Blogging Before Bed
I am blogging "first thing in the morning," which is actually at the end of my day.
I had been trying to blog after sleeping and before going out to play, but this has been a failure, as the lack of recent posts might show.
I've been waking up depressed a lot lately; and devoid of any of the enthusiasm or ideas that my mind might have been teeming with, before I lied down. They don't seem as important in the morning (4 PM).
There has also been pressure to get to the Lilly Pad as early as possible, making it seem like the longer I blogged, the later I would be getting there and the less money I would wind up making, and the more the blog would become about financial woes, rather than interesting adventures.
The trolley runs 24 hours now, so I was able to hop on one around 3:45 AM, after having played at the Lilly Pad from 11 PM until 2 AM and made 38 dollars.
Finance
This just about matches my total for the previous 5 days; something which had me planning upon contacting the Labor Staffers place about a dishwashing job, or anything.
I probably will still do that.
I played around a couple missing notes on the harmonica tonight, on old strings.
I had almost left the harmonica at home, but am glad that I didn't, as I was able to practice on the very highest notes found in the top 3 holes above the hole which is blown out.
My biggest money nights lately have come through the agency of a single inebriated individual showing up and gushing over how amazing my musicianship is and how enviable the life is that I am leading. "You are the soul of this country!," said Thursday night's version, who tipped me 12 of the 17 that I would take in the whole night.
17% Jar To Be Used To Save For Laptop
I have started a "17.5% jar" based upon my estimates of how much I can reasonably expect to save out of each nights pay, in order to live comfortably and have a new laptop in about 6 weeks from now...
So, as I am writing this at 8:44 AM, I will be able to get in 8 hours of sleep and be able to go straight to the Lilly Pad on this Saturday night.
A Goal Of Human Existence
I want to travel during these slow months; busking other places and maybe lifting my spirits through the adventure of it.
The irony is that, the times when I should have been waking up depressed -like when I was sleeping under a defunct trolley car that was parked on a grassy lot in Mobile, Alabama and woke up in a puddle of frigid water in a soggy sleeping bag and couldn't even have a cigarette because they had been soaked also- I wasn't depressed at all. I might have been thinking "this will make a good story some day," or "One day I'll look back at this and laugh," but I wasn't depressed.
Now I wake up in a spacious apartment that I can have for life, and all I can think about is dying there.
Everyone is dying, and it amazes me that people are able to take their minds off of it.
Maybe that is a goal of human existence, to take one's mind off of the fact that, whatever each of us is going to end up dying from is already latent within us -the guy who, as a kid used to wheeze every spring from pollen dies 70 years later from emphysema; another, who was always susceptible to nosebleeds his whole life kicks the bucket after a massive hemorrhage; the woman who can remember having dizzy spells at a certain stage of her life but who explained them away by attributing them to something like hormones winds up going bat shit crazy and killing herself at age 58, etc. etc.
It's the "weakest link in the chain" (that is the human body) theory. It must be hard for 98 year old people to divert their thoughts from waiting for something to go wrong; like someone who is expecting company and has one ear peeled for the sound of a knock at the door -did I just hear a knock? Did my heart just palpitate?
Part of what is depressing me is the fact that all these people are dying; Prince, Mohammad Ali, etc. and today's society is just giving them an additional "15 minutes" of fame, or more like 15 seconds (a 10 second encapsulation of a life, 5 seconds of the chorus of Purple Rain; and then on to the weather.
If that is all that an artist as prolific as Prince amounts to; then it seems pretty pointless to "work and suffer and struggle for fame."
What's worse is when very old people die who are only remembered by the handful of their surviving contemporaries and who are, hence, worthy of even less attention. Lauren Bacall (whom I think is still alive in her late 90's) will probably have a 3 second audio clip of the husky voice that was her trademark saying her most famous line, and then on to the weather.
As humanity expands exponentially, there just won't be a house big enough for all the household names. Is Debbie Gibson a household name? What about Judy Rankin (she was like the first female professional golfer or something).
And, finally; I really hate songs like
"Electric Youth", by Debbie Gibson.
And, that much more recent song by the group named Fun, which has the chorus:
Tonight
We are young
Let's set the world on fire
we can burn brighter than the sun
I hate these songs because every generation thinks that they are the latest and greatest thing to come along and that the previous generation is old fashioned, boring, closed minded, irrelevant and, though they know that they were once young they cannot fathom that they could have had the same feelings or lived through similar things. Everything was in black and white back then, was what our generation thought about our predecessors. Did I mention square?
I hated Electric Youth when it came out. I was in my 20's. I thought that the young kids coming up and singing along with it were an evolutionary step backwards for mankind. Like Neil Armstrong stepping backwards from the surface of the moon onto the ladder on the landing module.
Even when I was young, I knew enough to attribute the way I felt to my youth alone. I wasn't like: Hey, everybody, look at me, I'm full of energy and I can dance all night, and I just know that I'm going to "take it higher" and set the world on fire.
To all the millennials that I see these days exuding that "Look out, world, here I come!" attitude, I would like to walk up to and say "Look out, here comes the world!"
More About Travelling
The trick will be to retain the apartment here as a place that I can crawl back to regardless of what happens in my travels.
If I get jumped and have all my stuff and money stolen somewhere, all I would need is a bus ticket back "home," -something that seems to be one of the more easily acquirable things by the downtrodden, the vagrants, the stranded, the down on their luck and the skeezers in a lot of places where I have been. Imagine that; a free Greyhound ticket. It's almost as if they are trying to get rid of such people!
The computer room opens at 6 AM.
The 2 hours since I got back have flown by.
I cooked and ate pasta with tomato sauce, brought Harold the cat in, and then tuned my little radio to the sports station and listened to them talk about the death of Mohammad Ali while reading the American history book.
I am eating pasta with tomato sauce because this is the last day of the month before my food stamp card is to be loaded with 194 bucks; it ran out about 10 days ago, which has been par for the course since I got the thing.
I am blogging "first thing in the morning," which is actually at the end of my day.
I had been trying to blog after sleeping and before going out to play, but this has been a failure, as the lack of recent posts might show.
I've been waking up depressed a lot lately; and devoid of any of the enthusiasm or ideas that my mind might have been teeming with, before I lied down. They don't seem as important in the morning (4 PM).
There has also been pressure to get to the Lilly Pad as early as possible, making it seem like the longer I blogged, the later I would be getting there and the less money I would wind up making, and the more the blog would become about financial woes, rather than interesting adventures.
The trolley runs 24 hours now, so I was able to hop on one around 3:45 AM, after having played at the Lilly Pad from 11 PM until 2 AM and made 38 dollars.
Finance
This just about matches my total for the previous 5 days; something which had me planning upon contacting the Labor Staffers place about a dishwashing job, or anything.
I probably will still do that.
I played around a couple missing notes on the harmonica tonight, on old strings.
I had almost left the harmonica at home, but am glad that I didn't, as I was able to practice on the very highest notes found in the top 3 holes above the hole which is blown out.
My biggest money nights lately have come through the agency of a single inebriated individual showing up and gushing over how amazing my musicianship is and how enviable the life is that I am leading. "You are the soul of this country!," said Thursday night's version, who tipped me 12 of the 17 that I would take in the whole night.
17% Jar To Be Used To Save For Laptop
I have started a "17.5% jar" based upon my estimates of how much I can reasonably expect to save out of each nights pay, in order to live comfortably and have a new laptop in about 6 weeks from now...
So, as I am writing this at 8:44 AM, I will be able to get in 8 hours of sleep and be able to go straight to the Lilly Pad on this Saturday night.
A Goal Of Human Existence
I want to travel during these slow months; busking other places and maybe lifting my spirits through the adventure of it.
The irony is that, the times when I should have been waking up depressed -like when I was sleeping under a defunct trolley car that was parked on a grassy lot in Mobile, Alabama and woke up in a puddle of frigid water in a soggy sleeping bag and couldn't even have a cigarette because they had been soaked also- I wasn't depressed at all. I might have been thinking "this will make a good story some day," or "One day I'll look back at this and laugh," but I wasn't depressed.
Now I wake up in a spacious apartment that I can have for life, and all I can think about is dying there.
Everyone is dying, and it amazes me that people are able to take their minds off of it.
Maybe that is a goal of human existence, to take one's mind off of the fact that, whatever each of us is going to end up dying from is already latent within us -the guy who, as a kid used to wheeze every spring from pollen dies 70 years later from emphysema; another, who was always susceptible to nosebleeds his whole life kicks the bucket after a massive hemorrhage; the woman who can remember having dizzy spells at a certain stage of her life but who explained them away by attributing them to something like hormones winds up going bat shit crazy and killing herself at age 58, etc. etc.
It's the "weakest link in the chain" (that is the human body) theory. It must be hard for 98 year old people to divert their thoughts from waiting for something to go wrong; like someone who is expecting company and has one ear peeled for the sound of a knock at the door -did I just hear a knock? Did my heart just palpitate?
Part of what is depressing me is the fact that all these people are dying; Prince, Mohammad Ali, etc. and today's society is just giving them an additional "15 minutes" of fame, or more like 15 seconds (a 10 second encapsulation of a life, 5 seconds of the chorus of Purple Rain; and then on to the weather.
If that is all that an artist as prolific as Prince amounts to; then it seems pretty pointless to "work and suffer and struggle for fame."
What's worse is when very old people die who are only remembered by the handful of their surviving contemporaries and who are, hence, worthy of even less attention. Lauren Bacall (whom I think is still alive in her late 90's) will probably have a 3 second audio clip of the husky voice that was her trademark saying her most famous line, and then on to the weather.
As humanity expands exponentially, there just won't be a house big enough for all the household names. Is Debbie Gibson a household name? What about Judy Rankin (she was like the first female professional golfer or something).
And, finally; I really hate songs like
"Electric Youth", by Debbie Gibson.
And, that much more recent song by the group named Fun, which has the chorus:
Tonight
We are young
Let's set the world on fire
we can burn brighter than the sun
I hate these songs because every generation thinks that they are the latest and greatest thing to come along and that the previous generation is old fashioned, boring, closed minded, irrelevant and, though they know that they were once young they cannot fathom that they could have had the same feelings or lived through similar things. Everything was in black and white back then, was what our generation thought about our predecessors. Did I mention square?
I hated Electric Youth when it came out. I was in my 20's. I thought that the young kids coming up and singing along with it were an evolutionary step backwards for mankind. Like Neil Armstrong stepping backwards from the surface of the moon onto the ladder on the landing module.
Even when I was young, I knew enough to attribute the way I felt to my youth alone. I wasn't like: Hey, everybody, look at me, I'm full of energy and I can dance all night, and I just know that I'm going to "take it higher" and set the world on fire.
To all the millennials that I see these days exuding that "Look out, world, here I come!" attitude, I would like to walk up to and say "Look out, here comes the world!"
More About Travelling
The trick will be to retain the apartment here as a place that I can crawl back to regardless of what happens in my travels.
If I get jumped and have all my stuff and money stolen somewhere, all I would need is a bus ticket back "home," -something that seems to be one of the more easily acquirable things by the downtrodden, the vagrants, the stranded, the down on their luck and the skeezers in a lot of places where I have been. Imagine that; a free Greyhound ticket. It's almost as if they are trying to get rid of such people!
The computer room opens at 6 AM.
The 2 hours since I got back have flown by.
I cooked and ate pasta with tomato sauce, brought Harold the cat in, and then tuned my little radio to the sports station and listened to them talk about the death of Mohammad Ali while reading the American history book.
I am eating pasta with tomato sauce because this is the last day of the month before my food stamp card is to be loaded with 194 bucks; it ran out about 10 days ago, which has been par for the course since I got the thing.
If the crust punks over on "Squat The Planet" are correct, you can skeeze an amazing amount of money out of the public if you're traveling. Being someone who is "trying to get somewhere" gains a lot of sympathy, and "drops" as the skeezers say, IE cash handouts.
ReplyDeleteYou could adopt a schedule of busking in New Orleans when times are good, and taking the slow part of the year to travel.
Of course you could also take the slow part of the year to be a handyman or wash dishes or something. I understand dish washers can make $50 a day, which would be good money where I am.
For some reason, buskers are becoming an endangered species in San Jose. Over the past 2 weeks I've seen one, a kid playing, er, "playing?" a guitar.