Feels Like 88

9 Dollar Thursday

I am feeding Harold the cat one can at a time these days, spaced apart according to when I come by them.

Last night, I played for a little over an hour and made the above amount.

I took a break to move my bike, which I had had to lock up around the corner and out of sight of the half dozen web cams; and then just never went back to playing.

I have a closet shelf full of Disney movies on VHS cassette, and it oil-ifies me just to think of them...

I was in that closet digging around for a button up shirt to kind of change up my look.

Thinking about applying for a job at the Trader Joe's on Veterans Blvd. has perhaps put me in a button up shirt frame of mind.

It is Friday and I blew off a trip to the plasma place for 25 dollars because Jacob Scardino mentioned us jamming again, like we did last Friday at the house of Bob, his guardian. The "M.O.C." (Museum of Crap) Jacob calls it.

But, there has been no contact made by Jacob at this point, and it is getting too late to make the plasma run, given the contingencies that threaten to make it a fruitless trip. It is 81 degrees and feels like 88, with an 80 percent chance of rain.

What is that on my mirror?!?

The twenty five bucks will be there tomorrow, and I guess I will roll the dice, against 4 to 1 odds of getting rained on, and go out and busk in a little while.

Some positive things have happened.

A: Having songs that I once played coming back into my memory (perhaps because of the self-help dialogues that have me imagining the "me" of the past, with all the shortcomings and faults that led to the regrets and insecurities and guilt that I harbor today and which have caused me to miss out on opportunities which have been right in my face all along) is a good thing.

"If you can play 'Misty,' then you can play anything,"

Making that list of 1,000 songs that I could play, were I just to be reminded of their existence, seems to be inching closer to the top of the Things To Do list.

Use them or lose them, might have an element of truth to it, but actually...

Were I to reclaim about 224 songs from the past, then I would be in a position to develop the facility to "sound out" just about any other song that I know the melody to.

"If you can play 'Misty,' then you can play anything," a guy who plays rhythm guitar in one of those Old-Timey bands along with a banjo guy and a trombone, once told me.

This is kind of true in the sense that "Misty," goes through the "cycle of fifths" so that several keys are visited in it. The way the melody flows over those different keys is another study in how melody notes sound against different backdrops.

And there was a formula followed by song writers, especially back in the era of Frank Sinatra et. al. which involved the song going through little blocks of chords which, through cycling through the circle of fifths go into other keys, but the composer is always just a half step slide from slipping back into the original key.

Like in the example above, the E flat major 7th chord on the last line winds up being the E flat 6th which is the same chord with only one note changed.

The composer might have gone right from the first chord to the second like John Lennon did in "Across The Universe," but this progression gets to it by detouring through the C-F-Bflat (each a fifth apart) before it. And, so, it is "jazzier" than the Lennon song.

This same chord progression is in "Yesterday, When I Was Young," by Eddy Arnold, and in "It Was A Very Good Year," by Frank Sinatra. Which is no coincidence, since they are both "wistful" songs about lost youth. "Misty" is wistful in it's own way.

So, making a list of at least two hundred songs will soon be at the top of my list of things to do. I want to have it laminated, even.

I would extend what the guy told me to include that, if you can play "Bluesette," by Toots Thielemans, you could also play anything, including "Misty." That one is even more over-the-top as far as trying to hit all 12 notes in one song.

The Rains of Wednesday

There was a one hundred percent chance of rain, according to the weather app on my phone. Why would the weather forecasters not just say ninety-nine percent chance of rain? People would still grab their umbrellas and it would allow for the possibility that it might somehow not rain, say due to a cataclysmic event such as an undersea earthquake with the resultant tsunami somehow drawing the rain clouds away.

Right: Harold gives a critical listen-back to our latest studio session.

It started raining when I was on the bus on the way to the plasma place.
I had purposely left my umbrella at home.
I weighed the burden of carrying the thing, while riding the bike, against the odds that I would need it.
At the end of the day, after having gotten pretty wet, I concluded that I need to find a way to tie the umbrella onto the yellow bike.
That way, I could keep it handy, while freeing up my hands.

So, having gotten caught in the rain and lain there shivering as I donated plasma led me to the epiphany that I should rig up some kind of Velcro strapping system or perhaps bring Bungee cords into play, so that the daunting prospect of being encumbered by an umbrella all day would be diminished to the point that I could have the thing available whenever there is a one hundred percent chance of rain, tsunamis not withstanding.

Cecilia 5

If anyone thinks that my music already sounds like this graph (left) looks, then this tool might be for me.

I downloaded the Cecilia application which bills itself as "ear bending sonics" a few months ago, but finally opened it last night to see what it was all about.

It is for producing some pretty ear bending sonics, I have discovered.


My first hour of playing around with the program produced the above. OK, it's pretty boring, but sheds light upon where weird sounds might come from.
Not much else to show for a Wednesday night stayed in, but as soon as I load a few of Harold's meows into this program I might be onto something!

Three Years Ago

Three years ago, I posted what the above is part of.
I was drinking at the time, wouldn't quit for another 3 months.
I can see that I was worried about becoming like Troy, who is another busker whom I am still, to this day, confused with, and whom I have always seen as kind of a warning of what I might look like in ten years should I not stop drinking.
I haven't seen Troy in a couple years now. He disappeared from the scene right around the time I stopped drinking, so maybe he was a "ghost of Christmas' future" who no longer needed to hang around.

I hope I post tomorrow about an awesome Thursday night busking, because, after a stop for batteries and cat food, that's what is on tap.

Dismal Tuesday Night With A Ray Of Hope, Or Two

I played Tuesday night and got a can of cat food and the bus fare to Gretna to sell my plasma, out of it.

I try to block glare in photo of new hat while barfly pesters Erin

This I did, after oversleeping the trip to one of the food banks on the Sacred Heart van at around 11 in the morning.

Do I subconsciously not want to bring the foods into my apartment which the self-help dialogues that I am hypnotizing myself with, are telling me are "dead" and terrible foods?

I will say that, although the dialogues seem to have had the effect of making me stay in at night and work on things other than busking, the have also had the effect of making me, when I do go out to busk, recall more songs that I have once played, but which had kind of fallen, not out of my memory, but off of the tip of my tongue, at least.

Tuesday night, I was only making $3.50 off of scattered groups of tourists, who seemed to be pretty broke, if the fact that they weren't holding any expensive drinks, nor scarfing down any expensive food was any indication. They were like customers "just looking," if I've ever seen them. But, I was able to reclaim the song "A Day In The Life," by The Beatles from a place in my mind where it had had been put in the wrong file, or something.

So, now, I go back to my prune juice and my apple juice and my self-help dialogues for the night.

I at least got the fifteen bucks from selling plasma to go with the $3.52 that I made last night. It is raining lightly now. There is a 100% chance that it would be, according to my phone.

Rule Number One

Post frequently; even if it's just a short post to let your readers know that the blog is still being actively maintained.

Post frequently, or your readers will lose interest,

maybe not all six of them, but some might...

I encountered problems uploading the B side to Harold the Cat's single, which I had intended to link here in mp3 format -since mp3 offers "acceptable" sound quality.

It is probably splitting cat hairs on my part to be concerned with the sound quality of my stuff, since, only cats can hear the frequencies that might be attenuated in mp3 format. And, there is a refrigerator and a toilet that needs to have its handle jiggled way in the background, anyways.

I ran out of everything, sort of.

Going to Howard Westra's house to watch football Sunday night and then having to skeeze the dollar and twenty-five cents for the bus ride home, left me waking up kind of depressed Monday.

The Patriots lost the game, and I think Howard's coffee has chicory root in it, as I felt kind of bound up, like my intestines were full of sand -heavy but with no nutritional value, type of thing.

So, I did not go out to busk Monday night, choosing instead to embark upon yet another juice/water fast and cleanse.

I drank prune juice, and stayed in.

The self hypnosis tapes that I am trying to use religiously, may be causing me to choose not to go out and busk, for some subconscious reasons.

Maybe when I get to the second half of the book where "positive affirmations" are used, I will discover a wealth of new-found energy for busking.

Maybe working "smart" rather than "hard" might have me borrowing an amplifier from my friend Jacob and playing real loud on Canal Street to make decent money playing whatever, or maybe even working out a way for Jacob and I both to busk at the Lilly Pad....

Harold the Cat's Latest Song

Click Here To Hear Harold The Cat's New Song
A few minutes of messing around with some of my newfound editing skills using a meow from Harold the cat produced the above, which will hopefully play after the above link is clicked.*
*The file is in "flac" format; which Jacob said he could only open with Audacity, but I suppose in the future I could just export them to "wav" files that are Microsoft compatible.

I had a choice between a "share link" and a "direct hotlink" and chose the latter.

Jacob Scardino and I jammed at his house last night, and then, after getting back home and after having eaten a Wendy's chicken sandwich type of thing, an Aciago Ranch Chicken Club, to be specific.

I wanted to go to sleep pretty early, and did not go out to play on a Friday night.

So much for anything about busking on this blog for today.

It is Saturday night and I will drag myself to the Lilly Pad and set up and then come what may.

I guess Bob was being polite in offering to bring me one of these (left) since he was bringing Jacob one, and it wouldn't be polite to eat in front of me.

I had tried to negotiate for a simple, plain hamburger, which would have been cheaper for Bob and would have satisfied the requirement that Jacob wouldn't be eating in front of me.

By the time I got home at around 10 PM, I was feeling the kind of fatigue that I suppose I was warned about by the "Fit For Life" people, who say that mixing starch and protein together will lead to incomplete digestion, since they each require a different digestive medium, and that will make a person want to take a nap not long after eating an Asiago Ranch Chicken Club.

It was very good tasting, if a bit spicy.

8 Years Ago Today

Eight years ago, almost to the day, I was in Mobile, Alabama.

I'm not sure if I had made my first trip to New Orleans at that point in time.

I was sleeping outdoors, next to an Episcopalian Church.

I can remember the specific night (September 23, 2010) I had blogged about. I had become pissed off at a guy who seemed to be using me for my Raisin Bran. He had shown up one night to sleep at the same spot by the church.

On the night in question, I had run up to the Save A Lot and gotten a box of Raisin Bran, and had come back and offered the new guy some.

He had dug his hand into the box greedily and begun to stuff his face. I wondered if he was hoping I would just let him have the rest, since he had dug his filthy mitt into the box. Little did I know at the time that he was preparing me for the world of skeezers that I would soon be embroiled in in New Orleans.

The thing that stuck with me was how he had kept answering "yeah," to anything that I had said as he chewed away, apparently not even listening to me, but rather trying to humor me long enough for him to get as much cereal as he could.

"Yeah."

"I tried jogging, but my knee was still sore from when I twisted it..."

"Yeah."

"That's the one I had surgery on about twenty years ago."

"Yeah." (I don't care about you or your knee, just keep the cereal coming, type of thing)

This was a foreshadowing of Leslie Thompson, whom I would be meeting a couple years later, once in New Orleans.

When Leslie was up at around seven in the morning and hadn't had any whiskey yet, he would follow me, if I had money, shadowing my every move, as if not wanting to stray more than a few feet from me.

To any kind of conversation that I tried to make, he would absentmindedly reply: "Really?"

Once I determined that he was not even listening to me, but rather humoring me, in order to remain in my company until such a time that I broke down and spent my money on whiskey first thing in the morning.
I said "Oh, the sun is up," at one point, to which Leslie replied:
"Really?"
"Really?" I had snapped back at the guy "You can't see that the sun just came up?!?"

So, the guy 8 years ago, whose name turned out to be Mike, and who was a spitting image of Bill Murray the Saturday Night Live guy, and who became my friend was a precursor to Leslie Thompson.

It Is 1928

I Grab 7 More Dollars On A Wednesday Night
New batteries in the spotlight; priceless...

The crayons are still a work in progress...

Military time, that is, making it about 7:30 PM on this Thursday night.
I suppose I need to keep going out to the Lilly Pad to grab the at least 7 or 8 bucks that has seemed to have been available there the past couple nights.
I am due for a 30 dollar night, I can feel it in my bones...

What a difference between doing that and making nothing at all. Harold the cat's appetite takes no nights off.

The Seven Dollar Wednesday

I set out around 9:50 PM, thinking that I could ride the yellow bike to the Lilly Pad and be playing my first note at 10:15 or at about the same time I had knocked off the night before, wanting nothing more than to sit somewhere with my eyes closed...

Then, I saw David The Water Jug Player, sitting with his water jug by the Hippie Gypsie store. I decided to stop, in case he had no weed and offer to smoke some of the bud that Bobby had given me on my way out of Sacred Heart.

David beat me to the punch by gushing: "Daniel, do you want to smoke?!?"

I told him that I would be alright waiting until I got to the Lilly Pad, but had only stopped to see if he needed any weed.

There is something that happens to me at the psychological level when I touch bases with David the Water Jug Player.

Part of it is in the broadcasting of the message: "See, he isn't racist, he has at least this one black friend," to the rest of the eyes and ears of the Canal and Royal Streets block. This really seems to cause them to back off from me in the sense of not asking me for some silly amount of money like 4 cents, just to test me, to see where my "heart" is, and if I would indeed confirm their suspicions of me as perhaps hating black people enough that I won't even give them 4 cents.

The other part actually has to do with my religious beliefs, and how it is really like revisiting my roots as a homeless street musician to hang out with him and gain, through osmosis, a refreshed perspective upon the matter of the tourists needing what we do as buskers, to complete their experience of coming to New Orleans, and of us being the closest thing to a religious experience that they might have while here, the Hustler Club notwithstanding...

So, I left David, after accepting his offer of a toke of whatever bud the fates had placed in his pouch, and then having re-stuffed his little pipe with what the same fates had deemed fit for the likes of Bobby in Building C, and passed it back to him, which caused him to say: "Oh, this is good, I can taste it!"
It was better than what he had been "smoking on;" I could taste that..

So, my good deed having been done, I proceeded to the Lilly Pad and was able to be set up and playing by about 10:30. I had fresh, bright batteries in my spotlight overhead.

'Tis The Season...

It was fun, and I made 7 dollars.

I hurried to the Rouses Market before they closed at 1 AM, having played the, typical as of late, one hour and ten minutes to make the seven bucks.

I bought Almond milk to go with the box of cereal I had at home.
Harold the cat seems to want to go back outside right after eating lately. This is trying of my love for it. But, if I leave him inside he will be constantly meowing to be petted and scratched, and even to have his ears cleaned, something he has come to enjoy.

Fueled By Almond Milk

Right now, if I were to drop everything and head for the Lilly Pad, I might pluck my first note by 9 PM. Not bad, starting at that time on a Thursday night where the outside temperatures have cooled into the very comfortable level that my phone describes as "83 in New Orleans."

The Eighty Minute Wall

9 Quick Dollars On A Tuesday Night

Howard's Chinese art, left center...

I still have seven of the nine bucks I made last night.

I also have proven to myself beyond the shadow of a doubt that smoking weed before I start to play is going to ultimately lead me to knock off about an hour and twenty minutes later.


I had gotten there early and the CBD oil that I smoked at Bobby's apartment around 7:30 PM, wore off at -it think it was 10:08 PM when I looked at the time after having run out of gas, in a way that musicians such as Tanya Huang and Dorise Blackman would consider wimpish.


Sure, it was very hot and humid and I had just played pretty hard for a good part of an hour, enjoying every second of it. Until I lost interest, that is. That was at about the time that I might be just starting on a given night, if I had hopes of having a decent Tuesday night, but...

I just wanted to sit and stare at the stars in the sky and be totally in that moment, or close my eyes sitting somewhere (with my guitar and pack tied to part of my body lest the heroin addicts try to tip-toe up and make off with them) and let the only thought in my mind be: "I wonder if Bobby's CBD oil has some kind of opiate in it?"

What had also happened was that I had started to cough, a body-racking type of cough in the middle of trying to sing.

I am not totally over the flu that struck me last week, and am in fact in that dangerous phase when the body feels much, much better, but there is still a lingering cough or the point of fatigue is reached a bit sooner than normal, when working out with weights. It is now that I might negate the cleansing effect of having lay there with a fever for 24 hours, by immediately resuming old habits.


That first night that I felt better, I had gotten up and cleaned the whole apartment, beginning with throwing the sweat dampened clothing I was in in the hamper then taking a hot shower. I then mounted an ammonia attack against the kitchen and the bathroom and the hard wood floors.


Harold the cat had annexed the immediate area of the litter box to do his business, so that even as I lay shivering and sweating, he was actively messing up the apartment.


I completed my cleaning with the rearranging of the furniture. One clue that this might have been the right idea presented itself in the matter that the Chinese work of art, which Howard Westra had given me, fit perfectly over the side of the couch.


Then, I found that, setting the little laptop table at the foot of my couch made me feel like I was more in an office rather than a bedroom, and my productivity was helped.

Create Your Perfect Office

This correlates to the self-help hypnosis tapes that I'm using. One of them involves creating a space in your world of imagination and making it a "classroom," in the example from the genius book, but of imagining having there, everything you need to create your masterpiece.

It isn't surprising then, that I felt the urge to rearrange my furniture and place the laptop table right where all I have to do is sit up, upon waking from a dream for example, and then type away, recording as many details as I can before waking consciousness obliterates the memory.

Also, though, in my world of pure imagination, I would envision myself working non stop on some creative project, staying in my creative environment and working away. This hasn't involved going out to make money, lately, as, true to the promises of the voice on the self help dialogue, "everything you need, will magically come into your life," type of thing.

Everything Will Come To You Unbidden

So, Jacob called on Monday and we spent the afternoon recording tracks at his house, and then on Tuesday, a similar scenario materialized whereby, he invited me to the Uxi Duxi, when I might otherwise have gone and sold my plasma. This left me filled with ideas, rather than drained of vitatality.

I still went out and made the nine dollars in a little over an hour, but then was faced with the reality that, if I want to be extra productive, I need to cut out the tuning up joint that I have fallen into the habit of smoking.

The Genius Who Awakened The Genius In The "Awaken The Genius" Genius

The last time I used a similar book, it was the one called "Unlimited Power," by Tony Robbins. That was in 1990.

One of the exercises in that book, right around chapter three was to take out a pen and piece of paper and to imagine what you would have if you could have anything you wanted, with no limits, as if you were guaranteed success at whatever you endeavored for.

That time, I had been working at a job which paid well, for 1990. The wage was "only" $8.55 per hour, but we were required to work at least sixty hours per week, more, if we could. The company had a backlog of orders and needed to crank the products out as fast we could solder the components onto the printed circuit boards.


It would have been a great opportunity for someone to go hog wild and work ninety hour weeks, while sleeping for free somewhere, stock-piling checks every week equivalent to 130 hours of straight time, for as many months as the demand persisted. Someone like I would become twenty years later..

But, in my case, I had no such great financial vision, though I had determined  that I needed, somehow, more "power."

When sitting for at least 12 hours a day in a room with other people, tethered to your work, conversations flourish.

I soon found out that another guy, a skinny one with long-ish blond hair who was probably in his late thirties, was also into things like juice fasting. I had mentioned out loud that I felt like I needed more "power," and the guy, who's name I forget brought the Unlimited Power book to work the next day and handed it to me..

I had recently found relief, through my new discovery of juice fasting, from a lifetime of consuming foods that gave me eczema, after having done a three day juice fast, followed by three more days of spring water. These foods, I had built up a tolerance of, by being force-fed them my whole life, foods such as the carton of milk that comes on every kid's cafeteria tray along with the partially hydrogenated soybean oil that is ubiquitous.

There was was another guy who worked there whose body was ravaged by eczema. His skin was the reddish color it gets when a person is scratching it all the time. And he was obviously suffering, being 22 years old or so, and having to stop every once in a while to rake at his face or neck, like a chicken looking for grubs.

He was most likely buying into whatever his doctors were telling him about eczema and was probably even taking the antihistamines and applying the lotions, both of which treat the symptoms and not the cause of eczema.

It could also have been that "nerves" had been blamed upon his flare-ups. This determination comes from the fact that the eczema sufferer might draw a correlation between his itching and the normal stresses of daily life.
A lot of people will scratch their head when pondering something vexing, or might "nervously" scratch their nose or something when some troubling thought occurs to them.

It would be easy for doctors to conclude that the person with eczema just has a hyperactive mechanism and is itching like crazy due to stress.

I tried to help the young man as much as I could. He sat by himself, away from the rest of us, probably so he wouldn't bother anybody with his scratching, or with the flakes of skin that would fall like dandruff, from his face, neck, arms, you name it.

I pointed out to him that my skin had once been as bad as his, hoping that would get his attention, and even made him aware if he wasn't already that, in order to get any satisfaction out of scratching -the feeling that you are getting right at the itch- you must tighten the underlying muscles. Leaving the muscles slack and then scratching the skin above would produce no sensation of relief. It is as if the flexed muscles are holding the skin taut and still so that it can be scratched.

I told him about this and also about the fact that, if he were to probe around the area of his neck, he would find nerves that he could press on which would produce a sensation in his toes or arms or wherever else he might itch. Therefore, the irritation is caused at the spot where the nerves enter and leave the spinal column and not in the extremities where the itching is felt. I have always thought it was at the spot where the brain meets the nerves at the back of the head.

But, alas, this poor guy was very much averse to even attempting a 3 day juice fast and cleanse and mucous free diet..

He feared doctors the way some feared priests...poor guy.

There are always people who say that fasting is stupid and that, if nothing else, your body needs its 2,000 calories every day. They would say that you need energy from food in order to help you "fight" the eczema, the chronic eczema. 

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, I thought.

Unlimited Power

For my own part, I did the exercise in chapter 3 and wrote down that, if I could have anything I wanted -the sky's the limit- I would want to be able to stay home and practice on the guitar for 12 hours a day, and get paid for it.

Through a series of events and applying the principles in the book, I had just that situation less than a month later.

That stemmed from my having bought a box of chocolates for a girl who worked at the same place, on Valentine's Day.

She was a Jehovah's Witness, and so, she returned the thing to me, informing me as she did that she didn't "believe in," that holiday and treating me as if I had brought a t-bone steak with mashed potatoes as a gift to someone who's religion worships the cow.

So, I was brought into the office of the president, or whatever, of the company who presented me with a piece of paper which outlined the company's policy on "sexual harassment," and how it referenced the giving of "unwanted" gifts, to go along with other "advances."

The president didn't seem upset and told me that it was a mere formality that he was required to give me the information, along with another more specific text which began something like: "On the morning of February 14th..." and then mentioned the box of chocolates and Melissa, as that was her name, and then the fact that Melissa, as that was her name was of a religious group that spurned the giving of gifts, etc. And, I guess I was affirming with my signature at the bottom, as just a formality, that I would no longer give Melissa gifts on holidays that she didn't believe in, etc.

Well, I had a song that I wrote which was called "Melissa," and which repeated her name three times in the chorus, and so I thought it kind of a neat coincidence when I noticed that the three references to her name on my "disciplinary write-up" fell in kind of a diagonal line on the page, and so I highlighted them with yellow marker, before hanging the "warning" in my cubicle.

I wound up being fired for doing that after another higher-up noticed the thing and commented, "This is the exact thing we're talking about!" and told me that the whole point of the matter was that I had given Melissa unwanted attention in the first place, and that, by hanging the warning about it in my cubicle, and especially by highlighting her name, I was doing more of the same -now everyone in our department was going to know that I had given a box of chocolate to Melissa and that she had refused it.

The labor board did not agree with the action taken by the company, nor that I had been terminated "for cause," and they awarded me an unemployment benefit check which ran for the next half a year, I believe it was.

So, I was then home, practicing on the guitar for 12 hours a day, and getting paid for it, less than a month after having cracked open the Tony Robbins book and filled in the worksheet after imagining what my ideal situation would be.

I put that book down when came the chapter telling me that I would need to refrain from all alcohol, tobacco and pot use before continuing with the program. That was 28 years ago.

I have figured out that pot is holding me back in certain capacities. But, as it is Wednesday night, and I am on my way out to busk up anything possible, I still have some of Bobby's bud. My only hope is to take a break after I feel I don't want to play any more and to maybe drink a whole Rock Star Energy "zero" drink, maybe take another small toke and see if I can break through the eighty minute wall.

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect 200 Dollars

It is incumbent upon me to drop everything and head straight for the Lilly Pad, where darkness should just be falling as I arrive. It is a Tuesday night and it is pretty warm out, but I am absolutely broke.

The monthly fee took the last five bucks off my American Express card, and I have exhausted all other options, having not gone to sell plasma earlier today.

Staying in to work on artistic things has become too stressful from worrying about where the next dollar is going to come from, rather than whatever project I am into.

Immortalized

I wouldn't change much if I were to become chairman of the Olympic committee. I would change the baton used in the mile relay race to a big pair of scissors.

Thank you very much, be sure to tip the barista...

It is a Monday night and Jacob and I had a successful jam over at his house while his guardian, Bob, was away. We played a couple songs the names of which will be withheld because I want to surprise the composers of them with the result.

I saw this somewhere, thought I'd hang it here...

Jacob played the authentic kit of drum pads which when hit imitate the sounds of real drums, real drums in huge auditoriums, and cymbals and high hats that would cost a couple thousand bucks if purchased for their reality.

It is a very cool sounding contraption, excuse the pun.

The idea has always baffled me that the drum kit would be in almost every song heard on the radio and that the sound of a snare drum, for example would not become unpleasing to the ear. If someone were banging on a snare drum alone around a person all day that person might get tired of hearing it; but in the context of a musical band settings, it's possible to listen to a snare drum being hit all day and not get sick of it.
Same for the "thud" of a bass drum...

I played the acoustic guitar into a microphone set a few inches in front of it and sang from a few inches in front of another, and presto, a sound comparable to an average band using average equipment. 

Sunday Not Spent With Howard Westra Watching Football

The Uxi Duxi at 9 PM, Sunday, September 16...
I have been avoiding busking lately.

This should be a concern to myself, perhaps, since 94% of my income comes from it.

Lately, though, I have had the flu which was cleansing enough so that I now have a very clean apartment. And I have pretty good food at home and am not craving cigarettes to the point of going out to busk with tobacco in mind.

Plus, the other things I am doing, like drawing and doing the self hypnosis, self-help things have got me to where I can be pretty happy staying in, and knowing that, when I do go out to play it will be because I feel inspired to do so.

Still, though, I'm going to have to make a schedule for myself in order to insure that I play, say fifteen hours a week, minimum.

Tomorrow, I'm supposed to go over to Jacob's house where we will jam on some music. His guardian, Bob, will be doing his Christian radio show in the afternoon, leaving the house unguarded.

I'm trying to feel not guilty at all when I don't go out to busk. Like right now.

Everyone wants the guy to be feeling like doing it, is my theory behind that.

I will make my decision as I approach the apartment on my bike, whether or not to drop off this laptop, grab the guitar and harmonicas and then keep going, out on a Sunday night.

September in the past couple years has sucked as far as busking income, a quick check of my records indicates.

In fact a year ago I had taken in Travis Blaine as a renter, the one that paid part of his rent in sugar packets with the McDonalds logo on them.

Stop The Meowing

A Brisk Afternoon Busk

I came back from the Lilly Pad after I had made kratom money and had determined that playing in the ninety degree heat really does make it laborious. I am prone to breaking out in a sweat when I play at any level of intensity, and have had tourists comment "How can you stand it in just a tee shirt, aren't you cold?" when it had been about 55 degrees and I had been playing hard.

I walked up around 4 PM, and was greeted with the sight of Lilly, who was talking to an older black man who was standing on the sidewalk. Lilly was behind the gate.

As I approached her to ask her if she had gotten my text telling her I would be there in ten minutes, and that she surely must be swimming (without me) "in this kind of heat."

The answer to that question came in the fact that Lilly was indeed wearing her bathing suit, and her oldest daughter, Chantilly soon emerged wearing a bikini.
That was quite a stirring sight.

I had only ever seen Chantilly wearing formal types of dresses of the kind that were fit for her jobs at five star restaurants as a greeter, and such.

She had a comfortable amount of fat covering her pretty much uniformly, but the effect was one of incredible robustness.

I think, having memories of Lilly yelling "She's only sixteen, you pervert!" at anyone in a passing car, seven years ago, who might have said something as he drove past, has made an impression upon me at the subconscious level. Chantilly is 23 now, and in college, and so I guess we have grown out of our perversions, still, it was awkward, trying not to gawk. Her bikini seemed to show more flesh on her than it might on any other girl. Probably because of the formal dress thing. It make her seem like a Miss Universe pageant contestant.

Back In the day when the Grateful Dead were politically meaningful.

24 Hour Slumber Shaking Off Flu

I slept from approximately 11:30 PM. Wednesday, the 12th of September until just about that same time, but 24 hours later. I had had a return of what felt like a flu, I fell asleep and then fell into a fevered state in which I started to dream that there was something that I had to do to the recording that I had made before I went to sleep.

The truth was that there certainly was a simple thing to be done to the recording which could be done with 3 clicks, but in my tormented state where I was wearing my heavy "I'm a tourist, and yeah, I brought a little dough" New Orleans sweatshirt, because I guess I felt cold. The air conditioner had been fixed by the maintenance guy to the point that I had to continue to repair it by getting up and flipping the switch to "off" when it was getting a little chilly, and then, well you know the "Broken Thermometer Blues..."

But, I eventually got up and flipped the switch to off, at such a point that I was getting a little chilly, even in my "mug me," and then, over the course of a few hours, I believe my fever climbed, as perhaps the inside temperature keeping pace because it was in the high eighties by noon, and by the time that I had lay there 12 full hours and was in quite a delirious state but, yet, I connected it somehow to the "self help dialogue" hypnosis tapes which have perhaps programmed me at the "other than conscious" level to cleanse and purge myself, which laying there for 24 full hours, having plenty of nourishing apple juice but having run out of cigarettes and everything else except apple juice, I finally emerged an emaciated man, this Friday morning quite early.

I was in fact able to catch an incredible deal on a Boston Butt Pork Roast, paying 4 dollars for what had originally been priced at 25 dollars, but which was available -with the Winn Dixie Rewardsᶜ card- but then had been stuck with a bright yellow $6 off stickers. There were a lot of items bearing bright yellow stickers on that bright yellow morning. So many more than I had ever even come close to seeing when I had usually gone in there, at say 11 PM...

25 Dollar Acquisition of Butt  

About The Grateful Dead
They were lucky, the Grateful Dead, in that they had months and arguably even years to perfect their musical entity and yet non-entity, the "space jam" before the audience before them were not mostly on acid, and this they accomplished probably in the nick of time, expedited by the drug related departures of certain members and having shaken off the habit of acid to, in some cases replace it other things.

But, I guess my fondest moment as a deadhead was when, and I only saw this on a handheld video recording; one that had gone 1985-style viral, btw.

It was of the crowd at the Civic Center going as wild as if a hockey player had just scored a goal, right in the middle of a song.

And the reason was because Jerry Garcia moved.

He rocked back and forth and side to side a couple times, just while playing a little rhythm guitar riff in kind of a Chuck Berry era rock song.

He rocked back and forth, did Jerry Garcia, and it was something new, something the crowd of eighteen thousand had never seen before.

The opened up backs of VW buses in the parking lot across from the Civic Center soon abounded with tee shirts that memorialized the occasion using "Jerry Rocks" in large bold print, superimposed over a still shot taken during the rocking, and to make that point more believable at the point where he is most bent over out of his every-night-since-the-band-started-playing-40-years-ago posture and stance. And, of course the date that Jerry rocked upon.

For just a second it was like he decided to play air guitar and guitar at the same time...

But, perfect it, "the space jam," they did; to a level of consistent ambiguity so that any note they play next becomes no more objectionable nor less pleasant than any other; and then somehow make a song out of it by giving it some meaning by becoming recognizable as one of their songs, probably with lyrics by Robert Hunter, which could be taken for their poetic value in lieu of any musical content at all.

And makes sense; thanks mostly to the classically inspired melodic shapes of Phil Lesh on the bass.

He once said that, before a song starts he composes a melody, kind of frames it in his mind and then plays that melody. So this would imply that his part is static and that the rest of the band would have to pick up upon it and support it; but since the rest of the band don't know where the melody is going then they really can't do that.

But they can conclude that wherever Phil was going, they probably wanted to go, too, and lead by Jerry, they could.

And the band was mind expanding the way any band with six guys in it can be.

When Brent Midland was doing really cool things on the keyboard it was usually as a background to Jerry and Bob Weir doing something really cool, and not to mention their two drummers being strange in a sense when they are playing the exact same thing, it comes across as one loud drum set, but when they broke into contrapuntal stuff, it would soften such into where such busier stuff does well, but, for another thing, the Dead had engineers and technicians who understood that music amplified to be good and loud is only the former when it has not been amplified past the point of distortion, or to the point of being too loud.

And the neighbors complain about my friend Bobby's 33 watt Fender amp?!?

The result was that the band sounded good in the first place, as in having good sound; and it was always just loud enough.

The overall jibe at the concert was everyone was pulling for the music to be good and the deadheads thought that if Jerry and the boys could for some reason be feeling as good as they are suggesting with the music, then anybody, including themselves had no excuse not to.

But, maybe having the band as a litmus test of "does acid help your music in the long run?" is one of their greater worth's. 
   

Cosmic And Funny

"Popper is the singer, pretty sure he writes most of the material as well. I get the impression Blues Travelers audience is not dis-similar to Deadheads" -Craig Nelson, blog reader.

Where do blog babies come from?

I was just trying to recall, last night, a conversation that I had had with someone shortly after Jerry Garcia was pronounced dead.
It ran around the theme of "what are the deadheads going to do now; where are they going to go in their VW buses covered in decals now?"
And this person mentioned a few band names that were being tossed around as possible replacements for Jerry and the boys. Each one was delivered with a derisive shake of his head...

"Some people are saying The Dave Matthews Band..." (shake of the head) "Neh"...or Phish (looking at the ground and shaking head), or maybe Blues Traveler (shake, shake).

I had a feeling that the dead would eventually replace Jerry and go on, but it would only happen after enough time had passed to remove the appearance that the guy was being replaced.

The deadheads were very much into the autobiographical aspect of the band, which actually was busted down on Bourbon Street (set up like a bowling pin, as a matter of fact) and had ridden on "the bus to never-ever land" with Cowboy Neil at the wheel. And it was a good thing that they had gotten on before the bus stop exploded and left a smoking crater on Bob Weir's mind, but I don't want to spoil that story. The fact is, though, the deadheads appreciated the fact that the dead were singing about things that they actually hallucinated, nothing phony or made up, there. They took their songs from genuine illusions.

The Dave Matthews Band did enough improvising and stretched their songs out, ala Phish, enough to potentially interest deadheads. But, there is an almost fatal flaw in the lack of originality which the name "The Dave Matthews Band" could be seen as a harbinger of. "Hey, I thought of a great name for our band!" type of thing.

I don't think fans of bands such as "Moby Grape" or "The New Riders of the Purple Sage" were ready to wrap their minds around that name. Especially when the landscape abounded in dead clone bands like "Lobsters From Mars," "Further" and "Glass Camels."

Plus it implies that Dave is "the leader" and the others are his band, like what happened when Ziggy "became a special man, then we were Ziggy's band," in the David Bowie classic "Ziggy Stardust." The dead were all about "the music plays the band," and Jerry once said that people think he is the lead guitarist because his guitar is the loudest, "but, actually I'm following everybody else."

The Blues Traveler idea made me smile, wondering if anyone actually thought the deadheads might be looking for another heavy musician to follow around, maybe so, on a hit of acid, they could pretend he was their departed hero.

Just, to underscore the cosmic connection to things, the first time I heard Blues Traveler, without seeing them, the song ("Run Around") reminded me of something a friend of mine, who was overweight and vexed about that, would write.

The way Popper facetiously sang the line "Hey baby, let's stay in touch!" in that song was right up my friend Bill's alley, who had a very cynical view of relationships as seen through the eyes of a fat kid, who may have been told that by girls, as they walked away at a brisk pace.

So, it didn't surprise me to see how fat Popper wound up being.

And, the fact that my friend Ben Jernigan is a huge deadhead and wound up playing on the album of a guy whose name had come up in a conversation about replacing Jerry Garcia, kind of brings things full circle.

Where do I fit in? I'm still working that out...

If I went to see the remainder of the Grateful Dead, rather than Phish, it would be because of the playing of Phil Lesh, the bassist. "Phish" is kind of a portmanteau of his name, too, which is also cosmic and funny.

The Most Boring Post To Date, Mostly About Sausages

A night off, for ammonia therapy...

I did leave the Uxi Duxi and then ride to the CVS in the quarter, where I put twenty bucks on the American Express card, but not before hitting the Rouses Market, looking for a deal on some kind of meat.

I am tiptoeing around the keto diet, and wound up buying some "hot" sausage. I had mustard in my fridge, after all.

But I violated the keto diet when I grabbed some whole wheat pita bread to go with the hot, greasy sausage and mustard. I did stuff some steamed broccoli in them.

I wound up having a hard time falling asleep because my mind was racing trying to remember the acronym for PETA. I knew the "ethical treatment of animals" part but couldn't remember if it is "people for the..." or what.

The point is that the diet wasn't working if I was up thinking about that, instead of dozing off. It wasn't important, and I could just Google it in the morning. It reminded me of how, if I start to look for something in the apartment and can't find it, I will put everything on hold and keep looking for it, perhaps making me an hour late for where I was headed. I could always tear the place apart the next day looking for it, but find that it has become an obsession. It cold be my invisible tape, or my scissors or anything else that isn't necessary at that particular moment. Like what PETA stands for.

Perhaps the addition of the pita bread was responsible for that.

I had gotten back to the apartment and felt like cleaning.

After throwing a load of laundry with ammonia in, I hit the hard wood floors with a mixture of vinegar, baking soda and ammonia.

And, that is where this most-boring-post-in-the-history-of-this-blog ends...

I thought about how some people might not get enough nitrogen and hydrogen from the air they breath and how ammonia vapors might be their key to health, but the medical community just hasn't discovered that yet. They were late in determining the benefits of fiber and shark cartiledge.

30 Dollar Saturday Follows 35 Dollar Friday

It was good

to have been able to go out and make thirty bucks last night, the night after the one where I made thirty-five, but with twenty of that coming from one guy, Ben Jernigan, whom I haven't seen in years.

I need to do some Googling, but I believe Ben, who said that he has played with Willie Nelson, and who played my guitar once in Mobile when he and his friend, Lee Rumbley stopped by when I was busking and who played at a very high, Willie Nelson level of proficiency, is playing with the former bassist of the Grateful Dead now..

Ok, I Googled, and right now Ben has just finished recording in Mobile with none other than John Popper, otherwise known as "The Fat Guy Who Plays/Played With Blues Traveller." Just another coincidence, as Alex in California referenced the guy in a comment a couple days ago, and then the guy's guitarist walks up to the Lilly Pad the next night....*twilight zone theme*

Without his stopping by, it would have been a minimum wage outing.

I've played with some good musicians, myself...

Right now it is Sunday night.

I never did make it to the casino for noon to try to watch the Patriots game on one of their TV's.

I had been up until almost then, working on music.

Last night, I was able to give Bobby some cash, reversing the flow of money from borrowing from him to paying him back.

Still, out of thirty five bucks, I gave him seven. I know better than to look at a thirty five dollar night as anything more than two days worth of "expenses" covered.

But, he gave me a little bit of bud, as a reward for having paid him back seven bucks.

I worked on my original songs at the Lilly Pad, finding that they are getting "even" better, as I play them.

I find myself removing some of the limits that I might have placed upon myself, perhaps because of the self hypnosis that I did using the "Awaken The Genius" book.

I have, ever since high school when I ran track, been "dogging it" in a sense.

In high school track, I was always aware that a human being, if his life depended upon it, like if he's being chased by a bear, could run himself to death.

I think the legend is that the first guy who ever ran a "marathon" dropped dead at the end of it. His heart exploded, or something. Sure, and Zeus lived at the top of Mt. Olympus.

But, I always knew, when I ran the half mile that, I could try harder, give it my all, run as if my life depended upon it, and maybe collapse at the finish line and have to be revived with smelling salts; mmm, smelling salts...ammonia, mmm...

So, thus, when I've played music, I have labored under the same fear that, maybe if I tried to play a melody on the harmonica and on the guitar at the same time, my brain might explode, or something, and I have always been holding back a little bit.

The thing I need to do is to keep with the self hypnosis program and not quit doing it because I have seen remarkable results after one application. I think it is like antibiotics, I need to keep taking them until the whole bottle is gone and not stop after a couple days because I feel much better, type of thing...don't want the genius to doze off again...

There was no sign that my new friend, Caleb, had been at the Lilly Pad earlier that evening, that sign would have been maybe a few pennies laying on the sidewalk, next to an empty bottle of Mountain Dew, and maybe a broken guitar string.

The thirty bucks consisted of only two five dollar bills, and the rest ones, which is a good sign -having about twenty whole people throwing something.

At one point, some young black kids came along, and I could read in their deportment that they had thin hopes that I was going to be their cup of tea, but was able to get them to stop, by singing "We are humans; we are here," sung to the tune of one of my older originals, "The Cranium Song," from 1987.

I wound up giving one of them a beat, over which he rapped, but seemed to not be really feeling it. But, I stopped and asked him what one of the lines was that he had rapped, which seemed to change the dynamics of the situation -I had actually been listening to him- at which point he told me the lyric, and I tried it out myself, changing to a funky thing in E major and rapping the line over it then trying to rhyme the next one.

This perked him up and he said, "No, it's..." and then rapped more over the funkier beat and Youtube gained another video for its "rapping in the street" catalogue, and one of the five dollar bills that I made went into my basket.

Tonight, I might have to play catch up, in the sense of my leaving here (The Uxi Duxi) soon -It's almost 11 PM now- and then skipping busking in favor of going to the CVS to put twenty bucks on my green American Express ServeꜤ card, picking up toilet paper while there, then going back to the apartment to feed Harold the cat his first instance of his favorite dry food since before the great depression of August, when I became almost drained dry of my blood plasma.

I would then be able to get quarters out of the machine and throw a load of laundry in at Sacred Heart, adding ammonia, of course.

Don't ask...

Then, having money on my card, I might seriously explore the world of cheap harmonicas, seeing if the seven dollar "Iron Works" one might be indistinguishable from the eighteen dollar Suzuki "Folkmaster" ones that I have been relying upon when I haven't had the thirty bucks to plunk down on a Suzuki "Harpmaster."

Maybe a ten dollar harp, which could be a brand spanking new one every couple weeks would serve me better than the thirty dollar ones that sound amazing the first night, but which I am still playing after they are 4 months old.

I think it's about time I "wake up and smell the ammonia..."

 

Sleep All Day, Rock All Night...

"...the Law come and get you if you don't walk right.." -Jerry Garcia, from "Tennessee Jed," by The Grateful Dead
35 Dollar Friday
Caleb The Almost Amish Guy

Last night, I didn't start until about a quarter til midnight, and made the above amount, but twenty of it came from an old friend whom I haven't seen in about 8 years, Ben Jernigan from Mobile, Alabama.
Ben is jamming with some pretty heavyweight musicians, now, like Phil Lesh, formerly of The Grateful Dead.
We are Facebook friends, and I have seen, over the past years, stuff that he has put up, such as him jamming with Phil and Friends.
Caleb
Then, I encountered a small bearded young man who was carrying a guitar and said that he had just arrived in the French Quarter for the first time in his life about an hour before then.
He had set up on Bourbon Street, towards the crazy end and had been promptly dispatched by the police, and informed about the 8 PM "curfew" on street performing.
He was basically asking me "How does this work?"
I told him that we are supposed (holding my fingers up to make quotation marks) to be playing on Royal Street.
I was reminded how lucky I am that Lilly took the time to consult the Quality of Life committee, and had held a neighborhood meeting and had talked to the cops, all on my behalf.
Caleb, as that is his name, said that he had tried Royal Street and found it to be "pretty dead."
I told him that there are different kinds of "dead" and that the few tourists he did see on Royal were on their way to 3 hundred dollar per night lodgings, and that I knew people who made money off them between midnight and 4 AM.

After I told him where I played, he said something like "So, the nine hundred block is..." as if he was considering going there himself.
Initially this made me defensive, and I began to explain how it was kind of "my" spot and about Lilly and...everything.

But, not before posting up a few random pics out of my folder of them...

Then, it dawned upon me to flip the script and I actually told him about the Lilly Pad and told him that I would contact Lilly and tell her that I had met a guy (him) who turned out to be a nice guy, and that I told him that he could play at the spot, but just turn it over to me if and when I ever show up.

Caleb was all for this, and, within an hour of arriving in New Orleans had himself a spot that took me 2 years to secure.

It was a win-win situation.

Then I got home and worked on music for 12 hours, slept, discovered that my new food card had arrived in the mail, six days into the "seven to ten" days promised, and so, now it is once again time to fold up this laptop and go out and busk...

Time To Go

Right now on Bourbon Street. "Where's Daniel?!?"

HUH?!?

The genius book has these little self help "dialogues," which are intended to induce a hypnotic trance in the reader

and to give him the positive "suggestions" which are the bread and butter of hypnosis.

But, in an unusual twist, the guy suggests that the reader record his own voice reading the dialogues which he would then play back to himself, thereby taking the concept of self hypnosis to a more literal level.

So, there I was with the book and my recording gear already set up in front of me.

All I had to do was to record all the "take a deep breath...and, as you exhale, feel all the tension leaving your body..." type of stuff, and then put my headphones on, get into a comfortable position, and play it back.

The author has found that people respond to the sound of their own voice. I guess they trust it.

This makes sense because the last time I ever tried using a self help, hypnotizing recording, it was way back in the days of cassettes, and I remember that I was never able to go into a trance.

Part of that was because my mind was actively thinking about the voice on the tape, wondering what the guy looked like and about his choice of words, etc. And he emitted what sounded like a tiny suppressed burp at one point, and, instead of being in a trance, absorbing his every word but not consciously hearing them, I was fully conscious and thinking things like "Here comes the spot where the guy burps" and was never able to "go under."

The use of a person's own voice seems to be a stroke of, well, genius, and something that I had never thought of, myself.

I certainly felt kind of silly and self conscious, as I started to record.

I couldn't get through it without cracking up, laughing, unable to resist the temptation to ad lib stuff, like  yelling "Huh?!?" for example, after a question which went something like, "Wouldn't it be amazing if you could summon this resource at will in the future..(HUH?!?)"

I recorded the dialogue and then used Audacity's noise reduction effect to remove the sound of my air conditioner, which gave me a chance to experiment with that effect in a non musical context where I didn't have to worry about it making a guitar sound like it was under water, and I learned how to use it more effectively.

I then compressed the signal, finding the point just short of where it would make the "p's" pop, something that I can also apply to my musical recordings.

Right now, a couple blocks from the Lilly Pad

Then, I figured, why not add a heaping dose of "cathedral" reverberation to make it sound like I was trying to hypnotize myself in a huge cathedral, which I did find to be more trance inducing.

Still, I haven't been able to totally go under, and when my voice instructs me to slowly "return to the room," at the end of the dialogue, I have already been in the room each time. So far, anyways.

Maybe this is the missing piece of the puzzle for me, the ability to be able to use self hypnosis. In the past, I have never been able to go into a trance because, besides wondering what the guy on the tape is burping up, I have witnessed "professional" hypnotists who had groups of people, at the snap of his finger, walking around believing that they were chickens, flapping their arms and making clucking noises. Then, when the guy snaps his fingers again they returned to their normal selves and couldn't remember being chickens. This was way too freaky for me.

How do I know if I'm really a busker in New Orleans now, or if some guy just hasn't snapped his fingers to bring me out of it yet?

It is Thursday night, and the tropical storm has missed us.

I have a new set of strings to go on the Takamine, and a fresh set of batteries for my spotlight. My only reason for not feeling happy and confident as I ponder heading for the Lilly Pad for a night of busking would be that one or two of my harmonicas have developed a slightly flat note or two.

It won't hurt to go out and at least try. I wish I could summon those resources by imagining myself sitting in a circle of light, like I was talking about on the recording.