Monday, November 14, 2016

The Ides Of November Come Early

Crispy, Crunchy...

I ate a lot of bacon last night, and not even the 7 dollar kind; it was the 4 dollar kind.
I fried it in a saucepan, and the slices were soon swimming in about an inch of fat as they shriveled and did a macabre dance in the oil as if the soul of the hog was expressing itself one last time.
I'm not really happy with the tone of my skin this morning. I had done some exercises with my improvised weight set after eating the bacon along with some broccoli that I had thrown in.

On My Own For 2 Days

Travis, my guest is staying his last night at the pad. He has made appointments already to talk to certain landlords and feels certain enough that he can close a deal on a place tomorrow and not even have to stay at a hotel as an interim spot.

He is OK, except for the fact that he likes to commandeer a conversation and basically become the only speaker. I can opt out of the conversation pretty easily by going in to my own room.

I will credit him for not being bothered by any outbursts of guitar playing, at just about any hour. I came in from busking and felt like I just had to pick out the chords to a certain song that I had thought would be a good one to add to my repertoire. And, after playing for a while, it occurred to me that it might be bothering him, but he just said: "Do your thing," and sounded genuinely not bothered.

Plus, he is paid up through tonight on his 20 dollar per day "contribution to groceries."

Afterthought:

As The Travis Era winds down, with my guest of the past 10 days moving on to a place perhaps in Gentilly (Google "Highest per capita murder neighborhood: New Orleans" for more) which is $550 per month, but includes water, or a place closer to where I live, which has wi-fi but is a couple hundred more per month.

I potentially have another lady coming to visit for about 4 days this coming weekend, who will be in town to run a half marathon.

Travis and I have hung out and smoked herb and talked. The one and just about only complaint that I might have about Travis as a guest/roommate/lodger is that he tends to monopolize a particular conversation, and will commonly expound at great length upon themes that I might bring up in my own anecdote that I might be relating.

The mention of a certain locality, for example may spur him to speak for several minutes about his connection to that particular place, and the history of it, etc.

But, what is to be expected of a guy with whom you are passing a bong back and forth with.
I've got about 120 bucks on my green prepaid card, and am penciled in to use the studio over at the Musicians's Co-Op tomorrow, November 15th, 2016.

After the half marathon running lady leaves; and after 4 days of my not smoking around her; the ad that I placed in order to rent couch space will have expired on Craig's List.

This will be good, and it may be a while before I place another one. I want to get back to solitude for a while.

I will try to refine my next ad, if I ever place one. Travis was a very good fit for the situation, outside of being a bit windy upon most subjects of conversation. He had a very good sense of rules of the place and had no problem staying off the radar of most people. It was possible for me to keep my busking schedule up, so that I was accumulating money, rather than allowing the rental situation to become an excuse for idling.

I am thinking that getting some kind of sound baffling materials and constructing a small "recording" area in my living room might be my way to go, given the scarcity of studio time at Tipitina's. The microphone and software there can't be that much better than what I would have if I get another laptop. Unless the "human" element i.e. having others jam on my tunes, at Tipitina's is enough to offset the inconvenience of having to book time in blocks of hours at certain times, in order to work on your spontaneous creations.



 

4 comments:

  1. Travis sounds like pretty much every tech worker ever. They get raised as single children or if not, at least they grow up better friends with their Apple ][e or Commodore-64 than with other kids (am I dating myself by mentioning those models of computer?) so they tend to commandeer conversations. The guy I work for is like this - he communicates in the form of lectures, and according to his wife, has utterly ruined more than a few social dinners.

    Also, tech people are very good at following rules. First, they deal with computers and kinda wish they were computers themselves, so they love rules. And you don't make it as a tech worker unless you can not only survive but thrive in a cubicle environment. Your place, even with the restrictions it has, must seem really hedonistic to him. Likewise with payment of rent. In the world of tech workers, the kind of places they live, they get billed "hotel rate" for every *day* they're late on rent. I had a place in Tustin, California, that had the rent due 3 days before I got paid. It was something like $40 for each day late, and since this was the mid-80s that was indeed what a fairly decent hotel would charge. I outfoxed them by simply keeping enough money in the bank to pay the rent no matter what.

    So yeah, rule-following, prompt and mindful of things like rent, and good at putting up with others (craziness happens in techland too, like the co-worker who goes vegan and cracks deadly farts all day etc.) so you're in good hands with a techie type, as long as you don't mind "Mr. Science" lecturing in place of conversation, and a personality like cardboard. You could sure do worse.

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  2. Setting up your own recording "studio" at home makes eminent sense, because even if you don't get "platinum" quality recordings, you can rehearse, listen to yourself, etc then when you get to the "real" studio at Tipitina's, you'll be ready to record a real master.

    I've had people tell me I should go into "voice over" whatever the hell that is, and I looked into it, and I could not do it here with the metal recycling place next door, the trucks running over the railroad tracks at full speed even in the wee hours, the occasional cop-chopper, etc but the same applies, I could get a hell of a lot of practice in.

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  3. Yeah, Travis would take a topic that I might bring up and hijack it with: "Another thing about [The Beatles, World War II, etc.] that most people don't consider is..."
    and then punctuate the end of every sentence by raising his voice to stop me from jumping in.
    Towards the end, after I had gotten all my rent, I said something like: "Yeah, I already knew all that..." after he had spoken for 45 minutes, repeating things that I had just happened to read a book about."
    What got me is when he would become frustrated and say: "I don't know." as in "It was like, I don't know..it wasn't really, I don't know like the same thing but it was different like...I don't know.."
    Why struggle so hard to express the fact that you really "don't know" what you are trying to say??

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  4. Yep another thing in tech culture is to never admit you don't know something.

    Remember that kid, probably fat with glasses, who got really good grades in school but no one wanted to hang out with? It wasn't just his gross manners at lunch or even his amazing ability to get hurt playing tetherball, it was deeper than that. He had no ability to interact, "interface" he'd call it, with humans. Since preschool, his Mom had parked him in front of a computer of some form, and left him there.

    There was this thing in the 80s, where the more kids were exposed to computers, the more likely they were gonna be the next Bill Gates or something. What you see is the product. They're a *little* better at fitting in with others than when they were the fat kid with the glasses etc., but it's all on the surface. Like when I was overseas and someone would say this perfect thing in English, and I would assume they speak English well, and they did not, they'd just memorized a few phrases.

    I live in Ground Zero for this type of ... human. It's like living among Pod People or something. No one socializes. The only talking I overhear is about work. No one reads for enjoyment, and in fact the feeling around here is that all that colleges should teach is STEM classes and nothing else.

    The only people who socialize at all around here are the street bums and that's because the street bums need each other - if you're a street bum you're always getting and sharing information, and helping each other out.

    It's a fucking weird place.

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