Chocolate of all things

 I'd basically had the runs for months. I even mentioned it to Ken while I was telling him that celiac disease is in fact real and not a communist disinformation plot. 

I did my things, got a surprisingly good practice in considering it was again at 6-7 in the morning. The thing is, doing notes higher than C in the staff requires a pretty coordinated set of actions, and muscle tension, and all this while the body is just plain tired and wants to just go to bed and rest. 

I practiced while watching a movie called "Area Of Interest" which was interesting. It was based on the idea that a fellow named Hoess, and his wife, in command of Auschwitz, would not only live it up, but experience some kind of deep guilt and then one of their daughters would sneak out at night to stash apples where the prisoners would find them. 

In reality no doubt the real-life Hoess and his wife lived it up, and experienced no guilt at all. It's a pretty close analogue to the experience of someone administering a concentration camp, or "reservation" the remnants of one of our "Indian" tribes are in, or the wealthy administrators/owners of one of our for-profit prisons. Hell, kill off enough people, even children and especially children, and you're a hero. Abraham Lincoln was a noticed "Indian fighter" and Andrew Jackson, who was behind the "Trail Of Tears" and such enterprises, is on our $20 bill. (Benjamin Franklin, who didn't want "Swarthy" people in our country at all, is on our $100 bill.) 

I finally went to bed and woke up at 2 in the afternoon, did things and got going at the usual time, dropped off packages at the post office and deposited my pay check and now I know last week's check was good, and everything adds up. 

Then I went to Whole Foods to lock up the bike and took the #522 bus, the "rapid" one, to the music store which got me there in an hour, the time from my door to theirs the law-of-nature 2 hours. I asked about the soft flute case Craig had shown me last time, and instead he showed me another one which would not work. And I had to wait a half-hour for him to finish a lesson. 

I took the bus back as far as Lawrence and went to the Korean market where they sell really good packing tape, of which they had 3 rolls so I got those, and some cookies that looked like they were chocolate but they were really not. 

But was it ever a day for zombies! It's the warm weather. Crazy people on the bus, at the bus stops, etc. 

I got back to Whole Foods at long last, emphasis on long. I had some chicken and broccoli and a pint of Guinness, and by now it was about 9 in the evening. Keep in mind most people in this town are in bed at 10 and almost everything shuts down at 9. So I didn't get to sit upstairs, but rather had to sit downstairs and watch the antics of ...zombies. 

I got done eating and drinking and riding home, saw a ton of police cars etc at Diridon Station. It was, as could be guessed, a zombie going nuts, yelling a ton of things no one could understand. The thing's zombie dog was taken away by Animal Control and the zombie eventually ran out of energy and ended up in the back of at police car, still yelling but a lot less loud now, and still not yelling anything coherent. 

At one point, riding back on the buses, I'd gone to sit at a seat near the back and there were a bunch of hair clippings there. Someone had given themselves a hair cut there? I said something about getting on a bus and not realizing it was a barber shop, and someone said something like "Sit here" and it was a guy from the Jewish temple. The guy who plays trumpet. We talked a bit, he's still playing trumpet, I'm still same, yadda yadda. Nice enough guy, on the surface and that's what the Reform Judaism crowd is for - to put a happy face on the genocidal cult.  

But the main thing is, the day before yesterday I'd found a bunch of "Loacker" chocolate cookies behind the gym and well, they're good so I'd eaten them all. And today was the first normal "movement" I've had in a long time. 

Now, I'm going through about $3 a day in kim chee and Yakult, which hasn't been helping. If I can eat Loacker chocolate wafers with my breakfast and they cost that much, fine. No headache at all. One big difference is Loacker stuff is made in Italy and has to conform to EU regulations. American chocolate and even Japanese chocolate does not. 

So along with my Guinness and hot-bar dinner, I got a 1/2-lb can of Guittard chocolate powder, which is a local product, made just up the peninsula in San Francisco. No additional ingredients, just ground-up chocolate. I've no problem with having Loacker wafers as part of breakfast, but I'm thinking I can use this powder to make my breakfast coffee a mocha, and that might do it.