The Idling Street Musician

• Black Hat Replaced With Brown Hat
• 13 Dollar Abbreviated Saturday
• Kicking Myself Over Missed Opportunities

Just because you worked for an hour on it, doesn't mean that it is blog worthy, Daniel...

I like to stay up late and work on music and drawings, reading, drinking coffee, and then drifting off to sleep; often without having glanced at the clock beforehand (excuse the pun) and done some math in order to calculate when I would be able to rise, having 8 hours of sleep under my belt, and begin the next day.

"First thing in the morning" equates to around 1:30 PM in these parts.

The Anatomy Of Missing A Saint's Game

So, of course, when I woke up around 8:30 AM, just 3 and a half hours before the Saints game was to kick off, I felt the tiredness in my body of a man who had stayed up until around 4 AM, and had eaten a few pancakes with all fruit spread in the process, and then had laid down to sleep thinking: "I can go over and play by the stadium and probably make the 35 dollars that I have been accustomed to averaging for that particular endeavor.

I'll be able to jump right up at around 9 PM, pack up my gear and be on a trolley, headed towards the Superdome, a good hour and a half before kickoff; I'll make 38 dollars, and that will make up for having knocked off early the night before, after having only made 13 bucks."

Then, there was the matter of the Patriots playing the Chargers in Foxboro, and my opportunity to watch the game at Harrah's Casino, in their big room with a bar in the middle and TVs all the way around.

This was kind of what I was thinking about, as I drifted back to sleep at 9:30 AM, a good 2 and a half hours before the game was to kick off.

It's going to be the brown hat, until further notice...

Maybe not the mustache, but the brown hat...

I woke up again, and it was after noon. I did feel well rested, having put in 8 hours sleeping. There was still time to make it to the Superdome for the letting out of the people after the game.

The game was tight, and fans would be glued to their seats, watching it go down to the wire. The Saints would eek out a victory, and then the fans would exit, enraptured and thrilled by the outcome of the game, and there I would be; keeping a repetitive pattern of chords going, and playing the melody to "When The Saints Go Marching In" repetitively over them on the harmonica -so cliche, so hokey, so guaranteed to fetch around 35 dollars from the 5,000 or so who would walk past.

"I need a Great Motivator," I thought to myself, at around 2 PM, as I drank coffee and packed this laptop into my pack and embarked upon the Circuit of Life, hitting GNC for a creatine monohydrate drink and a packet of powder, labelled "Energy And Metabolism" by the "Mega Men" company, then a shot or two of kratom at the Uxi Duxi.

The packet of powder is on sale right now in the "sample" size, at 2 for 98 cents, at GNC.

This is actually a diamond in the rough and, apparently, a well kept secret, within that particular overpriced health food store. I really should buy the rest of the box of them that are on display by the register.

I had even tried to tell Travis, Mr. Skinflint himself, about them. A man could live off of 3 of them a day. This would help him save up for moving in to a new apartment, and even leave him some extra money to give to a guy who had let him stay for almost 20 days at his place.

The packet is more than adequate as a one-third-of-a-meal replacement, and with all of the vitamins, minerals and esoteric ingredients with reputations for, if not scientific evidence of, being able to produce energy and stimulate metabolism, you can't go wrong. There are even ingredients to promote brain health, like choline in them.

There is an amount of nutrition in them at least equal to that of a cheeseburger from a fast food joint, it just doesn't appear so to the untrained eye.

But, If you were to cremate a double McCheeseburger, reducing it to a pile of powdered minerals, you would see what I mean. There won't be any choline in the pile.

Take out the fat and salt and hydrogenated soy oil and other chemicals, that makes the burger look more substantial than the little pouch of Mega Men powder, beforehand, to be fair.
As far as calories per dollar, 260 of them, for 98 cents plus tax.

The creatine drink, I'm getting rooked on. Gyped, Jewed, taken to the cleaners, scammed, hoodwinked...
[As children, growing up in a middle class suburb of Boston, we learned to use certain phrases, and would, upon not getting a prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, for instance, utter something like: "I got Jew-ed!" and none of our parents would chastise us with: "That's not a very nice thing to say. But, that's a topic for another blog post. We were apparently unwittingly disparaging gypsies with our comments, also, and we might Welsh out, rather than paying off, a bet we had made.]

For 24 dollars, I can purchase 200 grams of pure creatine monohydrate powder, this is enough to make about 67 of the drinks that I now pay $3.12 a piece for. I would be saving 90% on the stuff.

13 Dollar Saturday

I should have bought the vat of it when I had the cash. After a dismal Saturday night, when I knocked off before midnight because there was a brass band playing in front of the bar, which was then supplanted by a guy pulling a sound system on wheels behind him, and I just hadn't had the patience to wait them out before continuing to play. It's a residential block, and whether or not there are ordinances regulating it or not, all such people seem to stop blasting their sound by midnight, or 1 AM, at the latest.

I just wanted to go home to record music, eat pancakes and drink coffee. Like a temperamental artist. Or a spoiled brat.

Feeling like a spoiled brat, I packed up, only 13 dollars to the good, and went off to have my pancakes, weaving my way down Royal Street past tourists, any of whom very well may have weaved their own ways to the oldest bar in America, where they very well may have tipped a musician who had had the patience to wait out a guy who pulls a sound system around.

DJ Skeezing 101

This is actually a valid hustle in New Orleans, as the guy, who basically rolls up to a crowd of people, perhaps a wedding party who are making their rounds of The Quarter, cranks up his sound, drowning out conversations, and then breaks into a wild dance, himself being painted and adorned in some way, in order to sell the dance-ability of the music to the crowd, and to get them going, becoming kind of a DJ (skeezer) rocking the block with his music, getting them all to sing and dance along; and keeping a tip bucket hovering not far from right under their noses the whole time.

Besides, I was thinking, as I left the DJ to his devices, I was going to be up bright and early; up and at 'em; at the Superdome, street musician skeezing, myself, and would make about 35 bucks. Sure I was. As long as I didn't stay up until dawn, mixing a recording that I made and stuffing myself with pancakes with all fruit spread, and waking up feeling a bit lethargic a couple hours before kickoff, I was.

So, now it is 8 PM, Sunday. The Uxi Duxi is closing, and I suppose I should go to the Lilly Pad and see what the last day of Voodoo Fest plus a day upon which there was a Saints game, when they won, produces in the way of tips.

The recording I made last night sounds excellent; I've been comparing it with the sound of professionally done commercial recordings, especially by listening from a distance, like from my bathroom, for example. It's useful to take note of what you can hear when you can just barely music playing from a distant source.

I've heard that professional photographers can make good money...

When I'm in the bathroom and I have music on in the living room, there are usually certain sounds that carry their way better into there. If I can just barely make out some of David Bowie's singing, and maybe the tambourine, for example, then I note that, and am able to adjust the sound levels on my own mixes, so they sound about the same from the toilet seat. You gotta' start somewhere, right?

So, rather than resent myself for not having stuck it out Saturday night and played until 3 AM, nor having made it to the Saint's game, I need to look at the bigger picture and congratulate myself for having made strides towards putting a CD together. And to get out there a couple hours from now and make some income flow is highly recommended.