Pitbull Higher On Bill Than Santana And Doobie Brothers

I am smack dab in the middle of Jazzfest.

It is a mystery, beyond The Dave Matthews Band being the biggest concert draw in the world, how they rank these acts, and how a Pitbull is higher on the bill than Santana, go figure.. The top ten acts listed contain two I have never heard of, ahead of Herbie Hancock, nonetheless..

It spans two consecutive weekends, and, checking the archives of this blog has revealed an 85 dollar night or two during this festival, made at the Lily Pad.
I played a 3 hour set last night, and made 40 bucks.

I was hindered for the most part by having a dim light.

Bobby in building C has given me a light which plugs into a USB charger and casts a bright beam, cohesive enough so that it makes about a 2 foot in diameter circle around the tip basket, and covers the “The Tiposaurus Rarely Bites” sign.
I had forgotten to run through my checklist of necessary busking items before leaving the apartment at 11:10 PM. I guess I haven’t learned my lesson about doing that religiously.

The first item on the list should be A: Run through this list.

Almost every aspect of the busking experience has been in flux, lately.

I keep being hearkened back to the biblical verse of: The Son of Man has no place to lay his head. As if the ultimate spiritual goal becomes clouded by security and creature comfort types of things.

The lesson that I learned from having been barred from the Uxi Duxi was that I had fallen into a certain complacency which was watering down my creativity.
When I was homeless, I had to improvise every minute of every day, since nowhere was the impermanence of things spotlighted more than through that type of existence.

If the river was rising while I was busking, then I might have returned to the wharf to find my bed under water, or I might have to wade through knee deep muddy water in order to get to it.

This was a favorable thing for me, for, it was about equal to the 5 foot alligator that hung out under there in its deterrence to skeezers trying to camp out under there. That was my spot; my wharf, my alligator, my rats, and my spiders that had the whole area spangled with their tautly stretched webs, everywhere except along the route that my path took from the edge of the wharf to where my bed of thick cardboard had been made.

It only takes spiders a couple instances of having their work destroyed before they start to avoid that spot when fashioning the next web.

My path crisscrossed a bit utilizing stepping stones that I had stabilized to keep them from lolling around when stepped on by a typically drunken me, with an absence of spider webs the whole way. So, my path was clear, and the rest of the webbing kept me from ever having to buy a fly swatter.

Any intruder would have no knowledge of my path and would have to venture over the chunks of granite, slick with slime from the river, and poised to rock in one direction or another as soon as weight was transferred to them, twisting the ankle of, and often felling any tipsy hapless skeezer who might land on the irregular stones in such a way as to fracture an elbow or a hip, where they would lie crippled with a face full of spider webs, and probably vow to never set foot under the wharf again.

The icing on the cake would have been if the alligator would then come and eat the incapacitated skeezer, preying upon the weak -the sign fliers- in keeping with its predatory instincts.

Taking away this daily struggle between life and death, I soon found myself, well, somewhat less inspired, and basically just hoping that I was on the right path.
There must have been a reason that I inexplicably made the comment: “We need to build that wall,” to the Uxi Duxi staffer who then found a way to bar me from going there.

I then made the comment of something like: Gee, I’d better stop shoplifting! as the tedious warning recording played at the Family Dollar where I had been a daily fixture, which caused a certain cashier to bar me from going there.

So, I find myself invigorated by having to think on my feet instead of being on autopilot.

I read the story “A Rocking Horse Winner,” by D.H. Lawrence last night, after returning at around 4 AM. to the apartment, to find that it was still there -the apartment, not the story- not underwater, no rats had eaten my bag of kratom, and there was no skeezer asleep on my couch.

The part of the story that made me think the most was when the boy in the story had arranged, through the help of his uncle and a lawyer, to give his mother 5,000 pounds (out of his secret “rocking horse” winnings) and it was decided to pay her 1,000 pounds a year on her birthday over the coming 5 years.

The uncle made the comment: “I hope it won’t make it all the harder for her later.”

That kind of resonated with me; how even a blessing can be seen as a curse in disguise.

But some sense of security and confidence is in order, and running through my checklist to make sure I am not forgetting the spotlight or the guitar tuner or the sign is a good idea.

I am pretty sure I would have made more like 58 dollars instead of 40 had I been brightly illuminated, a reflection of the bright neon found further up Bourbon Street, as it stretches, like a tedious argument, towards Canal Street.