There are bees here. Big, fat, black and honey-colored beasts patrolling the air and swooping in on my freshly-shampooed hair. I think that’s what draws them to me. Or maybe they are not bees but drones, those bee-sized drones the CIA used to infiltrate Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan are now being used to scoop up intelligence from the Windmill and from the neighboring schoolyard.

I thought I might walk to the 181 but I guess I just ran out of gas. I slept until 4am then awoke to play Fishdom until 5, doing one long, slow shot in the meantime. I feel fine enough, which is surprising.

I need to move all my sound off Soundcloud and over to YouTube. Soundcloud is such a wasteland of spammy accounts and garbage traffic. And to think I actually pay for it. I never paid any mind to my YouTube traffic but I looked at the “Analytics” today. A video I made in Philadelphia of Peter Richard Conte playing the Wanamaker Organ at Macy’s gets mad views. I had no idea. It’s even included on the website of Peter Richard Conte himself. I made that video under some not-so-small bit of duress and conflict from the person I was with, who just did not want to be there, and on that account neither did I… but who needs to remember the bad when at least the video came out alright. I actually think it’s pretty cool that the organist himself (or his agents) saw fit to use it on his website.

Another video involving a clearly intoxicated individual stumbling around a LinkNYC monolith also for some reason got thousands of views but it must have been a while ago because I cannot tell where that traffic came from.

It takes longer to post audio to YT versus SC. I have to make a video of it, obviously, which should be as simple as just putting a static image, like I did already. But moving that shit is going to be a major PITA, one which will probably lead me to do something I almost never do: decumulate. Is that even a word? Opposite of accumulate.

I might still make it to the 181. The sun feels nice. No sun on the bridge, though. Not much, at least. I guess there never really is.

…

Went back home, plodded through converting Soundcloud tracks to YouTube. Laughed when I noticed that I have 181 tracks uploaded at Soundcloud. A perfect time to get out.
…

Funny thing just now. At the ghetto coffee shop. I am not wearing a jacket for the first time in months. But I’ve become so accustomed to the gesture of taking off that jacket that when I got here just now I almost took off my shirt. That would have been… hilarious.

Throwing off my shirt is not something I commonly do when I get home. But one time I did, and for just a moment it was scary as hell. I’d been at Sunswick. The only unusual thing about that visit was that a keg kicked and I had to switch from one craft beer to another. I think this is what ignited an allergic reaction in me, because when I took off the shirt and saw myself in the mirror there were monstrous welts. They looked like enormous mosquito bites. It was only after I saw them that I kinda could feel the pressure on my skin, though it was not what I’d call painful. Just a little weird, and maybe itchy. It made me wonder if this had happened more often, and that I just didn’t notice since I seldom take off my shirt in that manner. As weird as it was I quickly decided that whatever these bumps were they would recede quickly, and they did.

I should read up on this again, but beer itself is said to be an allergen, or something that can exaggerate allergies. I have had violent sneezing fits after consuming certain high-octane IPAs, and I have no doubt that the booze is to blame. After a few beers, though, those sneezing fits actually feel kind of cathartic. My eyes water, snot pours out, and the scratchy timbre of the sneezes becomes increasingly gruff.

Talk about drinking, though… You know what drove me to go back to beer a couple of weeks ago, after being dry for a pathetic 3 or 4 days? It was Drew Carey. I downloaded the complete Drew Carey Show and in the pilot episode he was seen picking up a beer. That’s what it took for me to be like, hey who cares? I mean going three days dry and 3 months not does not really do your body any good. But then neither does going three weeks dry and three months not. Three weeks is the longest I’ve made it in recent memory. It’s weird what sets me off, though. I can be around booze and drunk people without partaking myself, although drunk people can be kind of annoying to the sober man. And it’s not like the site of a 6-pack has any power over me. But that little moment of seeing Drew Carey pick up a mug of beer was like a signal broke in my head.

Another such moment happened when a friend came over, knowing of my intention not to drink. But he brought a couple of beers for himself. The sound of the can opening set me off. I left him there alone so I could go buy beer and vodka, this after being dry for maybe 4 or 5 days.

I endeavor to drink not at all during the Tampa visit. This means meeting up with Sunswick friends and not joining them in imbibing, assuming they do their wont. That might be weird. But I’m also driving there and back, a pretty long drive to and from Ybor City. So drinking just doesn’t sound smart. And I’ve gotten into a somewhat obstreperous routine that I don’t think can be maintained at the house in Tampa.

I was once officially DWI. In my ignorance I simply did not know. When I had the Town Car I used to come home from the bar and, on a hot summer night, sit behind the wheel blasting the A/C and the radio. It was actually a fun little thing for a while. The A/C in that car could have cooled a house it was so strong.

Only by chance did I learn — from another sitcom of all places — that being drunk at the wheel with the engine running or even the keys in the ignition is all you need to have done to be DWI. My source for this knowledge was Everybody Loves Raymond, where somehow the scenario of sitting drunk in a parked car with the engine running passed through conversation. I later learned that a common way for police to get arrest quotas is to park near bars at closing time and wait for the drunks to start their engines. Once the key goes in you’re up for grabs. This sting-like operation did, at least, keep them off the roads.

Another brush with booze at the wheel came in Daytona Beach, when I was down there cleaning up my father’s affairs. I had not driven a car in forever, and what little reason I had to know about such things left me in the dark about who can and cannot have open containers in a moving vehicle. I guess nobody can. But my 2nd cousin from Tennessee made it seem to me like she could sip from her tall glass of bourbon without any trouble, just as long as I didn’t help myself to any of it. Maybe that’s the rule in Tennessee (I doubt it) but I do not think Florida would be so lax.

At one point — and I only recognized the precariousness of this later — we stopped at a red light and a police van idled right next to us, not even 10 feet away. That glass of bourbon was just sitting there in plain view. All the police had to do was look over and look down, since their van was somewhat higher above street level than the car we were in. They might have noticed the cousin acting visibly drunk. And then who knows what would have happened? Not I.