A Visit With Howard

• $15 Saturday
• Football At Howard's

"We get paid the most and hit the least (after punters)"

"This no longer seems like a practical way to make a living.." I thought to myself as I packed up my stuff after playing Saturday night for what amounted to 5 dollars an hour.

$15 Million Sunday (right)

Strings and harmonicas and spotlight batteries, batteries for the guitar tuner etc., could be calculated as costing me a couple bucks each night that I go out and play, whether or not I make anything.

I suppose the 2 dollar energy drink and the 2 dollar joint that I smoke can be considered business expenses, although they would be consumed on a night off, also.

Football Championship Sunday

I woke up with just about all of 15 bucks on my table. It was Sunday and the football games were to be later in the evening.
 
I rode to the corner, got an energy drink and a pack of cigarettes, pedaled to the ferry, paid 2 bucks to ride across the river, and then arrived at Howard's to watch football with 5 dollars left in my pocket. He had a Monster Energy drink, waiting in his fridge for me.

Howard has bought a new TV, which measures 32 inches across "the 40 inch one is too big for this room," and is going to give his old 20 something inch one to me tomorrow, when he comes here, hoping to talk to Tim, my caseworker.

I will then have a semi-modern flat screen high definition TV with no way to make it work, instead of the small and medium sized TVs that I found sitting near the dumpster and took, just out of a hoarding instinct.

I could give those away or sell them cheap, but, I think even the most inveterate skeezer here has at least a flat screen TV, even if it is the lowest, bottom end, skeeziest flat screen made.

The End Of A Curse?

The largest one I own, bought from Rose and Ed for 40 dollars, still sits there with a picture of Donald Trump taped over its black screen.

As soon as I had agreed to pay R and E that amount, I entered something like a 3 week stretch of making less than 20 bucks a night, with a good amount of 7 and 8 dollar nights in there.

It was like the TV was a curse, and a lesson to me to be very wary of having any dealings at all with other residents here. There had been a couple nights that I took off to watch movies, rather than busk, looking at the TV instead of being out there paying for it, but it turned out to be a bad time to buy a TV on an installment plan.

I had only a VCR and mostly Disney videos, and whatever I could find on the Goodwill's "59 cent video cassette" shelf. The picture quality wasn't great. It was hard to see who wrote or performed a particular song in the movie, due to the blurriness of the fine print in the credits, for example.

Plus, the Goodwill bargain shelf is rarely replenished through fresh donations of VHS movies, and by my third trip there, the same copies of "Beaches" (The Bette Midler flick) and the rest of the still uninteresting looking movies that I had already seen (there) were staring back at me.

That kind of nixes the idea of investing in another VCR, even at the typical 8 dollar Goodwill price on those antiques.

At one point, Berta, one of the housemates of Howard, brought in freshly made pizza, which I couldn't turn down after being told that they had searched high and wide for pizza without "partially hydrogenated soybean oil" being listed in the ingredients.

I especially had to eat it as, I could guess from Howard's face that he probably preferred whatever his "regular" pizza is, and was making an allowance for my partially hydrogenated soy oil issue. I didn't want his efforts "the Pizza Hut* people; they didn't seem to know what the hell I was talking about!" to go to waste.

*Pizza Hut pizzas are swimming in that lowest prices commercially produced cooking oil. I used to have to smear the insides of the pans with it, using a paint brush, put to that task, when I worked there. Dominos, ditto.

A TV In Every Home

Howard's TV is just going to sit in my apartment, awaiting such a time that he gets a wi-fi hot point of some kind in his house, when he said he will give me the converter box that he is currently using.

That is behind the assumption that he is going to be able to switch to using the Internet to watch TV, in a way that he won't need the box any more.

A Favorite of Howard's

I'm not sure if that will be the case.

I think whomever installs a box in his house that will put out the wi-fi "signal," will also bring another one that will plug into that box, which will unscramble the 275, or so, channels, and send them to his new 32 inch flatscreen TV.

They will probably "bundle" the services so that, for an extra 20 bucks a month, he "might as well" get all those channels, bringing his bill to "just $59.99 per month," or something; plus whatever they can get him to spring for by dangling the carrots of "on demand" stuff in front of him "...Oh, wow, that's the only Kirk Douglas movie I haven't seen!!"

But, I think I will wind up having to buy my own converter box. In time for the Stanley Cup Playoffs...perhaps, if I hurry.
...haven't seen them since 1972...I think I read somewhere that Bobby Orr retired...

I'm not in any real hurry, having not had a TV in 25 years.. Plus, I would need an antenna to go with it.

It's Time To Busk

I suppose I am going out on this Monday night, to try to follow up the 15 dollar Saturday with whatever a slightly cooler (55 degree) Monday night might yield. It's already (9:16 PM) time to get going on that.

Howard will be here, bright and early tomorrow morning, to drop off the TV