History Repeats

Last night Sue and I

wound up hanging out, after she asked me if I wanted her to hang out.
I only wanted her to hang out if she wanted to hang out.
She only wanted to hang out if I wanted her to hang out.
She wound up going along with me, toting her bags, her cat and her pidgeon.
I was heading towards a spot on Decatur Street.

It was 6:30 p.m., and I would only have an hour and a half to play before the curfew on street performers. At the mention of this, Sue suggested that we go to a different (less distant) spot.

We bent our steps towards Bourbon Street.
Sue had a bottle of wine with her, which she had been carrying around for a week, after finding it somewhere. The calories which she expended carrying around a 2 or 3 pound bottle the 30 miles that she walks each week, made it an expensive bottle of wine, in that sense.
I set up on Bourbon Street. Sue set out to get the cork pulled out of the bottle.
It took her a while to find a bartender willing to break the law by allowing her to leave with an opened glass bottle, but she did.
We sat there as I played; myself, her, Kooky and the pidgeon; and I wasn't making any tip money.

Very few people were walking past.

I was trying to keep a positive attitude. I knew that (if anything can be learned from history)she was going to vacillate between blaming her presence for the fact that I wasn't doing well, and then blaming me.
A guy came out of one of the nearby houses and told us that we were in a residential area, and to discourage others from congregating there, he would appreciate it if I moved farther down the street. "If they see you playing here, they'll think that they can sit here, too."
He said that gutter punks had been sitting there, making a mess and "doing heroin" right in front of his house.
I moved further down and played longer, only making a couple bucks.

By then the wine was mostly consumed and Sue started to become critical of the songs that I was playing and the way I was playing them and also commented that the people on the street were spending their money in the bars and didn't want to give me anything.

I felt like I was putting her through an ordeal.
I also felt my failure on this occasion magnified by her presence, even while knowing that it was just the way I was "framing" things.
She began to pressure me to move to another spot.
I decided to aquiesce, mostly because I planned upon moving to another spot closer to where Sue slept, thinking that she might take the bait and go off to do just that.
I stopped at Rouse's Market and got something to eat.

Maybe I should have gotten her something, even though she didn't ask me to. Perhaps that is why she said "I'm going to sleep," before marching off in the direction of Basin Street, without saying much of a "good night."

I wished that I could have gone back to the beginning of the evening when she had asked me "Do you want me to come with you?," so I could have replied: "Sweetie, it's going to be a long slow night, you'll be bored to death just sitting there, and I'll feel like I have to entertain you, along with the tourists, that's just the way I am. I should probably just go it alone"

I haven't seen her this morning, and I'm pretty sure that is because she doesn't want me to see her this morning.

Understanding women in general is hard enough, without trying to understand one who carries a pidgeon around in a paper bag.