Permission From Lilly

• Afternoon Rights To Lilly Pad Given To Guy From Paris
• 19 Dollar Wednesday Afternoon

I highly doubt that the FM radio has, hidden within its signal, subliminal data designed to hypnotize, then program, an individual who falls asleep with the radio on, but...

I am, however, going to stop sleeping with the radio on.

I have heard both sides of the argument; some people say that you continue to learn while you sleep and you might wake up ready to excel on Jeopardy if you put NPR on the radio before drifting off.

And then there are those like myself who believe that we are probably listening for sounds like a twig snapping in the nearby woods that was stepped on by a tiger while we sleep, and that we have a way of accounting for other benign sounds like the constant gurgle of a nearby stream going over a waterfall, and ignoring them while we are on the alert for unfamiliar sounds.

I guess the idea is that the radio will become a familiar sound, even though there is a constantly changing variety of sounds coming out of it, with the commercials being engineered to get someone's attention, and that the radio will block out the quieter sounds that might interrupt sleep, since they sound more like a tiger stepping on a twig.

No more radio while I sleep..

Thinking About My Age A Lot

I wind up thinking about my age and identifying with it the same way, I suppose, that I accuse the older black guys around here of doing the same thing about their race.
He walks around thinking: "Yeah, I'm black, that's right." and sees the world through that lens. Every way he is treated is just an example of how people are going to treat a black man. He goes into the store not to buy a beer, but rather to see if they'll sell a black man a beer, type of thing.

But, I am walking along thinking: “Wow, I’m fifty six years old...” while he walks around thinking “Here comes a black man, down your street!”

I catch myself doing that.

One of the inescapable things about aging is that, to some degree, you start to see life as being similar to watching a movie, in the sense that you can kind of tell when the movie is getting near the end.
Certainly, after the dog comes home and the family is once again happily reunited, then you know there is probably only one more scene coming before the credits start to roll.
And, you can also check your watch to see if the average movie length of 111 minutes, or whatever it is, has just about elapsed.

But, it's hard not to do the same thing given the statistics about the average life expectancy of humans.

"This should be almost over," someone might say after looking at their watch in the theater.
As a 56 year old, there is that same kind of cloud that hangs over me.

I think about age too much, I think. Let's see if a 56 year old can get a can of cat food...


What bugs me is this: Aren't we humans advancing technologically at an exponential rate and isn't it almost a given that, at some point in the future, we will be able to dig up the bones of our ancestors and clone them back into life?

And the family can be happily reunited?

If this is the case, then some of the dead bones buried in cemeteries now might belong to people who are going to be alive in the future, having been cloned by people who aren't born yet. It's something to think about.

So, does the fact that I am stuck on this planet mean that nobody is going to clone me at any point in the future, perhaps using the patterns of my vocals from Youtube videos thousands of years old? Because if the are going to, then wouldn't I be alive way in the future right now?

Maybe I am alive in the future but only have access to all the memories from this life I lived before my bones were dug up and myself cloned. So, the only way I can experience life is by reliving the memories from this life. And this is indistinguishable from living them.

Maybe this is why we should be fruitful and multiply. Perhaps it is through our descendants that our best chance of being cloned back into life lies. They are the ones who might buy a package from the lab where that kind of thing is done, in order to clone their whole family tree back to life for one low cost.

Us unmarried and childless loners must create some kind of work of art that will distinguish us that someone in the future might see and deem us worthy of being cloned back into life.
  
Santo At The Lilly Pad

Lilly had texted me maybe a year ago asking me why I never played in the afternoons.

I thought this might have been because she had gone back to sitting on the stoop where I play, sipping wine and become loquacious with the tourists that walked past.

This is something that used to happen about 4 years ago when I would play in the afternoons.

I would play in the afternoons because I would have woken up under the wharf in my sleeping bag in the late morning, probably when the angle of the rising sun was such that its reflection off the Mississippi River would be blinding.

The motion of the water and the tiny waves in the river would put the reflection of the sun in motion so that it would turn the wall that held up the wharf into a dazzling light show in which could be seen stuff to rival any shadows on any walls that might ever have been seen by any cave dwellers.

I probably would drift back to sleep, but then be up having an energy drink shortly before the Natchez steam boat would leave at eight minutes past one; this would be punctuated with a blast from the steam horn, which was as good as any alarm clock at a distance of 100 feet.

And, so, being a drinker then, I would have waited for the boat to leave and for all the people who had remained in the area to wave goodbye to people who were sailing off and, of course, to get pictures of the boat in action as it pulled away, to go with the photos of “Uncle Louie,” a wharf fixture.

A fixture at the wharf

This routine routinely placed me in the area of the Lilly Pad in the early afternoons, with myself probably working on my second 24 ounce can of “the strongest” malt liquor available at the lowest price, based upon a percentage of alcohol vs. dollar analysis that I would have done.

And so, sure, when Lilly would come out and sit near me as I played, her glass of wine in hand, and it being the middle of a typical week on just a normal summer day with the only reason there was something going on, being that there is always something going on in the French Quarter, these became special times, when I flirted with Lilly and we bonded and she told me that I could play on her stoop to the exclusion of any other musician.


But, with my moving in to Sacred Heart Apartments, those days of sitting with Lilly in the afternoons became numbered.

But, yesterday, I was in the mood to play in the afternoon. I was broke, and my sleeping schedule had been inverted and I had woken up well rested around noon.

Something told me to text Lilly that I was in the mood to play in the afternoon and was headed her way.

This text would have reached her right before she came out and told Santo, a horn player from Paris, that he could have sole rights to the Lilly Pad in the afternoons.

He has been playing there in the afternoons for a while, I found out.

This is good for him.

It does take playing there in the afternoons off the table for me though, even though it has been something like 3 years since I last went there at that time to play.

What happened was that I arrived there and encountered Santo, who was there with his horn and a lady friend, whom I didn’t see with any instrument.

I explained to him how the block was residential and that, technically, busking is illegal there without the busker having obtained permission from basically every resident on the block, and that I had gotten such permission from Lilly, etc.

Santo, who is kind of a small guy, and his lady friend, who was even smaller, said that they just wanted peace and love for everybody in the world, but that Lilly had just come out and told them “the same thing” as what I had said; that they then had exclusive rights to the spot, because Lilly liked their music and that they even had the right to run other musicians off.

I called Lilly and got her voice mail, then sent her a text telling her that there was a horn player from Paris at the spot and that I had told him what I had.

At this point, Santo and his friend left voluntarily, but not before he protested that things didn't work like that in Paris.

I went to get a milk crate.

When I got back, Santo and the lady were gone, and Lilly was standing on the sidewalk.

“No, Daniel!” she said.

“I told them they could play, you’re never here in the afternoon!”

So, Lilly had indeed given them the spot in the afternoons, something she might have hesitated to do had I texted her that I was on my way.

“You can play at night,” Lilly said then asked where they were.
They had disappeared.
She was going to tell them to go ahead and play and tell me to come back at night.

Now I owe the guy an apology.

The guy has been playing there a while, long enough to probably have shared wine with Lilly and to have found a soft spot in her heart, sharing accounts of his life of being a busker from Paris in New Orleans.

I sat down and played.

I felt slightly hurt, as if Lilly had abandoned me in some way, but then considered that Lilly was doing the same thing for them that she has done for me.

I found myself playing very well.

The thought that Lilly liked the guy's music was reverberating in my head and I tried to play my very best.

There really weren’t many tourists at all and I made the bulk of the 19 bucks that I did in the last of the 3 hours that I played.

Six bucks an hour, we had been bickering over.

I got tips out of a high percentage of the few tourists that there were; at least a buck from every groug of 4 or 5 that walked by -maybe they took turns throwing the buck, representing all of them.

It was 7:55 PM when I decided to wrap up, because it didn’t promise to get any busier, and because of my early start I had two hours to make it to the Uxi Duxi for a shot of kratom before they closed.

This gave me an opportunity to ride the Lafitt’s Greenway Bike Trail its entire length, as it starts about 5 blocks from the Lilly Pad and then runs pretty much perfectly straight to nearby the Uxi Duxi, perhaps a 3 mile trek.

One that I covered in 20 minutes.

There was no use stopping to grab my laptop, so my blog readers suffered...


I had told Lilly that I thought it was really great that she was helping the French guy out, and that it would be good for me to monopolize the spot with the help of another person.
If he is there, he can pass the spot off to me, rather than if some other random guy is.

I could even start showing up around the time he typically knocks off, thereby forming an airtight seal around the Lilly Pad.

I could also take Bobby up on his offer to finance some equipment for me so I could go into the Irish Pub where Johnny B. used to make fifty bucks in three hours, plus tips, and try to get a gig.
A little more compelling than washing dishes, maybe.