gilgamesh to the Latin language, but there was no way they could put any of it in perspective. I would get a lot more out of high school were I to go back and do it again now.
It's strange how reading John Grisham changes my attitude towards the whole world.
He writes about lawyers who leave the rat race of working for Big Law, and wind up finding meaning and purpose representing real people with real problems -the underdogs.
These -lawyers making big bucks- are the kind of people who throw me good tips and admire me for having pursued a meaningful life, rather than chasing after money. "It's cool that you play just for the love of it and aren't concerned with how much you make -so cool that, here, here's 200 bucks." type of thing.
I am hoping to really enjoy the Faulkner, now that I have lived in the deep south where he sets his stories. I might understand stuff that went over my head as a Massachusetts boy, who was reading it just because the guy won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Saturday, June 9, 2018
Just Too Hot
I couldn't figure out why my energy level dropped, as if off the edge of a cliff, at 11:03 PM last (Friday) night.
I wound up walking to The Quartermaster, leaving my bike tied to the post across from the stoop, thinking that the extra time plus the exercise might give me a second wind, and have me chomping at the bit to play more.
I wound up sitting on a step near the store, closing my eyes, and going into a state of mind which was not quite sleep (I managed to rock slightly or move my fingers, so no skeezers would investigate whether I might have nodded off and left something unguarded, but my mind was somewhere else in the universe).
I recalled Ekhart Tolle, near the end of the book I just finished, talking about the 3 "modalities" of Enjoyment, Enthusiasm and Surrender, and his advice that, if you are not enjoying what you are doing and are not enthusiastic about it, then stop doing it.
The third modality deals with situations where you cannot stop what you are doing, perhaps because if you do, then the tire won't get changed and you won't get your wife, who is in labor, to the hospital, or something. I suppose, if I absolutely had to make x amount of money, then I would have to surrender to the situation -playing a Bob Dylan song that I have no idea of the meaning of, and trying to play it like I mean it- and make that my life's purpose, in that particular moment.
I became immensely absorbed in just sitting there with my eyes closed and my mind pretty much blank, numbed by having played pretty hard for an hour and a half, netting only 20 dollars in the process.
I think I was "totally present" in that moment, and had no enthusiasm for going back to busk more, and had taken a break because I had stopped enjoying what I was doing. I began to value the meditative moment more than whatever money might have come from going back.
The vibes that I got from the people (and there were a good number of them still out) was that they were not tippers.
Either from some country where the idea of tipping is foreign to them, or blissfully ignorant that the musician's only source of income is what he is doing, or just being broke, and walking Bourbon Street "just looking."
Either way, it wasn't until this morning, after having slept until my customary time of 1:30 PM, that it occurred to me that it was probably the 95 degree heat of the night that ultimately made me feel dopey, aided only slightly by the apple juice only diet.
I had initially blamed it on just the juice fast that I was one day into.
That had made me feel slightly weaker and more prone to dizziness upon standing up, but it hadn't slowed my music playing down at all, it seemed, as I tore through my repertoire for an hour and a half, with sweat running down my face, before falling off the edge of the cliff, energy-wise. It just wasn't there, and I was starting to feel anger towards the smart asses who will invariably say: "Thanks for playing," but not tip, thinking that is funny, and angry at the people who weren't even there, for not being there, I guess.
I was singing "Tears In Heaven," by Eric Clapton, at one point, through which I was constantly distracted by thinking about the Eckhart Tolle book and its message that "heaven" is something that can only be realized in the present moment, an can be precluded by a person's clinging to the notion of a future heaven or hell.
So, it actually became pointless, and therefore, painful, to be singing about this "heaven" that Eric Clapton was probably talking about, where you float up to after you die, and become "liberated" from your body, all the while not believing in the concept, at a philosophical level.
So, why perform another guy's song that you don't believe in, I reasoned, before switching between a few of my own, looking for something that I was indeed believing in at the moment, but drawing blanks. Time to take a fifteen minute break.
This is the second day of the juice fast, and I am feeling the to-be-expected light-headed-ness, and physical weakness of that day.
My sense of smell has become acute and even the Pizza Hut that I walked past earlier smelled delicious. What say's "You're on the verge of starvation" like their grease bombs smelling appetizing, I ask?
And I am repeating the foibles of the last time I fasted by sneaking things like coffee and tobacco and, right now a high-powered energy drink, to go with the one, not two, shot of kratom that I am sipping.
"Nothing but apple juice every hour and spring water on the half hours, until a gallon of each has been consumed, for three days straight and then nothing but spring water for three more," is the recipe for the fast. Going past the sixth day on water alone could probably not be recommended by Doctor Christopher, due to legal issues. There might be rare individuals that would be harmed by this, so, in recognition of them, only 3 days of water only are prescribed.
Arguably, there are certain vitamins, like vitamin C, which don't stay in the body for more than 3 days, and so the water faster, at one point, runs out of that vitamin. Of course his body is also burning any cancerous cells for fuel that he might have in his body, so there is the trade-off.
Most likely, tomorrow, I will be able to shrug off the urge for a puff or two of tobacco, skip coffee and not come to the Uxi Duxi. I will feel too weak to go out and busk, but will probably keep putting one foot in front of the other until I am at the Lilly Pad, where I will probably play quite well, looking at the tips that go into my jar disconnectedly, not seeing them as a vehicle for putting food in the stomach or a cigarette in the mouth, or kratom...
I have already entered the "cleaning stage" of the fast, having the acuity to suddenly become aware of the odor of Harold's litter box and to want my apartment to be an outward reflection of the inner state. My tongue is also yellowish white as whatever toxins are being flushed out of my body through it are. It's kind of a Yellow Borneo kratom hue, now that I think of it...
As far as going out to play tonight, I realize that the ninety degree temperatures and the humidity, plus the "air quality" compromising levels of ozone that my smartphone warned me about, is probably going to make it so an hour and a half should be the extent of my playing time. So, I might as well choose the hour and a half starting at 11 PM.
If I have a couple sitting on Lilly's stoop that I am entertaining when quitting time rolls around, I'll be able to make an exception, and go longer.
Other than that, the second one of the songs that I am recording, "Hubert's Trip," is only waiting upon vocals, to be sung at the spot outside the University Medical Center on Canal Street.
It's easier for me to sing when only random strangers are in the area, rather than at home in my apartment.
There is a song by some friends of mine in Massachusetts whom I haven't seen in almost 30 years, called: "The Enemy Is In Your Bed," and it basically deals with the fact that, a person's "real" battle to achieve peace of mind hinges more upon their intimate relationships, rather than some enemy in the field, who is wearing different insignia than you.
The enemy is in your bed. Or your apartment building.
It is the people in my building who are the last one's that I could ever break my guitar out to try to entertain, beset by all kinds of negative thoughts as I would be while doing it.
"Are they going to realize that I am a good enough musician that I must be out there making enough to put me in a position to be able to come back home and share the wealth?
Will entertaining them make me feel like I am casting pearls before swine in the sense that my more thought provoking or clever lyrics are going to go over their heads?
Am I afraid to show my more vulnerable and sensitive side, for fear that they will interpret it as weakness upon my part and think things like: "If I steal his bike, he's just gonna forgive me and say a prayer for me, but I got nothin' to worry about otherwise?
And that is what I wound up referring to last night when this guy came along, wearing a tie dyed shirt and carrying a guitar case.
He kind of passed by me with an air of, I'm better than you because I have a gig in a club on Bourbon Street, or so I thought.
I played my best, and kind of goofed around a bit.
He walked over and put a dollar in my basket, told me that he played at the Tropical Isle club, I think it was, and then told me that he thought that I had a lot of balls to be able to play on the street, and that "one night," he was going to try it himself.
He visibly became nervous right around the time I was considering telling him to break his guitar out, and we would do a song together, as if being able to read my mind.
If he is the same guy who used to play at that club the last time I walked past it, 3 years ago now, then he is an excellent musician; one who is scared shitless to do what I do almost every night. I had to smile about that.
Then I explained to him how, my particular dragon rears its head when I am home at my apartment. "I always think that my neighbors are going to think that I'm singing about them, and that makes me too guarded and impedes the flow of my music. Out here, I know that no random tourists are going to come over and punch me in the mouth, because the piece of shit that I am singing about who was a roommate of mine 15 years ago was so much like they are that I must have written it about them..." The enemy is in your bed.
"Plus, you don't have an amp," he added.
I interpreted that to mean that he saw an amp as something that the musician can kind of cower behind, letting the sheer volume of it do most of the work of entertaining. Crank up the amp nice and loud and then just hit a C major chord and let it ring...sounds good, eh? type of thing...
So, "Hubert's Trip," a song I wrote when I was in college (mastering the English langwedge) is only waiting to have it's correct verses sung in the right order, before it will be ready to be put on a data stick and carried with me on my trip, for, if and when, I encounter Hubert.
He was working at an auction house and making something like twenty bucks an hour when I last saw him a dozen years ago. He was still living in his parent's house, in exchange for yard work and gardening, and knowing him, putting most of his weekly 600 dollar checks in the bank. He is the same guy I blogged about who spent only 90 dollars over the entire ten weeks of the summer of '88, saving the rest to get him through the next year of college, as an art major.
It is easy to imagine him having paid cash for a 200 thousand dollar property maybe just a few years after I last saw him. We don't keep in touch because, as far as I know, he hasn't come up to speed with Facebook or anything yet, and the last time I wanted to contact him, I had to e-mail the message to Skinner's Auction House, in Bolton, Massachusetts.
He was talking about buying a Victorian style house somewhere that needed some restoration, doing said restoration, and then turning it into a place where artists and musicians could live at reasonable rates.
I wound up sitting on a step near the store, closing my eyes, and going into a state of mind which was not quite sleep (I managed to rock slightly or move my fingers, so no skeezers would investigate whether I might have nodded off and left something unguarded, but my mind was somewhere else in the universe).
I recalled Ekhart Tolle, near the end of the book I just finished, talking about the 3 "modalities" of Enjoyment, Enthusiasm and Surrender, and his advice that, if you are not enjoying what you are doing and are not enthusiastic about it, then stop doing it.
The third modality deals with situations where you cannot stop what you are doing, perhaps because if you do, then the tire won't get changed and you won't get your wife, who is in labor, to the hospital, or something. I suppose, if I absolutely had to make x amount of money, then I would have to surrender to the situation -playing a Bob Dylan song that I have no idea of the meaning of, and trying to play it like I mean it- and make that my life's purpose, in that particular moment.
I became immensely absorbed in just sitting there with my eyes closed and my mind pretty much blank, numbed by having played pretty hard for an hour and a half, netting only 20 dollars in the process.
I think I was "totally present" in that moment, and had no enthusiasm for going back to busk more, and had taken a break because I had stopped enjoying what I was doing. I began to value the meditative moment more than whatever money might have come from going back.
The vibes that I got from the people (and there were a good number of them still out) was that they were not tippers.
Either from some country where the idea of tipping is foreign to them, or blissfully ignorant that the musician's only source of income is what he is doing, or just being broke, and walking Bourbon Street "just looking."
Either way, it wasn't until this morning, after having slept until my customary time of 1:30 PM, that it occurred to me that it was probably the 95 degree heat of the night that ultimately made me feel dopey, aided only slightly by the apple juice only diet.
I had initially blamed it on just the juice fast that I was one day into.
That had made me feel slightly weaker and more prone to dizziness upon standing up, but it hadn't slowed my music playing down at all, it seemed, as I tore through my repertoire for an hour and a half, with sweat running down my face, before falling off the edge of the cliff, energy-wise. It just wasn't there, and I was starting to feel anger towards the smart asses who will invariably say: "Thanks for playing," but not tip, thinking that is funny, and angry at the people who weren't even there, for not being there, I guess.
I was singing "Tears In Heaven," by Eric Clapton, at one point, through which I was constantly distracted by thinking about the Eckhart Tolle book and its message that "heaven" is something that can only be realized in the present moment, an can be precluded by a person's clinging to the notion of a future heaven or hell.
So, it actually became pointless, and therefore, painful, to be singing about this "heaven" that Eric Clapton was probably talking about, where you float up to after you die, and become "liberated" from your body, all the while not believing in the concept, at a philosophical level.
So, why perform another guy's song that you don't believe in, I reasoned, before switching between a few of my own, looking for something that I was indeed believing in at the moment, but drawing blanks. Time to take a fifteen minute break.
This is the second day of the juice fast, and I am feeling the to-be-expected light-headed-ness, and physical weakness of that day.
My sense of smell has become acute and even the Pizza Hut that I walked past earlier smelled delicious. What say's "You're on the verge of starvation" like their grease bombs smelling appetizing, I ask?
And I am repeating the foibles of the last time I fasted by sneaking things like coffee and tobacco and, right now a high-powered energy drink, to go with the one, not two, shot of kratom that I am sipping.
"Nothing but apple juice every hour and spring water on the half hours, until a gallon of each has been consumed, for three days straight and then nothing but spring water for three more," is the recipe for the fast. Going past the sixth day on water alone could probably not be recommended by Doctor Christopher, due to legal issues. There might be rare individuals that would be harmed by this, so, in recognition of them, only 3 days of water only are prescribed.
Arguably, there are certain vitamins, like vitamin C, which don't stay in the body for more than 3 days, and so the water faster, at one point, runs out of that vitamin. Of course his body is also burning any cancerous cells for fuel that he might have in his body, so there is the trade-off.
Most likely, tomorrow, I will be able to shrug off the urge for a puff or two of tobacco, skip coffee and not come to the Uxi Duxi. I will feel too weak to go out and busk, but will probably keep putting one foot in front of the other until I am at the Lilly Pad, where I will probably play quite well, looking at the tips that go into my jar disconnectedly, not seeing them as a vehicle for putting food in the stomach or a cigarette in the mouth, or kratom...
I have already entered the "cleaning stage" of the fast, having the acuity to suddenly become aware of the odor of Harold's litter box and to want my apartment to be an outward reflection of the inner state. My tongue is also yellowish white as whatever toxins are being flushed out of my body through it are. It's kind of a Yellow Borneo kratom hue, now that I think of it...
As far as going out to play tonight, I realize that the ninety degree temperatures and the humidity, plus the "air quality" compromising levels of ozone that my smartphone warned me about, is probably going to make it so an hour and a half should be the extent of my playing time. So, I might as well choose the hour and a half starting at 11 PM.
If I have a couple sitting on Lilly's stoop that I am entertaining when quitting time rolls around, I'll be able to make an exception, and go longer.
Other than that, the second one of the songs that I am recording, "Hubert's Trip," is only waiting upon vocals, to be sung at the spot outside the University Medical Center on Canal Street.
It's easier for me to sing when only random strangers are in the area, rather than at home in my apartment.
There is a song by some friends of mine in Massachusetts whom I haven't seen in almost 30 years, called: "The Enemy Is In Your Bed," and it basically deals with the fact that, a person's "real" battle to achieve peace of mind hinges more upon their intimate relationships, rather than some enemy in the field, who is wearing different insignia than you.
The enemy is in your bed. Or your apartment building.
It is the people in my building who are the last one's that I could ever break my guitar out to try to entertain, beset by all kinds of negative thoughts as I would be while doing it.
"Are they going to realize that I am a good enough musician that I must be out there making enough to put me in a position to be able to come back home and share the wealth?
Will entertaining them make me feel like I am casting pearls before swine in the sense that my more thought provoking or clever lyrics are going to go over their heads?
Am I afraid to show my more vulnerable and sensitive side, for fear that they will interpret it as weakness upon my part and think things like: "If I steal his bike, he's just gonna forgive me and say a prayer for me, but I got nothin' to worry about otherwise?
And that is what I wound up referring to last night when this guy came along, wearing a tie dyed shirt and carrying a guitar case.
He kind of passed by me with an air of, I'm better than you because I have a gig in a club on Bourbon Street, or so I thought.
I played my best, and kind of goofed around a bit.
He walked over and put a dollar in my basket, told me that he played at the Tropical Isle club, I think it was, and then told me that he thought that I had a lot of balls to be able to play on the street, and that "one night," he was going to try it himself.
He visibly became nervous right around the time I was considering telling him to break his guitar out, and we would do a song together, as if being able to read my mind.
If he is the same guy who used to play at that club the last time I walked past it, 3 years ago now, then he is an excellent musician; one who is scared shitless to do what I do almost every night. I had to smile about that.
Then I explained to him how, my particular dragon rears its head when I am home at my apartment. "I always think that my neighbors are going to think that I'm singing about them, and that makes me too guarded and impedes the flow of my music. Out here, I know that no random tourists are going to come over and punch me in the mouth, because the piece of shit that I am singing about who was a roommate of mine 15 years ago was so much like they are that I must have written it about them..." The enemy is in your bed.
"Plus, you don't have an amp," he added.
I interpreted that to mean that he saw an amp as something that the musician can kind of cower behind, letting the sheer volume of it do most of the work of entertaining. Crank up the amp nice and loud and then just hit a C major chord and let it ring...sounds good, eh? type of thing...
So, "Hubert's Trip," a song I wrote when I was in college (mastering the English langwedge) is only waiting to have it's correct verses sung in the right order, before it will be ready to be put on a data stick and carried with me on my trip, for, if and when, I encounter Hubert.
He was working at an auction house and making something like twenty bucks an hour when I last saw him a dozen years ago. He was still living in his parent's house, in exchange for yard work and gardening, and knowing him, putting most of his weekly 600 dollar checks in the bank. He is the same guy I blogged about who spent only 90 dollars over the entire ten weeks of the summer of '88, saving the rest to get him through the next year of college, as an art major.
It is easy to imagine him having paid cash for a 200 thousand dollar property maybe just a few years after I last saw him. We don't keep in touch because, as far as I know, he hasn't come up to speed with Facebook or anything yet, and the last time I wanted to contact him, I had to e-mail the message to Skinner's Auction House, in Bolton, Massachusetts.
He was talking about buying a Victorian style house somewhere that needed some restoration, doing said restoration, and then turning it into a place where artists and musicians could live at reasonable rates.
Friday, June 8, 2018
A "Traveling" Sign
It's a beautiful day to be at the Lilly Pad in broad daylight, to start the night at the ridiculously early hour of maybe six-thirty, if I leave the Uxi Duxi now...
Last Saturday, I started during the day and made a steady flow of 1 to 3 dollar tips in the hours right after supper, I would imagine they were.
There are too many tourists milling about for any one of them to sit down for a private audition -to exchange life stories and wind up leaving a huge tip, but that can always happen at midnight, if I'm still there. I will try to be still there at midnight, if I get there at six-thirty.
I'm saving for my trip.
I'm thinking of targeting certain cities along the way, buying Megabus tickets for their locations, rather than randomly setting out by hopping a train.
There is a small chance that the cops in Mobile, Alabama, who might remember me from five years ago might arrest me if I try to play there on a Friday night, since they know that I know that they have outlawed any kind of busking there, or they had, five years ago.
The lieutenant, who had been new then, may not still be there.
The one before him shot himself while parked in the driveway of his girlfriend. He had been very cool about promoting Mobile as "kind of a New Orleans," and I had been able to make close to a hundred bucks there, on any given weekend night. That was back when I drank, so that was making a hundred bucks while running to the store for more beer every once in a while, and running into the bushes to urinate every once in a while, and becoming so sloppy that my playing level dropped off towards the end of the night every once in a while.
I might get a Megabus ticket for Charlottesville, Virginia as a first stop. They have a pedestrian mall that featured buskers, at least when I was there right around the turn of the century.
I wasn't a busker yet, then. I worked overnight in a little booth at a gas station, and had a bitchin' homeless pad, underground, and concealed very well in the woods.
I would like to make at least one stop along the way. Colin Mitchell has made me curious about playing in some of these towns where he has been. I figure I can make at least as much as he said he did. He stays at motels and eats at restaurants while he travels.
He does put in closer to an eight hour day than I presently do. But I'm willing to sleep on the grass under a tree somewhere, which will be easy for me to find because I know the city from living there for about 2 years. It's only sleep, and when you're unconscious, you have no idea that you are in a motel room that you are paying dearly for. You might be dreaming that you are asleep on the grass under a tree somewhere, so why pay for that?
As soon as I buy a bunch of food for Harold the cat, I will think about heading out. The trouble is that Harold's appetite has increased in proportion to the "extra" food I have been getting him. I can't buy his normal one can to pour on top of dry food, and set the other one aside, it seems. Maybe he is actually smart enough to catch a glimpse of the extra can while I am "hiding" it and then develops a voracious appetite, knowing it is there...
I probably won't contact anyone up there until I am en-route, because I have been talking about doing this for at least every one of the past seven years, but never made it.
I waited too long into the summer and it slowed down here so much that just scraping by took precedent over saving for any trip.
The key is to leave upon the faith that you will be able to make money wherever you go, and to go out flat broke if that is the case. Having a "traveling" sign might be enough to make things work out.
Last Saturday, I started during the day and made a steady flow of 1 to 3 dollar tips in the hours right after supper, I would imagine they were.
There are too many tourists milling about for any one of them to sit down for a private audition -to exchange life stories and wind up leaving a huge tip, but that can always happen at midnight, if I'm still there. I will try to be still there at midnight, if I get there at six-thirty.
I'm saving for my trip.
I'm thinking of targeting certain cities along the way, buying Megabus tickets for their locations, rather than randomly setting out by hopping a train.
There is a small chance that the cops in Mobile, Alabama, who might remember me from five years ago might arrest me if I try to play there on a Friday night, since they know that I know that they have outlawed any kind of busking there, or they had, five years ago.
The lieutenant, who had been new then, may not still be there.
The one before him shot himself while parked in the driveway of his girlfriend. He had been very cool about promoting Mobile as "kind of a New Orleans," and I had been able to make close to a hundred bucks there, on any given weekend night. That was back when I drank, so that was making a hundred bucks while running to the store for more beer every once in a while, and running into the bushes to urinate every once in a while, and becoming so sloppy that my playing level dropped off towards the end of the night every once in a while.
I might get a Megabus ticket for Charlottesville, Virginia as a first stop. They have a pedestrian mall that featured buskers, at least when I was there right around the turn of the century.
I wasn't a busker yet, then. I worked overnight in a little booth at a gas station, and had a bitchin' homeless pad, underground, and concealed very well in the woods.
I would like to make at least one stop along the way. Colin Mitchell has made me curious about playing in some of these towns where he has been. I figure I can make at least as much as he said he did. He stays at motels and eats at restaurants while he travels.
He does put in closer to an eight hour day than I presently do. But I'm willing to sleep on the grass under a tree somewhere, which will be easy for me to find because I know the city from living there for about 2 years. It's only sleep, and when you're unconscious, you have no idea that you are in a motel room that you are paying dearly for. You might be dreaming that you are asleep on the grass under a tree somewhere, so why pay for that?
As soon as I buy a bunch of food for Harold the cat, I will think about heading out. The trouble is that Harold's appetite has increased in proportion to the "extra" food I have been getting him. I can't buy his normal one can to pour on top of dry food, and set the other one aside, it seems. Maybe he is actually smart enough to catch a glimpse of the extra can while I am "hiding" it and then develops a voracious appetite, knowing it is there...
I probably won't contact anyone up there until I am en-route, because I have been talking about doing this for at least every one of the past seven years, but never made it.
I waited too long into the summer and it slowed down here so much that just scraping by took precedent over saving for any trip.
The key is to leave upon the faith that you will be able to make money wherever you go, and to go out flat broke if that is the case. Having a "traveling" sign might be enough to make things work out.
Tuesday, June 5, 2018
I Fixed It Some
About "The latest video."
The video that I posted 2 days ago, I wound up going back into and fixing up a bit, especially the vocals, which had glitches.
I had sung through the song 3 times and was picking and choosing the best phrases from each and mixing and matching them, which led to a couple of voices stepping on each other, and the last note of the song being just plain off pitch. I was kind of like the runner who starts slowing down before he has actually crossed the finish line. This resulting in some fellows losing races by a nose to a guy who is going all out, full steam, and who lunges past the guy and grabs the tape first.
The musical analogy would be me falling flat on the very last note of the song, where the guy sings "...when I was young."
The original vinyl recording had a little vamp at the end, where the song goes to the major key.
It is (of course) in a minor key because it is a lament over wasted youth. But, youth is normally wasted on the young, and so, I guess the sentiment expressed by the major chord at the end is: "oh, but wasn't it great back then," and greatness has to be represented by a major chord.
I also forgot to put some kind of guitar solo in the thing, which I will probably do, by making the verse that ends with: "All the conversations, I can now recall, concerned themselves with me, and nothing else at all" repeat itself once. Then I will mute the vocals and play the guitar solo there instead.
There is a guitar solo on the Eddie Arnold record, but it is kind of antiseptic, and I think I can play a better one, bringing to issue everything I have garnered out of the evolution that guitar solos have undergone since that song came out in 1966(?)
I was also able to learn a thing or two about the Openshot video editor.
You have to wait for each action to complete itself before trying another one. If you are patient, then in twenty seconds to two minutes, whatever you instructed the program to do will complete in front of you. If you start clicking on the button repeatedly, or if you figure that the program didn't do the thing and then go on to try something else, that is when Openshot will crash.
I went to export a file and got the message "Openshot is not responding" with the choice to "force quit," or wait, and I clicked on "wait for program to respond," went back to my Grisham novel, and about 2 minutes later, I looked over to see that it was exporting and was already 44% into the process, or something.
So, feeling more secure about the thing not crashing, I was emboldened to try to change the pictures that displayed while the song played, moving them around so they would fall more in line with the verses, and have more to do with the lyrics, etc...
I believe that I have mastered the art of making average videos (up from kind of ragged) and reached a plateau whereby, through following the techniques that I have developed, all my future stuff will be at least this good.
Having a metronome program on my smart phone as I do now, I can set it to the exact tempo of the song and do more stuff like the 11 second live clip of me actually playing the song that is nestled among the still photos.
Going through the uploading to Youtube process again, after having only made minor changes to it is arduous, and then having to delete the inferior one (that will never really ever go away, especially if anyone "shared" it) is even more work.
I was fatigued enough after having stayed up all night working on the first one, so that I concluded "good enough" and put it on Youtube. I hadn't discovered the method of giving the Openshot editor up to 2 minutes to complete an action in order to keep it from crashing and so I felt lucky enough to have even gotten the song to play while the pictures showed, and figured I had better post it before I lost the whole thing in some kind of unrecoverable crash.
I am actually more than half satisfied with the above video.
The Actual Post
Workaraound: A Set Of Missing Keys
I went looking through other documents for instances of the characters that I am missing on my keyboard.
I cut and pasted them all (90687%*) -including the parenthesis- into a separate document.
So now, before I write, I cut all the missing characters out of it. When I need one of them, I hit "paste" and then delete out the ones that I don't need.
So, I guess I don't need a new laptop or a repair, after-all. I wonder how many years I can go using this method...
I was determined to go out and busk in broad daylight Saturday, after having rotated my sleep schedule by staying up from after I got home Thursday night, all the way into late Friday, reading a Grisham novel, for the most part, interspersed with peeks at other books, and listening back to some of my own music.
I think I have gotten my videos to the level of "average," up considerably from "raggedy," and I am pretty excited about the next few projects, now that I have a method. Plus, I have the incentive, given my upcoming trip to New England, to focus on special music for the trip. There are at least a few people whom I am making custom music for, to play for them once I'm up there and they ask: "So, have you recorded anything?" Some of them are musicians, whom I intend to astound by hitting the play button and having one of their own compositions done by myself, issue forth from the speakers.
I have come up with a system for producing stuff that comes out at a consistent level, by adhering to certain rules. Laying down a metronome track first is vital. It becomes the glue that holds the whole thing together. You can't really play a song until you can do it in steady time.
Taking a section where I nailed the chords just right and then making that riff repeat, using the aptly named "repeat" effect, is part of the system. Why try to play mistake free throughout a nine minute song, when I can take the perfectly played part, and make it repeat digitally for nine minutes? Then I can play the second instrument along with that, and only need to hit a stretch where they mesh perfectly, then, isolate that section and repeat. Then, repeat the process until you wind up with a dozen voices all in sync for the whole nine minute song. Yup.
And, it won't sound repetitious, because I will layer a bunch of live, spur of the moment stuff over the repeating stuff.
The way I look at it is, when a tourist buys a CD from a busker, he wants it to sound just like what he is hearing on the sidewalk so that, after he gets back from his vacation and is thrilling the neighbors with his slideshow, he might get around to: "Then we saw this guy, playing on the sidewalk..." part and be able to pop in the disc at that point and say: "Yeah, that's him!"
In a perfect world, it would be the same song that he has a snippet of on his phone, which he shot on the sidewalk. Just minus the traffic noise and sounding like it was done in some kind of recording studio.
But, I'm not going waste a lot of energy pursuing an even better sound quality in my studio at home.
Anyone would expect that the guy playing on the sidewalk saved his pennies and bought studio time somewhere, and if it sounds like not the most professional studio, then it would just fit in to what the tourist might expect that the busker would be able to afford.
I slept all day Sunday, after having had the 55 dollar Saturday. There is a whole different world of busking at the Lilly Pad during daylight hours.
There are typically a lot more people, but they are typically one or two dollar tippers. Nobody is going to sit and swap stories then leave me with a hundred and seventy-five dollar tip amidst the bustle of activity; that's the way it goes, but there is money out there, in the afternoon; a comforting thought, should I ever need to play for eight hours to catch up on bills.
Waking up at 9 PM, after having missed another Berta dinner opportunity, I decided to go out, and made another 48 bucks in 2 and a half hours.
I think about Howard Westra every Sunday morning, and his standing invitation for me to join in what is a traditional dinner, prepared by Berta, served every week on that day, "after church."
The last time I was there was probably 4 months ago, and every Sunday morning, after I get back from busking, I look at the clock to see if I can squeeze in eight hours of sleep and still be over in Gretna in time for the dinner.
But, so far the past 4 months, I have wanted more to stay up and do things, feeling that my weekend had arrived, after having played Thursday through Saturday.
Also, I really wouldn't want to be going over there with food primarily on my mind; it would have to be out of wanting to see Howard and it wouldn't faze me if he were to say: "Oh, wow! The one time you show up, Berta didn't cook. She had to take the turkey to the vet!," or something.
But, today I missed it again, having probably just laid down as Berta was ringing the dinner bell.
Mr. Know-it-All
Ken would be there, of course. Howard confided once to me that, had he known that Ken was "like that," he would never have moved there.
Ken is, like, a smallish guy with the grizzled look that certain rednecks who grow up in swamps get, wild hair for blending in so ducks won't spot you, and some kind of tattoo work and a missing front tooth that say "I hung around some pretty mean redneck bars when I was younger," and Ken has the annoying habit of being an expert on every subject.
Howard told me that it was nearly impossible for him to cook a meal in the kitchen without having the task wrested from him by Ken, who becomes adamant about showing Howard: "how you cook a chicken," because guys who grew up in swamps like him, have it down to a science.
Howard had been informed by Ken that he was doing it all wrong in each case.
And, each time, Ken had ruined the meal. His chicken had come out dry and stringy, Howard said. But in Ken's defense, he had nodded off off, drunk, and had left it in the oven a bit too long.
Howard had been too much of a pacifist to have resisted him, I guess. Maybe with a polite: "Beat it, pal. Get your hands off my chicken!" or other gesture.
Now, Howard just buys sandwiches to bring home and eat during the week. Sad, having a Mr. Know-it-All around...
When I was there to pick up the bike that they gave me for Christmas in February, Ken was dressing me down on every adjustment I was trying to make, telling me, of course, that I was doing it all wrong, then giving me erroneous instructions after assuring me that he has worked on "hundreds of bikes," infamously insisting that the bike had 24 inch tires when they had 26" stamped right on them. "I see what you mean (about him being a Mr. Know-It-All)," I whispered to Howard, at one point.
But, Ken would be there, on any given Sunday, to detract from the experience of the big dinner after church.
Howard described him as the type of alcoholic that you can schedule yourself around. At a certain time each night, in between beers eight and nine, perhaps, he becomes obnoxious, and retreats to his bungaloo in the back yard. If he should, for some reason, not retreat to his bungaloo once he reaches this stage, then, Howard has learned to withdraw to his own bedroom -draft dodging pacifist that he is...
When Ken drinks hard liquor he becomes a physical threat, especially to Berta, who is supposedly his girlfriend, but who sleeps in the house while Ken goes to his mobile home sized place in the back yard where he has his own TV.
I have seen some people there whom I have been introduced to as good friends of Berta's who wound up walking out with some pretty good portions of food, at Berta's insistence. She had foisted a small bag of leftovers on me on my way out, the few times that I had been there.
These visits were way back, during football season, almost 4 months ago.
The video that I posted 2 days ago, I wound up going back into and fixing up a bit, especially the vocals, which had glitches.
I had sung through the song 3 times and was picking and choosing the best phrases from each and mixing and matching them, which led to a couple of voices stepping on each other, and the last note of the song being just plain off pitch. I was kind of like the runner who starts slowing down before he has actually crossed the finish line. This resulting in some fellows losing races by a nose to a guy who is going all out, full steam, and who lunges past the guy and grabs the tape first.
The musical analogy would be me falling flat on the very last note of the song, where the guy sings "...when I was young."
The original vinyl recording had a little vamp at the end, where the song goes to the major key.
It is (of course) in a minor key because it is a lament over wasted youth. But, youth is normally wasted on the young, and so, I guess the sentiment expressed by the major chord at the end is: "oh, but wasn't it great back then," and greatness has to be represented by a major chord.
I also forgot to put some kind of guitar solo in the thing, which I will probably do, by making the verse that ends with: "All the conversations, I can now recall, concerned themselves with me, and nothing else at all" repeat itself once. Then I will mute the vocals and play the guitar solo there instead.
There is a guitar solo on the Eddie Arnold record, but it is kind of antiseptic, and I think I can play a better one, bringing to issue everything I have garnered out of the evolution that guitar solos have undergone since that song came out in 1966(?)
I was also able to learn a thing or two about the Openshot video editor.
You have to wait for each action to complete itself before trying another one. If you are patient, then in twenty seconds to two minutes, whatever you instructed the program to do will complete in front of you. If you start clicking on the button repeatedly, or if you figure that the program didn't do the thing and then go on to try something else, that is when Openshot will crash.
I went to export a file and got the message "Openshot is not responding" with the choice to "force quit," or wait, and I clicked on "wait for program to respond," went back to my Grisham novel, and about 2 minutes later, I looked over to see that it was exporting and was already 44% into the process, or something.
So, feeling more secure about the thing not crashing, I was emboldened to try to change the pictures that displayed while the song played, moving them around so they would fall more in line with the verses, and have more to do with the lyrics, etc...
I believe that I have mastered the art of making average videos (up from kind of ragged) and reached a plateau whereby, through following the techniques that I have developed, all my future stuff will be at least this good.
Having a metronome program on my smart phone as I do now, I can set it to the exact tempo of the song and do more stuff like the 11 second live clip of me actually playing the song that is nestled among the still photos.
Going through the uploading to Youtube process again, after having only made minor changes to it is arduous, and then having to delete the inferior one (that will never really ever go away, especially if anyone "shared" it) is even more work.
I was fatigued enough after having stayed up all night working on the first one, so that I concluded "good enough" and put it on Youtube. I hadn't discovered the method of giving the Openshot editor up to 2 minutes to complete an action in order to keep it from crashing and so I felt lucky enough to have even gotten the song to play while the pictures showed, and figured I had better post it before I lost the whole thing in some kind of unrecoverable crash.
I am actually more than half satisfied with the above video.
The Actual Post
 |
| It is just about pool season, for Lilly and I |
Workaraound: A Set Of Missing Keys
I went looking through other documents for instances of the characters that I am missing on my keyboard.
I cut and pasted them all (90687%*) -including the parenthesis- into a separate document.
So now, before I write, I cut all the missing characters out of it. When I need one of them, I hit "paste" and then delete out the ones that I don't need.
So, I guess I don't need a new laptop or a repair, after-all. I wonder how many years I can go using this method...
- 55 Dollar Saturday Afternoon/Night
- 48 Dollar Sunday Night
- Monday Off To Make Video (top)
I was determined to go out and busk in broad daylight Saturday, after having rotated my sleep schedule by staying up from after I got home Thursday night, all the way into late Friday, reading a Grisham novel, for the most part, interspersed with peeks at other books, and listening back to some of my own music.
I think I have gotten my videos to the level of "average," up considerably from "raggedy," and I am pretty excited about the next few projects, now that I have a method. Plus, I have the incentive, given my upcoming trip to New England, to focus on special music for the trip. There are at least a few people whom I am making custom music for, to play for them once I'm up there and they ask: "So, have you recorded anything?" Some of them are musicians, whom I intend to astound by hitting the play button and having one of their own compositions done by myself, issue forth from the speakers.
I have come up with a system for producing stuff that comes out at a consistent level, by adhering to certain rules. Laying down a metronome track first is vital. It becomes the glue that holds the whole thing together. You can't really play a song until you can do it in steady time.
Taking a section where I nailed the chords just right and then making that riff repeat, using the aptly named "repeat" effect, is part of the system. Why try to play mistake free throughout a nine minute song, when I can take the perfectly played part, and make it repeat digitally for nine minutes? Then I can play the second instrument along with that, and only need to hit a stretch where they mesh perfectly, then, isolate that section and repeat. Then, repeat the process until you wind up with a dozen voices all in sync for the whole nine minute song. Yup.
And, it won't sound repetitious, because I will layer a bunch of live, spur of the moment stuff over the repeating stuff.
The way I look at it is, when a tourist buys a CD from a busker, he wants it to sound just like what he is hearing on the sidewalk so that, after he gets back from his vacation and is thrilling the neighbors with his slideshow, he might get around to: "Then we saw this guy, playing on the sidewalk..." part and be able to pop in the disc at that point and say: "Yeah, that's him!"
In a perfect world, it would be the same song that he has a snippet of on his phone, which he shot on the sidewalk. Just minus the traffic noise and sounding like it was done in some kind of recording studio.
But, I'm not going waste a lot of energy pursuing an even better sound quality in my studio at home.
Anyone would expect that the guy playing on the sidewalk saved his pennies and bought studio time somewhere, and if it sounds like not the most professional studio, then it would just fit in to what the tourist might expect that the busker would be able to afford.
I slept all day Sunday, after having had the 55 dollar Saturday. There is a whole different world of busking at the Lilly Pad during daylight hours.
There are typically a lot more people, but they are typically one or two dollar tippers. Nobody is going to sit and swap stories then leave me with a hundred and seventy-five dollar tip amidst the bustle of activity; that's the way it goes, but there is money out there, in the afternoon; a comforting thought, should I ever need to play for eight hours to catch up on bills.
Waking up at 9 PM, after having missed another Berta dinner opportunity, I decided to go out, and made another 48 bucks in 2 and a half hours.
I think about Howard Westra every Sunday morning, and his standing invitation for me to join in what is a traditional dinner, prepared by Berta, served every week on that day, "after church."
The last time I was there was probably 4 months ago, and every Sunday morning, after I get back from busking, I look at the clock to see if I can squeeze in eight hours of sleep and still be over in Gretna in time for the dinner.
But, so far the past 4 months, I have wanted more to stay up and do things, feeling that my weekend had arrived, after having played Thursday through Saturday.
Also, I really wouldn't want to be going over there with food primarily on my mind; it would have to be out of wanting to see Howard and it wouldn't faze me if he were to say: "Oh, wow! The one time you show up, Berta didn't cook. She had to take the turkey to the vet!," or something.
But, today I missed it again, having probably just laid down as Berta was ringing the dinner bell.
Mr. Know-it-All
Ken would be there, of course. Howard confided once to me that, had he known that Ken was "like that," he would never have moved there.
Ken is, like, a smallish guy with the grizzled look that certain rednecks who grow up in swamps get, wild hair for blending in so ducks won't spot you, and some kind of tattoo work and a missing front tooth that say "I hung around some pretty mean redneck bars when I was younger," and Ken has the annoying habit of being an expert on every subject.
Howard told me that it was nearly impossible for him to cook a meal in the kitchen without having the task wrested from him by Ken, who becomes adamant about showing Howard: "how you cook a chicken," because guys who grew up in swamps like him, have it down to a science.
Howard had been informed by Ken that he was doing it all wrong in each case.
And, each time, Ken had ruined the meal. His chicken had come out dry and stringy, Howard said. But in Ken's defense, he had nodded off off, drunk, and had left it in the oven a bit too long.
Howard had been too much of a pacifist to have resisted him, I guess. Maybe with a polite: "Beat it, pal. Get your hands off my chicken!" or other gesture.
Now, Howard just buys sandwiches to bring home and eat during the week. Sad, having a Mr. Know-it-All around...
When I was there to pick up the bike that they gave me for Christmas in February, Ken was dressing me down on every adjustment I was trying to make, telling me, of course, that I was doing it all wrong, then giving me erroneous instructions after assuring me that he has worked on "hundreds of bikes," infamously insisting that the bike had 24 inch tires when they had 26" stamped right on them. "I see what you mean (about him being a Mr. Know-It-All)," I whispered to Howard, at one point.
But, Ken would be there, on any given Sunday, to detract from the experience of the big dinner after church.
Howard described him as the type of alcoholic that you can schedule yourself around. At a certain time each night, in between beers eight and nine, perhaps, he becomes obnoxious, and retreats to his bungaloo in the back yard. If he should, for some reason, not retreat to his bungaloo once he reaches this stage, then, Howard has learned to withdraw to his own bedroom -draft dodging pacifist that he is...
When Ken drinks hard liquor he becomes a physical threat, especially to Berta, who is supposedly his girlfriend, but who sleeps in the house while Ken goes to his mobile home sized place in the back yard where he has his own TV.
I have seen some people there whom I have been introduced to as good friends of Berta's who wound up walking out with some pretty good portions of food, at Berta's insistence. She had foisted a small bag of leftovers on me on my way out, the few times that I had been there.
These visits were way back, during football season, almost 4 months ago.
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
I Wrote This Yesterday
 |
| Arriving too late to get a cup of coffee from the Starbucks, here at Harrah's Casino |
There is a good deal of noise there, but that just makes my voice blend in from a distance and I don't feel like I am personally affecting any one while there.
In front of the University Medical Center there is an area about the size of a football field which contains paths that cut it into sections, each of which being adorned by statues and water fountain type things and modern sculptures, plants and large pebbles filling in the rest.
I found that, by taking a place on one of the two foot high walls which border the beautified areas, I was about a hundred feet from the nearest traffic and basically sitting in a football field sized area holding the microphone inches from my mouth with the sensitivity of the Snowball set to fifty percent.
I use ninety three percent to record an acoustic guitar from a couple feet away, just to use that as a reference. The result of setting the Snowball to be that deaf -as that is what the effect of turning the sensitivity down is- is that the traffic that is a hundred feet away has its sound attenuated by half, making the cars sound like they are ten times farther away, I think the logarithm is...
So, singing loudly -because the decibel level of the whole area is high enough so that my voice probably only "carries" a couple hundred feet, making me feel free to just belt out melodies, offensive or otherwise- into a microphone held 4 inches from my mouth is acceptable from a noise reduction standpoint.
It's like; would you rather have someone whisper vital information in your ear while you both stand at a noisy construction site, or have them yell the same information to you from a hundred feet away at a beach where it isn't technically "loud" but there is the sound of surf crashing, the wind, the seagulls an an occasional ships horn from a half mile out at sea?
If the information is vital, why flirt with the possibility of a seagulls' obscuring a syllable or the crash of a wave making the word "session" sound like it could have been "lesson" because the "sh" sounds blended in with the seething froth?
So, I have discovered one more recording technique destined for a "making decent sounding home recordings on a shoestring" type post or book that might come in the future.
I have written a couple posts offline and at odd times and I now go to fetch them and perhaps put them below. Or to write "Never mind." and move on.
The first post I found had more about the forty-seven dollar Sunday that I had, mentioned the keyboard on this laptop now having keys that don't work -the digits seven through zero, one of the "Ctrl" keys, and most important to me, the parenthesis, both of them -it's going to be more dashes now.
Then, I voiced concern over leaving my key with Wayne, my neighbor, before embarking upon any trip, missing digits seven through zero.
The way I wrote it was:
$1Ꞁ.Oꝯ night.
The reason that amount looks funny is because the keyboard on my laptop has, at this time at least, some non functioning keys.
Most annoying, when using the Audacity recording studio is that the "Ctl" key on the left doesn't seem to work. And the "end" key doesn't bring the cursor to the end of anything, as far as I can tell.
Going out so late on a Sunday night so as to not even arrive until almost midnight and making forty seven bucks was good.
It is a mere eight days now, before my food money comes.
Harold the cat might just have to be an outdoor cat, unless Wayne, my neighbor does indeed want to take my house key while I'm gone and let the thing in and out.
Now that I think of it, it might give me a sense of insecurity to be miles away from home and to know that I have a place waiting for me if I can just get back to New Orleans, if some calamity is to befall me, but to also not have my key on my ring.
The Key To Serenity
In this world where "anything can happen" it's possible to imagine my neighbor Wayne, God forbid dying while I'm away, and myself returning after an arduous journey, hungry and tired, overheated and just wanting so much to take a lukewarm shower, eat something and take a nap, but, I am unable to get into my apartment.
Perhaps I have to wait around for a locksmith to show up.
Maybe after Wayne died, his apartment was cleaned out and my one and only key to my apartment, they found on a table somewhere when cleaning the place, and chucked into some box which was mailed to Wayne's family in wherever because it looked like it might be important...
And, there I would be, unable to let myself and a meowing Harold the cat in.
I better make myself a copy of the key if I'm going to leave one with him.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)