Right Off The Bat

Six Dollars On A Cold Monday Night
Response To Comments

So, if a guy sings near you, you're going to dazzle him with a flashlight while literally blinding them with pepper spray, and then hit them on the head, taking the risk of killing the guy, with a length of rebar?

Somehow this site has morphed from "being a busker in New Orleans" to "being on a par with the lowest criminals and losers in New Orleans" -Alex in California, blog reader

The teachings of spiritual masters are almost all in agreement over one of the "mysteries" of faith, which is that, to think of a deed is the same as doing it; just as bad as doing it if the deed is bad, even to the point where "to look upon a woman with lust" is akin to committing adultery.

So, I suppose I should not have even blogged about "fighting off" a skeezer using violent means. This would cause the drama to play out in the minds of my readers so that they would be envisioning the violence and that would probably make them complicit in it, maybe even poison their thoughts, and make them go out and look upon a woman with lust et alia.

I suppose by blogging about the whole scene I had derived some satisfaction, as if I had revenged myself upon the skeezer just through the thought, like Jesus would say I did.

The Bigger Issue

The larger matter, dealing with the bigger issue of myself trying to live a more meaningful life, has to do with how the skeezer sent in his well dressed buddy, who had probably spent whatever cash he had brought from Spain or wherever, on booze and weed and coke, for himself and the skeezer, probably after having been found by the skeezer to be vulnerable in this regard, and being guided by the skeezer to where such is sold. And how, after the well dressed guy with the heavy accent caught a good buzz and then saw me busking and was drawn to the guitar, what I imagined transpired then.

Which was that the crusty skeezer "sent in" the guy in the dinner jacket and nice slacks and shoes to fool me into thinking that I had a potential tipper by my side.

The larger issue, as a busker, would be that I should be trying to play my best regardless of, or despite, the appearance of whomever is in front of me. And to have given him the respect that I initially did and to notice in myself that I actually reserve that for people who look like they might have money, and that, had it been the crusty skeezer who sat down first, I probably would not have tried to play my best, but would have taken a "I hope you don't plan on sitting there for long" approach to him, right off the bat.

So, maybe I felt outwitted by the skeezer and resented his having correctly guessed that I would play my ass off for his new buddy just because he is well dressed. ...that's hilarious, the guy is picking drinks out of the trash with me and Daniel is playing his ass off for him! type of thing.

I imagine the well dressed guy to be of the Spanish "nobility" of the type that look down their noses at "businessmen" as being beneath them, as, to work is not noble. And, some of these nobles can be pretty much flat broke in life, but can maybe get their breakfast free at any cafe in town because of their last name.

And, I saw in him some of the spirit of my ex step son, Michael, whose mother was wealthy enough so that Michael would never have to work, which he didn't.
But one scene kind of illustrates Michael in action.
There was a group of about five people in a circle and a blunt had been lit, by me, actually.
When I went to pass it to the person next to me in the circle, counterclockwise, even, in keeping with an unwritten rule of the "counter" culture, of which pot smokers traditionally were, there was Michael's hand, reaching for the blunt like he wanted it next. Besides me, the other people in the circle were friends and family members of Michael's each of which he may have deemed himself above in station, due only to having been born of a woman whose family had more money than the one's they had been born into, and he may have thought it would be out of order if they smoked off the blunt before him.


But, having been his step father for almost a year at that point, I knew that his behavior was sprung from the fact that he didn't even want to wait the twenty seconds he might have to before the blunt came around to him. Plus, he was determined to get as much as he wanted off of it, so if it was passed to him second, he would have the most available to him, and should it require the remainder of the thing to satisfy him then the rest would be out of luck, but, what could they do about it, his last name was Asriev?

And, so I saw a bit of this spirit in the guy, who reached his hand out for my guitar, with the fingers splayed in a very Michael-ish way, and saw the same petulance in his attitude towards me which made me feel as if I was an impediment in the way of him playing a guitar. Even though the guy playing it was working with it, trying to make money, and even though well dressed guy never once displayed any of that, himself.

Then, to the exercise of me trying to deal with perhaps unresolved issues from the past was added the matter of the skeezer expounding the "Rainbow Gathering" philosophy of: When someone asks you if they can play your guitar, you should let them.

He said this in almost a Mr. Rogers (Neighborhood) tone of voice. "It's nice to share what we have with others..." type of thing. This is the guy who would steal one of my hats later, by the way.

I blogged about an episode I had maybe 4 years ago when I was sitting in the Neutral Ground, having bought some weed off of a thirty something year old guy, whom I had struck up a bit of a friendship with through talking to and who I was about to smoke with.
He wanted to check out my guitar and was playing it as I was packing a bowl of weed, which is probably one of the things that attracted a younger guy to come sit by us, uninvited.
He looked towards a corner where there were people gathered and then gushed: "Let me have the guitar. I want to make some money!"
My older friend, having been raised in a different age perhaps, knew that it wasn't "the" guitar, owned by nobody and everybody, but that it was mine.
After I had refused to let him have "the guitar" he became angry, telling me that he had owned much better guitars than mine would ever be, and that he would at that very moment have a much better guitar, but that his had fallen off a train and broken. He said that he "so wanted to burn" me, at one point.
That was a familiar irony to me.
This group called The Rainbow People gather each year to be as beacon of light to the world and to live in harmony and peace and love and, most importantly to those like pyro-man, to share everything. If I've got it; you've got it! type of thing...
Let me play the guitar! Sure, here's the guitar. When you're done, just hand the guitar off to anyone else who wants to play it. We think everyone's music is beautiful and should be heard!
This group, which the skeezer reminded me of are called "drainbows," by the Rainbow people. They go to the peace and love occasion looking to eat drink and be merry for free, while contributing next to nothing.

So, unresolved issue number two reared it's head and I realized that I had gotten "two for the price of one" out of the guys. The Guy Who Wants To Play Your Guitar hanging out with The Drainbow. What a golden opportunity for me to apply my newly acquired skills in living in the present moment and seeing conflicts dissolve away or never materialize in the first place. Peace, love and sharing.

It already seems ridiculous to have contemplated attacking him with rebar, although, I will say that the last time I had to fend off a guy, who was twice my size but stumbling drunk, I blogged about maybe 2 years ago.

He had grabbed the neck of my guitar and tried to wrench it from me, and then had punched me in the side of the face when I resisted his efforts.
He never bothered me again, even though he walked by on a couple subsequent occasions. I had landed a punch to his face and was trying my best to knock him out, since it had taken a relatively long time for the first punch to register as astonishment on his face. I just wanted to put him down to keep him away from the guitar.

Had he managed to smash the thing on the sidewalk, I was pretty sure I was going to attack him with it, using the baseball bat like neck.
It is easy to think of a guitar as being as flimsy and light as the body of it is, with its ultra-thin wood which will smash to pieces on a sidewalk in a way that might lead you to believe that you couldn't really hurt someone by hitting them with one -it would just be like a pie in the face or being hit with balsa wood- and so it probably would have been easy to take him by surprise and break his nose with the fret board.

But, that was about a year ago at least, after I had been off of drinking alcohol for a long time, after I had been on kratom for maybe half as long, and before I started practicing the techniques presented in the Eckhart Tolle books, or the "Awaken The Genius Within" one.

It is truly possible that, were I living in the present moment, and not being hampered by thoughts stemming from "the ego" I might have been able to befriend both of them, rather than just having left. But, who even knows if a skeezer has the capacity to show friendship.
They were gone ten minutes later when I rode past after dropping my milk crate off, but there was another group of young black kids that seemed to be rapping. It's possible that the skeezer told them that they should rap there. The Hector look alike surely got bored after the guitar was nowhere in sight, but if the skeezer was by himself he might have sat there longer.