Busted

My wife and I passed the ice cream sandwich between us as we cruised down St Roch ave.

Lights flashed in the rearview mirror...Busted!

Lesson learned: don't pass an oblong white thing as you're driving through the 'hood.

The degreaser

This is just a bunch of stuff about Jake, the guy who rented me my art studio when I was fresh out of college. As I mentioned in the previous post, he mortgaged the art studio to buy a guitar, tried "vibration" as an alternative to making mortgage payments, and was foreclosed. Jake was 48, which seemed like a zillion, when you're fresh out of school. Maybe experience isn't the best teacher...

The weird thing about Jake was that he was a handsome intelligent talented person without addictions or obvious psychosis. So wtf?

These are the kind of people who can draw you into their delusions.

Supposedly he was involved in the development of a "degreaser".  The word degreaser popped up all the time, almost like a word of the day, but my awareness of what it really was, was so peripheral,  that for a long time I thought it was maybe  a new and improved dish detergent, or something like that.

The degreaser seemed to have been in the final stages of development for years, and I couldn't see why it was such a big deal, until it was revealed to me that the purpose of the degreaser was to save the earth from the environmental destruction of fossil fuels. It was going to be easy. And we could could keep driving our gas guzzlers, as we ushered in the new age. Pretty seductive.

Oh, and the degreaser formula, (unfortunately incomplete) was channeled from the spirit world.

"Come on now, that should have been a tip off!" you say.

Well that's the problem with the outlandish. Experience tells me outlandish things can be inlandish, so who can say?

Sometimes my pal Gina and I channel drawings from the spirit world. It's so easy and reliable that it's almost mundane, but since I have no viable explanations besides spirits, that's what I accept as being true.
Wait a while and I'll post some spirit pictures.

I'm assuming the degreaser was bs, considering how greasy everything is. (especially in our corner of the world)

The free money society

I'm not saying that my father was convinced that I was a dummy.
But I am convinced that he had his suspicions.

During college I didn't work much, So I had to put up with my father bugging me about why I couldn't stretch that $20 longer than a week.

Like all college students, I was a revolutionary thinker, with all kinds of ideas for improving a society that can be inconvenient and annoying to 18 year olds.

So I said to my father, "I don't understand why people have to work to get money, why can't the government just set up a bunch of free money stations, and you could go there, fill your wallet up with free money, and not have to waste so much time and energy working for it. Then when your money ran out, you just go back to the free money station, and get some more."

My father really took it to heart, and it irked him to no end.  The "free money station" haunted me for years, and whenever he thought I was being financially irresponsible, he would bring it up again and again.

No matter what I said, he wouldn't believe that I'd only been kidding, and yes, I had a grasp of basic economics.

The most annoying part of all was that he always mislabeled my sham concept as being the "free money society" instead of the "free money station". Even when I'm being totally full of it, I'd still appreciate a little proprietary accuracy.

Had I only known the extent to which my "free money station" would affect me...
After graduating college I was renting an art studio from a new age musician who was supposed to be using the money for the mortgage he had taken to pay for a new guitar. He was unemployed, so instead of paying the mortgage, he was hurtling towards foreclosure. Luckily he had a plan. He vibrated. He vibrated for months and months.

Ultimately this plan failed, and with my fathers help, I could have scooped up the deal of the century before it went into foreclosure, if not for that cursed "free money society".

ya snooze ya looze

WTF?! I was going to post on that!http://cakewalkneworleans.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/on-my-street/
On one hand, what a gyp, on the other hand, more proof we are soul mates.
(incidentally, we're not just talking about some random blogster, that's my wife we're talking about, I don't know why she doesn't have her name on her blog.)

Jammin'

When I first moved to New Orleans I bought a road bike, and put a big delivery basket on the front of it. It was fast as lightning, and I could carry anything on it.

One night I was riding home with a big Jar of strawberry jam in the basket. I was in top gear and had attained warp speed, when the car turned left in front of me. I didn't even have a chance to brake, and as I flew over the trunk, I though of how different my life would be, in a short while.  

Somehow I popped up off the pavement without a scratch! 

Or did I?

Glistening on the asphalt, a big wet gelatinous pool of thick red blood.

Oh, it's strawberry jam!

I rode my skinny tire 12 speed road bike into the side of a car as fast as I could peddle, flew over it, landed in the road, and didn't get a bruise, scrape, scratch, or mark of any kind. 

But I ruined my jam. 

Walking to New Orleans

The summer of 95 was marred by lost love, epilepsy, and a lost drivers license. I wasn't going though another northeastern winter, not after that.

I socked away a weeks pay in Connecticut, I packed my bag and stuck out my thumb. The rides were rare and short, and I did a lot of walking. So much walking.

A man picking apples in his yard lifted my mood when he gave me one and said, "There are enough apples for the people and the animals!" I walked along eating my apple, and considering the good omen, maybe it is a kind and benevolent universe, with plenty for all.

When I got to Albany I found the train yard and spiked the door of my boxcar. (If the door slides shut, a boxcar can become a rolling tomb) My train finally pulled out, and I was surging across the landscape, cutting towns in half, through fields and forests, leaving everything behind.  A freight train stops for nothing, a welcome contrast to my hitch-hiking stint.

The day faded to night, wake and sleep wrap around each other, and you become another clunking swaying part of the train.

I was awakened by stillness and quiet in the dark. I poked my head out the door, and found myself in a rail yard. I hopped down onto the crunch of the gravel, shouldered my pack, and started walking. I wasn't ready for walking again, not so soon. My feet ached, and I had blisters.  I made my way between the rows of train cars, far above me the lights buzzed atop their poles. Corralled by chain link, and with nothing to get to on the other side, I followed the rails. There were no people. I finally extracted myself from the deserted netherworld of rail shipping, and staggered along the side of a highway. Cars raced by, and I wondered if there were people in them. I still had no idea where I was, or which direction I should be going, so I kept on walking.

I don't remember how I found out that I was in Syracuse NY, but I do remember the collect call I made to my mother.

"Uh, it didn't work, my feet hurt really bad, and I am in Syracuse, can you come get me?"

An hour later I was riding home in my mothers car. I stayed there, eating whole grains and letting my feet heal for a week, before catching a bus to see see my sister in Minneapolis, and then successfully hitchhiking to new Orleans. Never hitchhike within 200 miles of your home town, you will never escape it's gravitational pull.

Zen and the art of wheel alignment.

Once I swapped some art for a Ford Probe. It was a good car, but it wore tires. When I took it in for an alignment, the mechanic noticed that one of the front wheels had been pushed back, probably from hitting a curb, so he couldn't put it on the wheel alignment machine unless I had some very expensive front end work done. A bitter pill to swallow, on a bartered car. I guess he could sense the position I was in, because he volunteered, "You can align it yourself, you know." 

I asked how, and he gave me a demonstration.  He planted himself about 15 feet in front of my car, a wide stance, and proceeded to do automotive thai chi moves. "First you find your center...Relax, breath..." He pitched gracefully to the left, sighted down the side of the Probe, then pitched to the right, and repeated, explaining how to align a car based on this combination of intuition and observation. Later that day I found my center. It worked very well.