Wednesday, March 13, 2024

An Invitation

When Google is making sure that hardly anyone sees a certain blog, then I guess its author is at liberty to write whatever hare-brained thing that comes to mind; as he tries to make sense of the shadows on the wall...

Tanya invites me to join "the party."


I still haven't found the key to unlock the joy of writing just for the sake of it, with the journey being the reward, type of thing.

The obnoxious Big Tech bosses, already controlling what 90% of the people with smartphones are going to see and hear every minute of every day leading up to the November election, are really getting on my nerves with their shadow banning of this blog.

If I'm going to say positive things about Robert F. Kennedy Jr (*flag goes up somewhere in Mountain View, California*) then the algorithm is going to make sure that the post is seen by only a select handful of people -those already deemed to be lost causes -boomers and other incorrigible "Trumpers-" whose votes will just have to be annulled the "2020" way.

By them finding, for each, a corresponding "gullible person of color" who has been captured by the Google algorithm. One that they can scoop up in a van laden with pizza and a keg of beer, and whisk off to the polling site ("We can register you on the way there" [ using this app that Zuckerberg was generous enough to have underwritten the cost of, and made available to Meta users, upon whose phones records show that neither RFK Jr, nor anything positive about Trump has ever appeared]."

I'm starting to wonder if there isn't indeed wisdom in the perpetuity of the deep state and its "perpetual war" machine. Maybe, to hell with Trump, Kennedy and Ramaswami, and maybe Karrie should go jump in a Lake.

Maybe I should feel gratitude for the piled up bodies of dead Jews, and dead Palestinians, stacked to one side to leave room for some dead Chinese and dead Arabians to come. We might should thank the bodies for this high standard of living that we all enjoy in this, "the greatest country in the world." 

Maybe I had everything backwards. Maybe the MAGA candidates are ironically making America "less great" by throwing a monkey wrench into the business of war. Maybe I should blithely snicker at the sight and sounds of groups of people of color, holding their phones and screaming "I hate Trump" at the night sky. 

Maybe I should be investing my unemployment checks in Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics stock and thinking: "You go, people of color; do your thing, don't let Kamala and me down! Listen to what your phone say's!"

The Chinese did not give their citizens the same "M-rna" type vaccine that it was insisted that U.S. citizens, to include the children and, certainly, all the members of the military, be force fed. I sure hope that the next bio-weapon, er, virus, that is being developed doesn't decimate the U.S. military, while leaving the CCP-ers unscathed! That would fuel speculation that Biden and company have been useful idiots all this time; and that might be quite a leap to make...  

Friday, March 8, 2024

Can You Promise At Least 6 Ongoing Wars??

I was thinking today about how interesting this blog might be still, to this day, if I were to still live under the wharf. 
Need a lift?

Chances are that, if I lived there when the Covid thing came into play, I would have, one way or another found out about the nice hotel where the city was putting the homeless people. I remember seeing the tent cities dissapear from under bridges everywhere and hearing the news that the homeless were being housed in a pretty nice hotel. They were being fed and I would imagine given some kind of funds for use on "personal items" ie. bottles of booze, weed and crack rocks and maybe toilet paper. So, I suppose that, as soon as tourists started trickling back into town after the emergency had been lifted, I would have been back to busking, in a race to see if I could restablish an income at such a time that my hotel room and money for personal expenses had dried up. So,it's hard to speculate with any certainty about whether or not this blog would be more interesting if I still lived under the wharf. I imagine I would have returned to there, sometime in the fall of 2022, and them might have endured some hard times over the course of the next year and a half, which would bring me up to this time now, when it is "different." This is the word used by Jonah the kopra player who used to make $100+ a day quite regularly playing that interesting instrument. Now he is peddliing a pedicab instead because "the Quearter is different now," according to him. Things will hopefully become interesting enought to wrtie about here. Even though this blog is shadow banned by the algorithm. I suppose I could fool the algorithym by using sarcasm. I could say that we need to start as many foreign wars as possible, so that foreigners will kille each other off, using weapons that were made in the U.S.A. and they could reduce the world's population to a level more comfortable for the likes of Bill Gates and other science buffs who have calculated just how many people need to be pared off the three of humanity. It can't be Bill himself, because we need him alive in order to direct the operation. But, if we can sell weopons to both sides and ciphon money off the treasuries of both nations that way; and then give the job of rebuilding those wiped out nations to good old American ventures, then it is quite reasonable to expect the U.S. citizens to enjoy a quality of life that is at least 5 fold better than anywhere else on the planet that is still standing. This is how a magnificent, well oiled war machine should work. We all live lives like the ones portrayed in the "Happy Days," sitcom of the 1970's and the rest of the world will just have to war amongst themselves for the scraps that fall off our table. This is why offense is taken over people migrating here illegally, just so they can ride the gravy train. They are supposed to be in their hell hole countries aiming U.S.A. made rifles at their non-Christian contemporaries... This is why I'm going to definitely vote for an "establishment" candidate this fall, be her democrat , or republican, that doesn't matter... Sarcasm,-and algorithm'ss inability to discern it, and adjust the blog author's social credit score accordingly...

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

68 Degrees On February 21st

And, so I'm going out to busk until the sun goes down or I make my kratom money whichever comes first...

Sunday, February 18, 2024

A 4 GigaNight

Back, After Almost A Month Without Internet

I started a fast about 6 hours ago. But, not before the "one last hurrah" of a package of Little Debbie™ Glazed Donut Sticks.



I guess I was sending the message to my brain of: This is the kind of thing we will be flushing out of every cell of the body, right down to the mitochondrion. 

Sort of like putting a blood hound on the trail of a missing child by letting it sniff her dirty socks before setting out to search the countryside...

I wonder if the spelling of "Donut," rather than "Doughnut" on the product has anything to do with copyright issues. Perhaps the Dunkin' people have registered the name "doughnut." (Christ, I've already Googled "the plural of mitochondria," and now I have to look up "Dunkin' Doughnuts." I guess I'm a little rusty after not having been able to blog for about the past month...).
It's almost like you might glance quickly and see "DO NOT" -as much a warning as part of the brand name of the product.

I chose them as the lesser of evils. They have soy AND palm oils in them, so I guess that means only half the amount of soy oil as they might otherwise have, with only half the toxic effect that the former produces in me. And, "less than 2%" of titanium dioxide doesn't sound like it can hurt you much.

40 days of 40 bites...

The 12 Pound Tin of Jambalaya

The fasting seems to have been ordained by circumstances, the chief one being that Lent, a prescribed period of fasting and prayer which I have never seen "religiously" observed by any of the Catholics that I've ever known, is in full swing. 

People will bicker over the significance of one word in the bible -"Man was created in our image," is one that comes to mind. This has spawned debates over how many Gods there actually are as, every iota of that book being divinely inspired, every word is important.

Not so much when it comes to the passages about Jesus fasting for 40 days and 40 nights to prepare for His imminent torture. These verses are slighted over and the following in the Lord's footsteps is amended to perhaps not eating meat every Friday during Lent, or perhaps even skipping the last meal on that day (but having a few crackers handy to quell any cravings that might emerge, should they become unbearable).

Unlike the interpretations of other words and phrases, which people have undoubtedly been burned at the stake over, the "40 days and 40 nights" has either been spun to mean "a long time," like the duration of time taken to flood the whole earth, back in Noah's time. People could only count to ten back then (20, if they were wearing sandals) and so, "40" probably was used instead of the word "innumerable," by those divinely inspired men. Like when a car doing "a hundred miles per hour" flies past you on the street. It might have been going 82 MPH, but "a hundred" gets the point across.

The Baptists that I bivouacked with for about a year or so in the late 1980's were of the same mind. They didn't smoke, drink, nor wear beards or mustaches, but they seemed to make up for lost time in the church basement, where vats of strong coffee, along with cakes and pies and puddings awaited them. I would add that, neither did they do drugs, but given the way they seemed to substitute food for all other excesses, I'm sure most of them were whacked out on "doctor prescribed medications," if not drugs. Every word is important.

I think the consensus, in these religions, is that Jesus was a master of fasting and praying and, until you can walk across a lake, you'd better stick to just skipping a meal every Friday during Lent, and not hurt yourself trying to copy Jesus, type of thing...

So, Fat Tuesday arrived, the parades started on time, and I was once again looking out my window at a spectacle that would not be seen again for another year. I started to question just what what I had in common with the hundreds of people lining the streets, celebrating. Do I even belong as a member of humanity?

I found some encouragement in the fact that so many people had turned out for the parades, though. I think it would have been downright depressing to see the floats passing along a deserted street, their occupants holding beads, trinkets and lit up objects with nobody to throw them to. I was glad that the population weren't all holed up somewhere, smoking crack, and not to be bothered by wholesome family fun.

I still felt a bit alienated, but could see alcohol containers everywhere and figured that I would at least venture out to walk around drinking for free and, who knows, might find myself whooping it up as I jumped up and down with my hands outstretched, trying to get a glowing rubber ball or a light-up Frisbee thrown to me. I always wondered just how the guys on the floats picked out their targets. Of course, families with children usually walk away laden with beads around their necks and carrying a couple bags full of more, mostly plastic items (nothing heavy enough to injure someone caught by surprise and hit in the face with it).

There was one time when I had gone out to watch the parades and, noticing that nobody was throwing anything my way, began to sulk a bit, and was probably standing with my arms folded and my head down, feeling sorry for myself and wondering if that was New Orleans' way of telling me I wasn't wanted here, when a pretty nice object -a stuffed animal or something- came flying off a float and landed right at my feet, having obviously been aimed at me (the throwers are pretty accurate, having had so much practice).

I went out to Canal Street, where it became evident that a lot of cans of "hard seltzer" had been handed out, as part of some promotion, probably off the back of a pickup truck, with the White Claw Hard Seltzer logo painted on its side. These were all over the place, still cold, and with just one sip taken off a lot of them. I finished 3 or 4 of them, as I wandered around, stopping at one point to squat down and kneel in the grass by the trunk of a large oak tree, as I finished one. I then looked and saw a small pipe sitting in a nook in one of the roots of the tree, with its little bowl stuffed with what turned out to be some good weed. Is New Orleans still telling me I'm not wanted here...?

I started heading towards the Brown Derby, after smoking the bowl, but then aborted that trip. I had been thinking of getting a dark beer, but had gotten drunk enough by the time I was half way there, off of unopened cans of beer laying in the grass in various spots, that I figured it was not necessary to spend any money. It wasn't Modelo Negro I was finding; but it was free...

I went back out after the parades had passed, and spotted a half dozen huge tin trays, covered with tin foil and full of jambalaya. I was on my way to the Winn Dixie to get some food. I had to kind of watch how much I spent, I thought, because having no phone and no Internet, I had no way to check the balance on any of my plastic cards. I had grabbed a bottle of spicy brown mustard, but then thought: what if the jambalaya isn't there any more? Mustard could probably wait, as I would probably rather have coffee and bottled water and "superfood" powder from WalMart to get me through to the end of the month, instead of mustard with nothing to put it on...

Getting back to the neighborhood, I saw that the tins of jambalaya were still there, so I was able to balance one in my arms and tote it, along with my groceries minus mustard into the Sacred Heart building. I started to regret not having spent $2.49 on the spicy brown mustard, but caught myself, and pushed the thought away. It takes discipline and practice to be able to invoke the Law of Attraction by feeling joy and gratitude for things not yet manifest -like someone who has ordered something they have always wanted and is tearing the wrappings off a package that arrives a few days later, thinking: this must be it!! already thrilled to have the thing they have always wanted, even though they haven't seen it yet, type of thing...

So, instead of even thinking about the mustard, I felt grateful for the things that I did have. 

And, there in the lobby, on a table where people leave stuff that they don't want, like the cans of green beans that come in the boxes of food that certain residents get, was a cardboard box, the size of a bread box. In it were probably about 2,500 little packets of...mustard.

It's coming upon 12 hours into the fast, and I'm hungry. My mind is trying to trick me with the idea of: Why don't you just do a carnivore diet, and fool your body into thinking that it's fasting? Then, you can probably even sell your plasma while detoxing at the same time...
The mind: always suggesting you turn stones into bread then eat them...

Response To Comment

One of the last posts I put here before having my Internet connection die, was the one about Dorise Blackmon's memorial service. An "unknown" left a comment that I paraphrase as: Dorise was never a fan of yours after she found out about your child porn arrest. You should have paid your respects by not showing up.

If it's disrespectful to speak ill of the deceased, then, what is it to put lies in their mouths?

Dorise let me stash my extra guitar at her house, when I was homeless. I was walking towards the music store, in 2013, to buy a guitar tuner when she pulled up in her car with her girlfriend in the passenger seat and asked me where I was going, then told me: "Wait here 5 minutes," after I'd said I was on my way to buy a guitar tuner, then returned 5 minutes (out of her schedule) later and handed me a brand new Snark™tuner.
I've sat and hung out while she played about 240 times. Once, she and Tanya had started playing the song "Daniel," after I showed up. Since I was in a hurry to get to my spot that night, when the song got to the part where Elton sings: "I can see Daniel waving goodbye," I waved goodbye and walked off. About 3 hours later, when I was walking past them again, they stopped the song they were in the middle of and Dorise asked me: "Do you not like that song, 'Daniel?'" 

Since they played instrumental versions of songs, they hadn't associated the "waving goodbye" line in the song with the way I'd walked off. And 3 hours later it still seemed to be bothering Dorise.
Then there were the times I showed up after they'd packed their gear in their van and Dorise would motion to me to walk with her and would buy me a veggie burger at a nearby bar.

All this after she found out about my "child porn" arrest. That happened in Mobile after I had wised off to a new Lieutenant who had taken over the downtown area and was against buskers, seeing them as little more than panhandlers. (He and a female officer walked up on me when I was busking,  with him asking me, derisively, "What are you doing?" in a tone that implied: just what the hell do you think you're doing?!

I looked at them and said: "Golden Slumbers," by The Beatles, off Abbey Road.

"No, I meant what are you...oh, a smartass!"

I was searched, and amongst the pictures on my phone were some taken at a nude beach, which depicted nudists of all ages. Perfect, for the Lieutenant. I was charged with possession of child porn, held for about 2 weeks, then had all the charges dropped after a grand jury refused to return an indictment after seeing the "evidence."

But, then I had to leave Mobile, as the new Lieutenant knew I would have to. Because people trend towards being like "unknown," and, after seeing my picture in the local paper after the arrest, then seeing me back on the street 2 weeks later, along with a follow up article in the same paper, stating that the charges had been dropped "in the interest of justice" because none of the images had turned out to be pornographic, the people had already deemed me guilty by accusation.

"There's that child molester!"

It's like these idiots who say that president Trump is a scoundrel because he's been impeached twice and indicted x number of times; when they were the ones who impeached him twice, and indicted him x number of times.

"Just because you got some fancy lawyer to get you off the hook doesn't mean you ain't a pervert!" said one yokel, to me.

Yeah, I did pretty well busking the night before, and was able to hire OJ's "dream team" of lawyers.
That's how they run homeless people out of town. Another way is to fine them pretty heavily (for their means) and give them, say, 60 days to pay up, or go to jail for 60 days. When 60 days are up, the homeless guy is then some other county's problem; long gone, and never to be seen again because they would have issued a warrant for him -60 days on the original charge; plus maybe 10 more for "failure to appear" in court. The guys in the jail were saying things like:: "I know one thing; as soon as I get out of here, I'm getting the hell out of Mobile! F**k this place; these cops are assholes!" 

Dorise had been a street musician her whole life; I think she was shaking her head over the way the cops in some places act, and not over the nude beach pictures from Wilmington Lake, Vermont, and wasn't just pretending to be my friend over the course of 10 years.

Alex Carter

He lives in California, and used to frequent this blog. That was when he was considering of "retiring" in New Orleans and probably wanted to to have some contact and potential life-lines here.
But, the last I saw, he has changed his plans, and now wants to retire in Hawaii. So, he has no need for Dan McKenna. Now he is online, kissing the asses of Hawaiian people; trying to ingratiate himself; sending gifts.

He doesn't seem to have grasped the concept of: wherever you go, there you are. This magic move to somewhere is going to be the key to his happiness, the change will do him good, he thinks.

He has changed religions a few times; tried about a half dozen diets, dabbled in everything from drawing caricatures, making and selling ribbons, gathering and selling seashells, and flat out panhandling. He does profess to hate "bums," though.

He has taken up about a dozen different musical instruments, as if there is such a one that is going to unlock his abilities. It doesn't seem like he will ever realize that he, himself, is the constant. 

It's always going to be Alex Carter playing the trumpet, or Alex Carter playing the violin, or Alex Carter playing the flute, or Alex Carter playing the ukulele. There's a pattern here.

So, he is going to move to Hawaii, where he will soon find himself annoyed at the "zombies" and bums, perpetually trying to be of service to people and garner appreciation for it, swapping one occupation for another, thinking that it is the environment that is "the problem," and, most likely starting to formulate a plan to get out of Hawaii, because he will have found the land of "The Rolling Surf," to be so much like where he moved from that it really hadn't been worth the trouble and expense of getting there. Alex in San Jose, Alex in Hawaii...

Jealousy would be my guess as to the motive behind "unknown"s comment, since I'm 99% sure it's Alex Carter. He's old and set in his ways and it's easy to recognize his voice in the comment. Even the way the verbs are placed in the sentences is an identifier. He saw the pictures in the post of me in the company of the tribe of New Orleans artists -my tribe- and he couldn't stand it. I know, I'll tell him that his deceased friend never really liked him; that will be a good use of my time! 

The timestamp on unknown's comment being within an hour of when Alex posted something to his own blog...another amateur mistake made by someone trying to pretend he is someone who knew Dorise well enough to know what her feelings (that she never expressed to me) were...

Woke liberal leftist trash (who, in all his anecdotal blogging, never once mentions ever having a girlfriend; so there's something to be read between the lines, too. I think Wendell, the flute player, might have said that the guy is a faggot)

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

The Temperature Speaks For Itself

 

The coldest temperature that I ever busked in was 37 degrees, and I remember that, in between songs, like if I was talking to someone, I had to keep my hands wrapped around the neck of the guitar. If I let go of it, the next time I fretted a chord or something, I would feel how the neck itself had dropped in temperature and it might have taken a minute or so of playing before the stinging in my fingertips subsided. At 37 degrees, I just relied upon a few simple chords that could be played using the strongest muscles in the hand, like a G major chord, played by wrapping the thumb around for the bottom note and using the third finger for the top note. The pinkie was kind of out of commission at that point.

I used to play at a Kangaroo store in Jacksonville that was across the street from a bank that had a large sign that alternated between time and temperature. I was able to not how every degree that it dropped below 50 became noticeable. As the temperature went from 44 to 43 was when the stinging in the fingertips started, with me having to blow on my hands in between songs and to keep one hand wrapped around the open position frets to keep the neck as warm as possible.


It is 34 now, according to the Bourbon Street webcam. At that temperature, I would be telling my hands to form certain notes and chords, but there wouldn't be enough strength in the fingers for them to obey.

If it were a matter of just sitting at the Lilly Pad with the guitar, wearing gloves and not playing, but rather just making myself visible, I might consider going down there. When it starts raining and I duck under the overhang to wait it out, I often get tipped by people who might make the observation of: I guess you're out of business; that sucks... before handing me a 10 or a 20. But, in a cold weather situation, the tourists are usually hurrying past, trying to get into the warmth of the bar as quickly as possible. It's unlikely that I could draw any of their attentions with the simple 3 chord songs I would be relegated to playing; the ones that are played using the thumb and the ring and first fingers.

Although, I will say that 99 times out of 100, I am rewarded in some way for just going out there. There are the tips that come from people who admire the courage, or desperation, of someone busking on a 43 degree night. "I don't know how you do it..." they might say. And it is also probable, in such situations, that someone who is in the 1% and might have about 500 bucks on them will drop a 50 dollar tip, thinking that that might be about all I stand to make on such a night. On more than one occasion different people have given me like 65 bucks and said: "Get a room, and get out of this cold, or sit in some bar, buying a drink every hour or so until the sun comes up" type of thing... But I would say that, more than 90 times out of 100, I end up thinking: I sure am glad I decided to come out...


But, right now Harold is inside with me, and I think I'll do the Wim Hof breathing method exercises for a half hour and then I might call Lilly. I'm sure the first thing out of her mouth, while skipping the formality of saying "hello" (she has caller ID and almost never say's that, but often continues a conversation from a previous call. The last time I called her, as soon as it connected, she said: "He's really polite; he's a nice guy, really polite; the girls thought so..." which was referring to Jacob after the time that we were busking and Lilly and the girls stopped on their way into the house and chatted for a bit.

During the pandemic lock down, she would answer with: "Did you get the vaccine?" and I would say that I hadn't even left the apartment all week, telling her that I had stocked up on groceries and cat food and was hunkering down. Not even Lilly's worrying mind could envision me catching the big "C19" from Harold.

"You can't be sure, Daniel, maybe cats can spread it without getting sick themselves, and then you would be screwed. It's a horrible death, Daniel; horrible!"

She would then talk about how her and the girls had been bed-ridden with vaccine related symptoms, taking Tylenol and NyQuil, and basically suffering, probably to the same degree as they would have, had they gotten the virus.


It's just astounding how the Phizers and Modernas of the world, that account for something like 70% of the advertising revenue of what people had been conditioned to regard as the "mainstream" media, working in cahoots with the Bill Gate's and other Davos elitists of the world, were able to pull the wool over so many eyes. 

Something like 72 news channels are owned by a handful of people, who were able to create the impression that "everyone, everywhere" was saying the same things; and so that became truth by preponderance. Not aware that they were all following the same marching orders, people would "flip through the channels," thinking: "Oh, look, they're condemning Trump, too! And, so is this channel, and this one. They all are! If I was Trump I would just resign, because, obviously everyone is on to him, just look at all these reports, from Whoopie in the morning, all the way up until Colbert before midnight. "Everyone" can see what a jerk the guy is!"

I know some people are gullible, but, how hard is it to see that the democrats literally accuse "the other side" of doing exactly what they (the democrats) are doing?!
Rachael "If you take the vaccine, you won't get Covid, you can't spread it, etc." Maddow actually said she wasn't going to air Trumps "victory" speech, because she refuses to air "misinformation." Wow...



I guess Don Lemon at least won't shame all of the previously healthy young people who have dropped dead, the world over, in the past couple years; because of some factor that has surfaced in just the past couple of years...hmm 

Funny how those incidents didn't get any media coverage. Even when that Buffalo Bills player collapsed on the field during a game, none of the announcers said anything like: "I wonder if it's one of those vaccine related heart issues that we've heard about..." Oh, my bad; I guess they wouldn't have heard about that; unless they were watching some podcast that they could get themselves fired from their jobs just for watching...
Russell Brand has shown about a 3 minute video of nothing but young athletes collapsing on tennis courts, basketball courts, soccer fields etc. etc. etc.
Oh, but I'm forgetting, Russell was accused of an incident of sexual harassment that allegedly took place like 20 years ago. I guess that means that video was Photoshopped or AI generated...just the type of thing that someone anonymously accused of such a thing would produce. Sometimes I forget.

"Is There Anybody Else Up There?"

I admit that, at first, I was apprehensive. I noticed that the lion's share of people had capitulated to the fear mongers who have a monopoly on the mainstream venues.
Even Catholic people, who would normally have their throats blessed at the start of flu season each year, seemed to have relegated that particular article of faith to voodoo or witchcraft. Some kind of invocation to the Holy Spirit to ward off that year's strain of flu, is all well and good, but "not if my life depends upon it," type of thing.

I was waiting to see if the city would be coming around yelling: "Bring out your dead," pulling tumbrels stacked high with cadavers, before even considering taking a medicine that later was proven to put healthy people under the age of 35 at a greater risk than from the C19 itself. (those statistics come from insurance providers, whose livelihoods depends upon cutting through the hype and the lies and analyzing hard cold facts.

The tumbrels never materialized, and at the same time, I was seeing footage on the local news of the hospital down the street being overrun with C19 patients. On one such day, I had been to the very same emergency room because of a toothache, I think it was.


There was no such crowd of patients. Furthermore, there was a follow up report maybe a week later, ostensibly to illustrate that the situation was still dire. I recognized the people shown as being the same ones from the older broadcast; the guy in the Houston Astros shirt alongside the short pudgy lady with her jeans tucked inside her boots. Yeah, that was them...still in line a week later...

It (the way fear had weakened people's faith) reminds me of the joke where I guy falls over a cliff and is hanging by that little tree branch that cartoon characters always seem to grab on their way down.
He is trying to hang on and is yelling for help: "Is anyone up there? Help!"
Then a voice like thunder cascades down, saying: "This is the Lord, your God. I will save you, but first you must have enough faith to let go of the branch..."

The guy thinks for a second, then yells: "Is there anybody *else* up there?!"


Well, I've managed to stay up all night again. The sun will rise shortly. It's 24 degrees outside with a wind chill that makes it feel like 17. There's still a bunch of stuff I wouldn't mind staying up longer in order to get to...
The highlights from the 2 playoff games that I missed because, in the case of one, I went to the memorial service for Dorise Blackmon, who passed away last November, on a day that I had been thinking about her for some reason... 

Christmas Eve Eve Eve Live on Bourbon Street at the Lilly Pad

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

From The Big Head To Canal Street

Thunderstorms; heavy downpours, Harold entrenched somewhere dry...

The uncluttered living room, which is where I spend all my time now, when I'm home; reminds me of a jail cell.
Some of my most content moments were spent while in solitary confinement in one county jai or another. All I needed was a good book and coffee and I would stay up all night, reading by whatever light filtered through the bars.





What has to happen is, a period of extreme boredom has to set in. 
Going from a busy lifestyle with all kinds of choices, and plenty of stimuli, on the outside to being thrown into an 8 foot by 9 foot cell with just a minimalist cot, and a stainless steel toilet/sink combination, with 4 walls, a ceiling and floor with bors in ther front and a slit of a window in back can bring this about.
Pacing back and forth is an option, and looking out the window at whatever the view is, another.
One time, in Jacksonville, I was on the 6th floor with a window that faced west. The sunlight would beam through the window for a few hours each day, right before dusk. Using a pencil, I would track the beam by putting marks on the wall, showing, for example, exactly where it fell on the wall when the evening meal showed up, and was pushed through the bars.
Soon, I had a functional sundial, accurate to within a couple minutes.
With the changing of the seasons, the exact spot where the sun went down would shift (to the left, if it was fall) so that it would go down to the right of some tall skinny building on the horizon, perhaps, but would shift, a quarter degree or so, to the left (if it was fall) each day, and might disappear behind the tall skinny building for a few days, before starting to touch the horizon on the other side of it. This became like a calendar of sorts, and I was able to protract where the sun would sink on whatever day I was slated to get out.

 I always liked the solitary confinement situations, where I would only be let out for an hour each day. This is an arrangement that is used to punish inmates who break the law, somehow, while in there. They can't put you in jail for attacking or stealing from someone, because you are already in jail. So, they make it "worse" for those hapless souls by locking them in a special cell (called a "lockdown cell," by the unimaginative institution) by themselves for 23 hours a day. Most other inmates hated this, as they were the gregarious types that would pass time, like 8 hours a day of it, playing Spades in a groups of about a half dozen. They would loudly slam the cards they were playing onto the stainless steel table, accompanied by a gutteral vocal ejaculation, the way Karate guys do when they punch and kick and break pieces of lumber.
I guess the idea behind all that racket is to add an element of intimidation and underscore the power of whatever card they are slamming down, as if to say "Take That!!"
After each card is so presented, in the manner of a basketball being slam-dunked, it's greatness is then hailed through the barking out of a series of various gutteral groans and ejaculations. These are invariably delivered, at least by the black inmates, with as much "bass" being put into their voices as possible.
Because of the acoustics of a jail pod, these notes get really muddled and it sounds like a pack of dogs all barking at once. Things like: "What cha gonna do?! Huh? What cha gonna do?! I got this hand; I got this hand, you ain't got s***!"
The irony is that, a lot of times it is a fight that breaks out during a card game that gets one or more of them sent to lockdown.

Those types hate the solitary confinement. Another aspect of the punishment is that the lockdown cells are in an isolated part of the jail so, no talking half the night through the bars.
And, if the locked down inmate can't read, that's even worse.
But, I always enjoyed the peace that came with isolation.
     
I can't really tell which came first, the chicken, or the egg...
With the "chicken" being the uncluttered living room, and the eggs being the ideas.
It might be that I was ready to make a change, and decluttering the room was part of it. Or it might be that the spaciousness is helping me to keep my thoughts simple.
When all you have in a room is a couch, it's easy to sit on that couch and appreciate being alive and having air to breath. Then when I bring one item in from the other room, where I shoved everything. that item gets my full attention. That saves me from spending only 5 minutes on 25 different things and not getting very far into any of them. This gives me the chance to gradually add things to my environment. Just a guitar and one method book is enough to keep me busy. And it is a high quality of focus.
But, since the water from my bathroom sink comes out piping hot, but the tub's faucet is lukewarm, it just dawned on me that I can get some kind of attachment to connect a hose to the sink, and I can use that to fill the tub with hot water. I've had a lukewarm shower for about 2 years now, and only now did I think of that...


Then, I was thinking how nice it would be to have some kind of jogging application that uses GPS on my phone, so I can start jogging and not have to measure or guesstimate the distances I might be running.
Not long after having that thought, I accidentally clicked on the Google Playstore app and, front and center on their page was a jogging app that does just that.
So, with fun added to jogging, especially for a statistician like myself who loves pie charts and graphs, that was a fortuitous discovery and might help me realize one of my new year resolutions, which is to start a jogging program, so as to help phase out tobacco, which is another one of my resolutions....
Right now, I resolve to get some sleep.
These are novel ideas that are coming to me, connecting the dots between things that have been right in front of me, forever, but that I just never noticed.
Earlier I tried the app while slowly jogging from where there is a large bust of some historical figure's head in the park to Canal Street, finding it to be .42 miles. Eventually, I would like to be able to run that distance in 2 minutes. 

Monday, January 1, 2024

My Stripped Down Environment

I woke up for the first time in 2024,


and was in my stripped down environment, which I could ascertain the reality of by opening my eyes and scanning my surroundings.
The "decluttering," as promised by the author of the decluttering book, has returned positive results in the way of organizing my existence.

Before, I would wake up and then situate myself in front of my laptop, where I would succumb to the powers of suggestion and wind up retracing the previous day's  cyber journey and wind up clicking my way into what was threatening to become an habitual state of mind.

No Longer In That Rut

There was a literal rut in the couch cushion that was forming from me sitting in that same spot, day after carbon copy day.

My living room was cluttered with about 25 things that could only hope to attract about 4 percent of my attention each.

Now I wake up in the openness with a couch and 4 walls and immediately turn myself inward, fostering a feeling of gratitude, which is ironically "for everything I have," as I sit in the almost empty room.

So far this year I woke up with the idea of plugging my full sized USB keyboard into my Android phone, thinking that it would circumvent the "thumb typing" that had been my only method of blogging here using my phone, after the hot spot data runs out, typically half way through the month.

The encroachment of clutter...

I have already typed this in in about a third of the time it would have taken me with my thumbs -a great discovery made less than 8 hours into the new year!

The only thing I haven't been able to do is to add a photo and then to continue putting text in. Going to the editor, I see the photo displayed, but am unable to click in an area outside of it to resume typing...
But, I guess there are more ways than one to skin a cat...
I'm going to try to put a photo in now that the text is done. Done, except to add that I am about to run to the Brown Derby, where I should have a whole months worth of food money on my card, but where I might just get some juice in order to do a beginning of the year fast and cleanse.

$271 Friday Before Christmas

Yeah, and follow that with a $3 New Year's Eve, but more on that later, I guess.
The alternative to embarking upon the juice fast and cleanse would be to go and sell plasma. It seems like the 3 dollars I split with Jacob last night is earmarked as bus fare to go and do just that; and get the 40 bucks that I would have been satisfied with from last night's playing.
It's not like a couple people didn't come and smoke us up and one of them give us some magic mushrooms. Peace of mind: priceless!

New Orleans New Year

Friday, December 29, 2023

It's Time


 I remember the day I came across this book, perhaps 3 years ago.

My apartment was so cluttered that I had stacks of books everywhere. Some stacks were behind others and so I couldn't even see a spine or part of a cover sticking out that might remind me of having a book that I would have gotten somewhere, interested in reading.

I've got to organize my books, I thought. Just to emphasize this point, I said to myself: You see, for example, I've got this little light green colored one wedged in between two larger ones, and I can't even tell from here what book it is, or where I even got it. I definitely need to declutter this place!

Then, I went and pulled it from the stacks. It was the book shown.

I am thinking of practicing the art, as part of a broader ranging New Year's resolution.

And the place to start, according to marie, after resolving to stop capitalizing your name, perhaps, is in doing a visualization that she describes thusly: "This means visualizing the ideal lifestyle that you dream of."

I have come about putting my own visualization together by deciding to revert to the lifestyle I had in 1998, when, at the age of 35, I was a bundle of energy and would race against the neighbor's dog to a store a quarter mile away, where I would get a Sobe "power" drink (plus a treat for the dog) to start each day, around 1 PM.

I played the guitar at least 5 hours each day, and did about an hour and a half of working out on a weight set in the garage, consuming at least 3,500 calories, 25 grams of protein and 100 grams of carbs, all out of bottles labelled with names like: "Ripped Fuel," "Carbo Force," "XXL,"and "Metabalol." I didn't chew at all until the evening meal of fish and greens with garlic and hot sauce, to go with a bottle of red wine. 

This one looks like it was taken from Emerson Pond, where my friend, Dave and I caught many a Painted Turtle...

So, I visualize waking up in an uncluttered apartment, where I will create the only dirty dish in the place by making a cup of coffee, and then will do the WIM Hof breathing exercises, before stretching out for a mile jog to an outdoor gym comprised of equipment that utilizes the weight of a person's body as the "resistance," where I will work out before jogging home.

Switching my diet back will be a challenge, as I have, only in the past year, eaten things like pizza and even ice cream sodas.

The pizzas were thin crust, gluten free, organic and topped with white cheese and spinach, but still something I would have passed on in 1998.

The ice cream sodas were me trying to recapture a part of my 14 year old self, the part that did things just for the sake of being "creative." I kind of came to the conclusion that I was possessed of that energy despite the ice cream sodas.


I used to hop on my 10 speed bike and ride 37.5 miles to the base of Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire, lock the thing up, then climb the 3,704 feet to the peak of it, eat a bagged lunch I'd brought, take a few pictures, then ride back home. That was just a typical summer vacation day when I was 13 or so.

I have lost some of that initiative, and perhaps it's because my house is too cluttered.

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Treats Of Seedy Texture

I guess I should be posting at least something.
I mixed powdered chia seeds into kombucha -apple flavored kombucha and, I've never tasted anything better in my life, unless it was some time I washed a lamb and feta pita down with a 40 dollar bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from the Russian River valley part of California.
I'll bet that there isn't a homeless problem in that valley..
Chia seeds and kombucha!
You can soak the chia seeds in hot water if you want the texture less seedy and more like tapioca, it's up to the individual. I'm not telling anyone how to prepare their kombucha and chia seed beverage.
I have been squandering a lot of time watching YouTube and searching for random things that pop into my head.
I don't know,; I like watching guys panning for gold somewhere in Alaska that can only be reached by helicopter and grainy black and white footage of Cassius Clay fighting that British champion...
It just gets to be time consuming..
The sun will be up soon and I still haven't checked out the volcanic activity in Iceland.
I want to see if the population is standing around the thing warming their hands, or what...

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Miracle Food Cures From The Bible

I seem to have, once again, made an abscess go away without having had to go to a hospital, or lanced it myself, using one of the hypodermic needles that I sometimes collect off the sidewalks of the Quarter and bring home.


They are pretty good for draining those infections, since they can draw as well as inject. Only when the pain in the gums is worse than the stab of the needle could ever be, does the idea of self-lancing become feasible...
This had been my body declaring in no uncertain terms that, no, the 35 years of health that I've enjoyed while avoiding certain foods has not made me invincible against them.

About 10 days before getting sick, I had been straightening out my refrigerator and, noticing a box of a certain seafood broth (meant to be the "stock" in making clam chowder or lobster bisque, perhaps) that had been in there for at least a couple months.

As I am pretty sure that refrigeration retards the multiplication of bacteria but doesn't stop it entirely, I unscrewed the cap and took a whiff of the seafood type broth. It smelled very peculiar, maybe like fermented lobster tail, or something; kind of like a linseed oil essence. I decided to toss it out, rather than rely upon boiling it to make it OK to eat. After all, there ain't a whole lot of calories in seafood stock, nor protein, carbs etc. You might get some calcium and maybe some trace minerals from the deep sea, but I think it's role is to just add flavor to -I don't know- crab cakes?

Within a half hour or so of having smelled the likely rancid stuff, my nose started to feel irritated. Soon the back of my throat felt weird and I felt like I might be "coming down" with something over the next few hours. That never came to fruition but made me wonder if people can get sick just from smelling food that has gone bad.

Out of all the foods that rot, it would be interesting to survey people on which ones smell the worst. Chicken would probably place or show, besting beef, in the stench-off, my opinion. Rotten eggs go back generations, striking the fear of metaphorically becoming one into whomever might be "the last one," in various competitive situations.

I think the rotted shellfish and crustaceans might not be as offensive because we might have developed an immunity against sea borne bacteria from our primordial ooze days. 

This past Saturday, after having consumed the protein drink made from soy, yogurt and raw honey, I got a swollen gland in my throat. The throat became scratchy, then there was sneezing and some lung congestion.

Friday's post went semi-viral...why??

Then I ate the Pillsbury Crescents™ rolls, trying to get some hand eczema to flare up. This made me feel miserable enough to cancel busking and stay home instead. And to have an ice cream soda.

That's what started the toothache. Just like the folklore that has been handed down through the generations warns that it will. "But you'll have to have them all pulled out, after the Savoy Truffle," sings George Harrison on the White Album. He's talking about teeth, of course.

I had always assumed the lore referred to the decaying of the tooth's enamel from eating sugary foods then maybe not brushing well enough. Now I think that it is actually the sugar in the blood stream that somehow feeds bacteria from the inside, weakening the body's immune response. 

I was in so much pain that I could measure my heart rate using the throbs of pain in my gums. I had dug into a book I have on "Miracle Food Cures From The Bible," and along with doing Wim Hof's deep breathing method, and doing acupressure at different spots on my head and neck, and soaking a face cloth in hot water and applying it to the side of my face that was swelling, and doing push ups and other exercises, I was able to find a couple bags of chamomile tea -one of the miracle cures from the bible for abscesses, with thyme being another- and stuffed one of them between my cheek and gum where the pain was.

This was somewhat of a leap of faith, trusting something from the bible, I thought. But then I thought that Pharma would always censure information about any cure not involving doctors and pharmacists and insurance companies, etc. and the fact that I had never heard of such cures meant nothing in the real sense. Hell, when I type in the word "kratom" in this editor, Google puts a red squiggly line under it, as if to imply "this is not even a word." I think that is because people use kratom (there's that line again) as a means of getting off of opiates, which must be disturbing news to the pharmaceutical companies, whose CEOs probably give their yachts names such as "The SS Oxycontin."

Love Thy Neighbor

So, my faith in the unerring wisdom of the Lord, and with a tea bag stuffed in my cheek so that I probably looked like a major league baseball player, I stepped out into the hall, to see my neighbor, Wayne emerging from his apartment one door down. He greeted me and I mumbled a reply as best as I could.

Wayne seemed to figure out right away that I had a toothache. Either he thought that the teabag in my cheek was part of an abscess, or that I had stuffed a teabag in my cheek because of one, he piped up and asked: "Bro, you got a toothache?"

"Ymmm, Immmm, gmmhh, fmuommmer, mmmhah"

"Come on, I got some stuff my dentist gave me that I never used. I don't like to take anything for pain, I like to tough it out..."

It's probably easier to "tough it out" after a dentist has done his part to relieve pressure, remove decay, etc. But, when you are in a situation that is only going to get worse until it kills you (which is another "belief" that I take with a grain of salt -pink salt, in the case of a toothache- as probably having originated with the medical association to keep people from using home remedies and other things, instead of letting them solve the problem at 90 dollars per hour.

My neighbor gave me a couple of antibiotic capsules and a small handful of, wait for it......hydro-codeine pills. It was a miracle cure, brought about by my faith in the bible. All I had to do was step outside my apartment with the chamomile tea bag in my cheek and, boom! -just like that- I found comfort.

In one of the anecdotes in the section of the miracle foods book that talked about thyme was the testimony of some herbalist who had affected the cure of some disease in a man, mentioning that he first got him to cut out white sugar and white flour from his diet.

Resist the Pillsbury dough boy; and he will flee from you!

Anyways, the sun is coming up on a beautiful Tuesday. I am on the lookout for a Christmas card that my mom has sent that might have money in it (along with "the thought" that actually counts) as well as a parcel from The Lidgley's of London, who have resurfaced after having weathered the U.K's authoritarian Covid edicts and come through the immunization process unscathed.  

Friday, December 15, 2023

Something To Be Grateful For And Glad About

My hot spot data was "re-filled" at about 8 this morning.


I now have 2.5 gigs to use, and will be very careful to not view short "reels" of video on Facebook, as that was where I think a lot of bytes were spent last month, when the data lasted only about11 days, instead of the whole month.

Hand Eczema Update

I ate one roll of the Pillsbury Crescents, and how stupid that was...

I was thinking that it would give me a flare up of hand eczema, like I haven't had in decades, so that I would be accepted into the clinical trial of the new miracle cream that some company is trying to put on the market.

This was stupid on so many levels.

First of all the phrase "If you have your health, you have everything" kind of surfaced in my memory right as I was starting to notice that I was starting to feel like crap after eating the things. This puts in jeopardy any trip to the plasma place that I might have been considering, since I don't feel up to it.

It might even screw up busking tonight, should I not be able to get to sleep because my mind is racing from having eaten this disease causing "food." Serendipity didn't disappoint, as I just happened to land on some video where the discussion was about how people are given medications to treat a slew of ailments, but never advised to stop eating the kind of crap that is making them sick. 

They were talking about Pillsbury Crescents; I know they were. 

Bleached white flour, sugar, soybean oil...and that's before you even get to the preservatives. They seem to be trying to position the "Some ingredients derived from bio-engineered sources" message on the label like it's a good thing. Right under the "no high fructose corn syrup" one. Who needs high fructose corn syrup when you've got bio-engineered ingredients; like who needs enemies with friends like them, type of thing...

I'm going to meditate and then try to sleep and maybe recover enough to make a plasma donation before they close at 5 PM. I don't think it's too cold to busk, in fact I just checked by going outside and estimating that it was about 65 degrees at 10 AM. 

It's not too cold, so if I don't get the plasma money, at least there will be a couple hundred to be made at the Lilly Pad tonight...if I feel like playing for 5 hours, that is...
But, I'm glad to have the hot spot data. The last couple posts, done on my phone, were tedious and I was missing every 10th letter or so and had to back up and then had to scroll the screen manually because it wasn't keeping up. Those government phones come hard wired with Google and are just mind control tools. If I try to watch Russel Brand, the video will stop and start the whole way through. But if I want to hear someone talking about how Trump is going to personally shoot all the Negros, Jews, and homosexuals that will be lined up against the wall (that's really why he wants to build it so badly) and yadda, yadda...then the video will play in high resolution just fine; Rachael Maddow will look life-like. Yikes...
Sure, the legacy media were full of crap about all things Covid, and full of errors of omission about all things Ukraine, but that just means they are overdue to be correct; and this "Trump-will-come-into-your-house-and-eat-your-Poptarts-if-elected" narrative might be just that time.