but, let me sort through everything first and figure it all out.
Monday, May 3, 2021
and, i've located a couple of stores that will take this big pile of plastic bags, as well, which is a start in clearing out this pile of non-recyclable plastic. good.
i think i always wanted to get into the habit of dropping them off on a monthly basis, i was just never clear on how to do it, and it just built up forever. if i can figure out a spot to drop them off at, i'll get into the habit of clearing it out every month - or at least every couple of months, when it's cold.
so, i'm in now.
i have finished the grocery shopping for the month. i'll need to take a second trip mid-month for fruit, mostly, as per the norm. in the process, i smoked through that free pot. and, that's really what i did this weekend.
hey, i got eleven joints out of what they gave me. these were pinners, but it's reflective of the strength of the pot. and, now i don't want to touch it again for another six months.
even that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the weather, which is what really happened. we hit 30 degree humidity here on windsor for a few hours yesterday, and the whole city was outside to enjoy it. i decided to make a purchase at the rona in belle river to give myself an excuse to bike there in the heat:
as you can see on the map, belle river is not exactly outside of windsor, but it is the last in a series of outlying towns, in that direction. when i went out that way to go to tilbury, i went through another couple of kilometres of posh lakefront properties before having to turn off onto highway 2. given the rate of development in that area, it may not be long before the first town outside of the metropolitan area, saint joachim, becomes the exit point of windsor, but it's still really belle river, for now - if you take tecumseh all the way there, you don't leave the city (although, you wold if you took cabana, instead). there's almost nothing south of cabana, from walker road east - which is the road that marks the eastern end of the downtown core, proper. so, that's the way the way the city is developing - along the water front that defines the peninsula, and apparently in both directions. as development on the water completes, if the city ever turns inward to swallow the farmland inside of the peninsula, it's going to become a major city, very fast. and, from what i can tell, this development seems to be driven by retirees, who are building these posh mansions outside of town at a very fast rate.
but, let's start where we left off.
it was on friday afternoon that i realized how nice it was going to be on sunday, and i decided that i couldn't miss the opportunity for the bike ride, especially given that i had this smelly pot that i wanted to get out of the house. see, the cop/landlord had falsely accused me of smoking in the house a few days previously. in fact, i think he smoked in the house - or at least in the truck, maybe. after giving him shit for the false accusation, he suggested to me that it might have been a skunk because it smelled badly in his truck. riiiight. more likely is that he just smoked in his truck, and then had to react to it when he realized how strong it was - and that i was running the shower to blow it off. whatever. my position is simple - just fucking stop doing it, or admit you don't want a non-smoking lease, after all. either way, my concern started to shift about avoiding giving him ways to frame me and leaving aromatic marijuana in the cupboard for long periods all of a sudden seemed like a bad idea. like, i didn't even buy the stuff - some dude just gave it to me. i had no intention of smoking at all this month. so, smoking it while going for a long bike ride on a hot day sounded like a good way to use it up, and i planned around that by buying a bottle of great stuff from the rona in belle river, to fill in the holes around the baseboards. that should hopefully keep the humidity out a little when it actually picks up for days or weeks at a time...
i like the humid air, but i don't like the sweaty floors. it should help, at least.
so, i made the purchase on friday afternoon and then, having decided to smoke through the eighth of a gram this weekend, rolled a pinner on my way to the store to get a couple of basics. unfortunately, i bought too much stuff to bike home with, so i had to cart it back, bring the cart back and then take my bike back. i was able to get some eggs before i fell asleep.
i was up early on saturday and focused on getting a basic outline for the diet additions before i went out. in the end, i got most of what i was looking for:
- some spinach
- some green beans
- thyme
- ground cumin
- basil
what i skipped was ground celery seed (i couldn't find any) and fish, for now. i'll do some research on the fish some time next week.
after finding some cumin in the store, i realized it was the taco spice; i thought it was curry powder. i had mentioned i wasn't sure if it would be good in pasta or not, thinking it was curry powder. in fact, now that i realize what it actually is, i'd bet cumin will be a very tasty add to this tomato-based pasta bowl, but i'm going to add these additions incrementally, to see what kind of taste difference they make, one by one. we'll do the spinach first, and go from there.
saturday was a colder, blistery kind of day, although it warmed up later on. unfortunately, the main cause of the colder temperature was a vicious wind coming at me directly on the way back from the old, and now new again, store #2. i've been avoiding the closer freshco, because i'm suing them; on a bike, the further freshco is still not very far, but it meant biking through that nasty wind, and it slowed me down on both of the two trips, to the point that i had to walk. the main problem was that i was only biking with one hand, because i had a roll of toilet paper in my left hand (both times). so, getting up hills and even maintaining balance in the wind was frequently difficult - it was that heavy.
but, after a total of four trips, all of which involved smoking a pinner, i was done everything except a handful of items, but mostly just soy milk, which i needed to go to the metro to get because they're the only place that carries the low sugar vanilla soy.
now, this metro has been constantly shifting it's hours on me since the start of the pandemic. it's supposed to be open 24/7, but changed to closing at midnight early in the pandemic. i suppose that the overnight hours were actually intended to service the chrysler plant around the corner, and the pandemic just gave it an excuse to react to the third shift at the plant closing. then, at some point, it cut it's hours on sundays to close at 18:00 instead of midnight. now, even more recently, it's increased it's sunday hours to 20:00 and started closing early on saturday nights, too. so, i got there around 21:00, expecting them to open until midnight, only to find they had closed at 20:00 - earlier than any of the other stores in town. so, the 24/7 store is now closed the earliest of all stores, at least on the weekends. ugh. if i had known that, i would have gone there earlier, and hit the freshco last. but, i had to turn around empty-handed.
instead, i stopped at the burger king and got two whoppers, and that was really it for the night. i looked it up and, supposedly, according to the usda, a whopper packs an average of about 13 mg of heme iron, which is the most in any fast food burger, by far. a big mac is like a third of that. i think that a part of the reason my iron crashed recently is that i stopped eating fast food when i was drunk, because i haven't been drunk; to be clear, i don't think that's the primary problem, but it might be the trigger.
so, that was my saturday - biking around in the wind stoned, and getting everything done except the soy, then crashing after a huge burger.
i wanted to be up early enough on sunday morning to get some fruit & eggs and also to take a shower before i left as i was biking in a face mask all day on saturday and not showering afterwards was how i ended up with a chunk of matted hair i had to cut out back in december. everything was ok, this time, but i didn't have time for the eggs. i was out at about 13:00, with two pinners to guide me, but i didn't actually smoke the first one until i'd picked up the item from rona in belle river. so, i just biked all the way there without stopping. i didn't check the time, but i only had two hours to get there, and they were still open after i cycled back with a bottle of mountain dew, so i suspect i may have beaten the 1.5 hours suggested by google (which is based on an assumption of 10 miles/hour). but, then i found myself in need of finding a serene spot to smoke a joint, hoping to have a kind of pleasant coast in the sauna back.
unfortunately, the marina was just jam packed with people, and there's a stay-at-home order in place in ontario, which nobody cared about, clearly. i haven't seen any news reports about "covidiots", either. i mean, i don't blame them - i was doing the same thing. but, it meant that trying to find a quiet spot on lake st. clair to enjoy a little persy was completely impossible. i couldn't even find a bench on the bike path. there were people everywhere.
i realized this later, on my last trip out, but a part of the problem may have been my lack of familiarity with my surroundings. i mean, i might have been picking places that were just too obvious. having grown up in ottawa, i know all the bests spots, there; it probably won't happen this year, but at some point i'm going to have to go on some serious spot hunting around here.
something else that stood out as i was snooping around was that the primary problem in that part of windsor is that all of the waterfront property is privately owned, something else that is strange to an ottawan, where there's just miles and miles of publicly owned riverfront, both up the ottawa and the rideau. i mean, there isn't any private property along either of these major rivers, in ottawa - it's all parks and wilderness. in windsor, even the creeks have mowed lawns backing on to them, so it's actually quite difficult to find what i was looking for at all.
in the end, i settled for an old tree on old tecmuseh on my way back in - which was pleasant, but not what i was envisioning.
i stopped to get my soy milk on the way back, but decided on a half trip because the price might come down a little mid-month. i had to take a last ride out to the walmart to get a different flavour of soy, and found a better spot up near jackson park, in behind where nobody goes. i did get some eggs when i got back, and then found myself asleep, again - which is fine, that was a long day.
i was up relatively early this morning to get some fruit, and mostly spent it vegging. i had one more joint to smoke, which i smoked this afternoon, after the rain came down.
and, now it's done and i have a lot of cleaning to do in here before i get back to filing. the fridge seems 100% better so far, so i should be able to get to a final cleaning on that side of the apartment, as well.
right now, i'm going to do some dishes, take a shower, get into some cleaner clothes and make some pasta. hopefully, i'll be awake enough to do some more rummage-type cleaning, tonight. i still have to get my blood taken, probably tomorrow, and will wait to do laundry until tomorrow night. so, i should be to filing tomorrow or the next day.
no zinc results, yet.
see, and this was predictable - natural immunity is working on the variants, but the vaccines aren't.
it's why i wanted to catch it when it was weakest, rather than hide inside until a vaccine was developed. but, of course, the logic would be reversed if i had an underlying condition.
and, all evidence right now is that i don't.
i actually have this hunch that chomsky is going to end up on the oldest people of all time list, and then nobody will believe he actually existed.
when the stories talk about him leading a climate change revolt from a central bunker in the sierra mountains via online messaging at the age of 120, future historians will just write it off as legend.
in canada, we have this idea of ministerial responsibility, so there are procedural reasons why an opposition would call for the minister's resignation. the opposition is doing what it's supposed to do, in the parliamentary tradition. but, there are scenarios where the process is somewhat farcical, and this is one of them.
she's essentially correct - she was in control of a system that, through decades of neglect, was unable to respond to a crisis of this sort, and it's a problem that existed throughout the western world. my theory is that the primary reason that china didn't get hit in their old folks homes is that life expectancy there, while rising quickly, is still much lower - they have many fewer very old people. it's a crude metric, but if you look at the lists of current oldest people, and even of oldest people of all time, china has one entry - a drastic under-representation. japan, on the other hand, is definitely over-represented.
so, for her to take personal responsibility (as per the tradition) for a systemic deficiency that was present almost throughout the industrialized world would be absurd. it would mean nothing.
after some deflection, she might end up doing it, though - as such is the power of parliamentary tradition, in canada.
regardless, it's just silly political drama. what everybody needs is to fix the systemic deficiencies, and what this government may be willing to do is likely limited. we're going to need an election to get around that, not a new minister.
today's post is my fourth official lp, inri041.
this used to be my first serious record, before i took the vocals out of the first two, and stripped the third one down. it's still a definite jump in abstraction. but, that's been building for the last two weeks.
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this is a project that has been through many incarnations and reversions, which should hopefully stabilize now that the tracks are entirely instrumental and the substantial number of outtakes have been categorized into companion eps. i don't expect to modify this further; as of jan, 2014, the slow, 15 year process of removing samples and reconstructing instrumental sections is now entirely complete.
what's left when the thematic ideas are stripped out is an eccentric and elaborate delve into psychedelic and electronic music that has no clear parallels that the author is aware of.
the record can be sectioned into 4 parts:
- ignorance is bliss [introduction]
- entropy/curious george/gravity's rainbow [program]
- a commercial break [intermission]
- acidosis [finale]
recorded over the space of the year 2000. remixed substantially in 2004, 2006 and 2014. existing version released on jan 14, 2014. finalized as lp009 on oct 9, 2017. this is my fourth official record; as always, please use headphones.
this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2000, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2014, 2017).
an audience exists somewhere that will cherish this as the truly unique monstrosity that it is.
released november 11, 2000
j- guitars of all types, bass, programming, drum programming, sequencing, synthesizers, live drums, piano, loops, films, noise generation, organ, ebow, flute, mandolin, treatments, effects, found sounds, sampling, sound design, generative synthesis, granular synthesis, generative percussion, light-sound synthesis, digital wave editing, production, coughs, a broken equalizer, cover art
the star trek sample in 'gravity's rainbow' is from the episode "errand of mercy" (mar 23, 1967).
the rendered electronic orchestra includes theremin, ukelele, orchestra hit, string ensemble, taiko drums, gongs, trumpet & sax.
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