A Hurdle in the Way of Posting At All

I am sitting here listening to one of the Lilly Pad recordings, specifically the one made Monday night, May  with Jacob playing an acoustic bass guitar that he had gotten the very same day.

The reason I haven't posted to this blog in perhaps going on a week is that I have been waiting until I could make it a "musical" post, by including one of those very recordings that I made at the Lilly Pad...well...

Here's an analogy.

Let say you get a call late at night from one of your friends. He is at some club and the band on the stage has connected to him on some cosmic level. They are strumming his past with their fingers, singing his life with their song or some bullshit, and so he has called you, thinking that you've just have to hear them.

So, you listen, and hopefully you can even make out enough to agree that they would probably sound good, if not coming through a phone.

This would represent me posting up a clip of the Lilly Pad recordings right off my phone to this blog.

But, you tell your friend you are going to be up and so he should swing by after he leaves the club and he does. He has the recording of the band on his phone, and you plug his headphone jack out into the auxiliary input on your amazing home stereo with a frequency response from what only birds and cats can hear, all the way down to the bass notes that only snakes can hear.

It sounds a lot better, and now you can even tell that there is a bass player in the band...(and a bird, wtf?) and this makes for a pretty good listening experience, and you might even listen to the whole recording, especially the rendition of "Whole Lotta Love," the Led Zeppelin song at the end, where the Tibetan throat singing group takes it to a final crescendo.

But, you will still be able to tell that it was recorded on a phone. This is because of what I found by looking at the "spectrum" of the sound recorded using my LG Aristo smart phone.

Trying to get notes lower than a certain frequency through a phone's speakers would just be counter productive. There is, I guess, a reason that it requires at least a 4 inch in diameter speaker to play music that doesn't sound tinny.
The spectrum revealed that the very low and very high frequencies dropped as if off of cliffs at each end. It also revealed that the pitches that make human speach more audible to other humans have been boosted, with the 1,000 hertz range like a spike on top of a turret.

So, you might tell your buddy: "Hey, Let's run these through my Cecelia "ear bending sonics" application which you do, and in so doing, find that, by boosting the grave frequencies ridiculous amounts and cutting back on the human speech frequencies, your buddy makes the comment of: "Wow, that sounds just like it did at the club!"

This would represent me posting up the clips of audio from the Lilly Pad, in the current state that I have them in. Which I am thinking of doing.

But, now more delays, because now that I have them sounding "just like it did at the club," I have to go through and pick the best performances at the quietest times when the phone was positioned the best to capture the sound, etc.

Those best performances each have some small glitch in them -me dropping the pick, then picking it up before resuming, is a good example- and by spending a few minutes editing, I can have the songs back up and running.

It's just that I have (never mind the 36 days worth of my own music elsewhere) about 4 hours of myself playing at the Lilly Pad to go through, trying to decide what is worthy of being put on the blog.

But then, to extend the analogy. Let's say you have a brainstorm and you get up at 4 A.M., unable to sleep because of the creative juice in your veins, and, by moonlight you begin to work, and 18 to 36 hours later, you invite your friend over to show him how you used the Tibetan throat singers to create pads and rhythms and you layered these together underneath a hiphop beat played on a drum kit, as well as additional percussion, guitars, back-up vocals (the icing on the cake) and even your cat meowing, and then rapped over the result etc.
And your friend say's "That's amazing!" and then you both stare silently into space, each pondering whether or not the monks might sue for copy write infringement.

That would represent me waiting even longer to post any of the Lilly Pad recordings on this blog, so that I could do the above mentioned type of things to them.
     
Head In The Cloud

A funny thing happens, after you post something to Soundcloud, and then you see that someone out there in the vast universe has heard the song and has left a comment on it.

Realistically, what I get from comments to the effect of, "this is a cold-stone rocker, keep doing this stuff!" is a slight sense of suspicion that somebody is compiling a "channel" and wants their channel to be a, the-bigger-the-better database of recordings just like mine.

The channel master might even, in candor, say something like "It's not the best music, but it's all made by people on their tablets in their bedrooms" type of thing.

With a little bit of investigation, I found out that I have indeed been "loved" by a group just like that. That is their niche.

This is not to say that that particular network of people wouldn't be in a position to promote something that was truly worthy of them making it their contribution of the month.

But, now I have to follow up the piece that they loved with something night and day different, nothing "electronic" about this one. The "keep doing what you're doing" crowd will feel rebuffed.

But, I am going to try to at least put one of the things up with this post. This seems to be a hurdle in the way of posting at all...

Their pitch is to say something like "have your music heard by thousands of people."
But, that is kind of deceptive. It is more like, have your song in our ever expanding database of them, sinking further into oblivion with each passing day.
 
Jacob and I were able to jam along for what amounted to a 3 and a half hour session.

Along with that recording, I have another one of about a half hour in length, from the Friday night prior. That one has a lot more background noise, plus it was done before I got the selfie stick for the cell phone, using which I can prop the thing right in front of my face.

The decision for me now is, am I going to post any of these recordings to Soundcloud, without adding things like my snare drum, other percussion instruments, and, why not backing vocals. Backing vocals are the "icing on the cake" for a lot of songs I love, now that I think of it.

On a song like "Girl," by The Beatles, for example, it is John Lennon singing "tit-tit-tit" in the background which I consider the hook in that song.


These recordings are invaluable as far as giving me an indication of exactly* how I sound out there.
*By boosting the bass response a ridiculous 40 db, which is the maximum amount using the "bass and treble" function on Audacity plus, sending it through the same effect again for another 9 or 10 db.

When I get back from busking in about 4 hours, I might try to post up some music.

If You Can Make It Here, You Can Make It Anywhere

As I sit here in my room, I am listening, upon the "Claudia" computer, to a WAV file of my busking session of last night, with the whole track run through a reverb, which I panned to the hard left, while panning everything else to the hard right.

This is because I have watched a few videos by Rick Beato, and this is how he described how they achieved a stereo effect by doing that in the late 60's.
This just seems to be yet another, in a series of things, that I have stumbled upon recently and learned something from.

I'm sure it has something to do with the self help dialogues that hypnotize me and program my subconscious mind to filter things in order to discern what is going to help me along my path to success.

What I am finding is that I am encountering the latest, cutting edge type of stuff.

From the books that I have been finding at the Goodwill Store, which has been like a college bookstore to me, which bear titles such as "The Best American Short Stories (of 2011, in one case) to the computer books, and even the fact that I found one of Christina Friis CD's there and snapped it up for one dollar, it seems that I am never going to fail for lack of resources, nor inspiration.

The Christina Friis CD is the one that, about a year ago, won the distinction of "CD of the Month" on the CD-baby website, through which she published it.
Learning all about things like that website is in my future curriculum.

The importance of the CD is in that, it represents to me an example of the highest caliber of musicianship that I could aspire towards, in the literal sense.
Sure, I could put on a Miles Davis CD and try to trade licks with John Scofield, but Miles is never going to be playing on a corner on Royal Street.

And so, the degree to which I could learn Christina's repertoire, gives me kind of a yardstick to gauge whether or not I am at least meeting "CD of the month" levels of musicianship.
Her CD was done in a professional studio with each part played by studio musicians who were all about sounding "professional," and are as good at it as anyone who ever played on a Celine Dion album, for example. Their job is to compliment Christina's singing, and otherwise kind of stay out of the way.
 t is just good to be rubbing elbows with the cream of the crop in one's chosen field.

It can't help but make you better.

The game of chess illustrated this to me at an early age.

I was able to beat the kids in my neighborhood. But, when I went downtown, to a certain video arcade, there was a kid named Richie who, on a roll-out rubber chessboard rolled out on top of a Space Invaders machine, would "smoke" almost any player who walked in there, including me.

I was 15 years old and wouldn't try pot for another 2 years, but Richie bragged about smoking "12 joints a day." This worked to infuriate over losing to him.

I thought pot was supposed to make a person goofy and silly, and I was expecting Richie to make goofy and silly chess moves because of the 12 joints a day..."Oh, man, I like totally didn't even see your bishop there, boy am I baked!" type of thing.

I also bore the misconception that, since my parents were rich enough to pay my tuition at a Catholic high school, to which middle class parents sent their kids to prepare them to have more tuition paid at good colleges, but Ritchie went to public school, and would even cut classes to smoke joints, I should have been able to outsmart him; based on that alone.

One thing it did inspire me to do was check a few chess books out of the library and to study such things as the Sicilian Defense and the Ruy Lopez opening, so that I eventually could give Ritchie a decent game, while other kids played Space Invaders around us.

But then, 4 years after that, I was in Basic Training and found that I could beat about 90 percent of the chess players in my company.

It seems that ol' Ritchie, in his cloud of pot smoke, was a good teacher. 

I hadn't anyone to compare him with -hadn't taken a tour of video parlors nation-wide- so I only knew that he was better than me.

So, if fate had thrown a lesser player than Ritchie in my way, I wouldn't have been such a hot shot on the chess boards of Company B.

Fast forward 15 years, and I would be locked up in jail with a guy who was 53 to my 30 years old, and who would conclude: "Yeah, you haven't been playing anyone really good," after he smoked me off the board, our first dozen games.

Wally was his name,* and I calculated that we had played about 100 chess games and that he had won 90, I had won four, and we had drawn 6 of them.

But, then, fast forward another ten years, and I am able to beat the computerized chess game that I bought from Radio Shack, if I think long enough on each move so that the whole game takes about 8 hours.

So, it turned out that Wally was probably an even better chess player than I thought he was.

*Wally was the name that Bob used while in jail. He explained the reason for that as "If I'm out somewhere in public and someone say's 'Hey, Wally, how's it going; remember me from jail?'" he could always tell the people he was hanging out with, whom he might not have told about being in jail: "He must have me confused with some guy named Wally.."

Every town has its "hot" musicians. These are the ones who give lessons at the downtown music store, like Jerry Garcia did when he was a teen.

But, then the local hot guitarist reaches drinking age and his band lands a gig in "the big city (for us that would have been Boston)" and things proceed the same way from there.

His band plays in the opening time slot, to warm the patrons up for the headlining act, and is largely ignored, even when doing the material that always populates the dance floor at the watering hole in their home town.

And then, the band that goes on after them sounds a bit more tight and a bit better rehearsed, and that's "the difference that makes a difference," and they return home with a new found respect for all the intangible things that go into a performance. Things like letting no more than 20 seconds elapse between songs, even if the guitarist has to switch from the electric to an acoustic guitar, or if the drummer is going to sing the next song and it is discovered that his vocal microphone is "hardly" on. The latter should be solvable by a simple gesture to the sound man of pointing to the microphone, then making an upwards gesture -a couple "check, check"s and you should be ready to go.

After that experience though, what happens is that the next time his band plays at the little roadhouse in town, people notice a sudden improvement in them. They sound tighter and better rehearsed, and they hear comments such as "You guy's have gotten a lot better since that last time I heard you!"

This happens to a lot of bands who wind up touring and opening up for a "national" act. They don't come out the same way they went in. 

So it is good to be in New Orleans where the goal is at least in sight because, like New York, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

Come On And Take A Free Ride

It is the age of free things.
After having woken up this morning feeling a slight heaviness in my heart, but having had that feeling lift off of me after I did some push-ups and focused upon the present moment and became thankful for the things I had, I started my day in the late afternoon.

I now have unlimited access to the Internet, and while allowing me to use his network might have been, to my neighbor Wayne, akin to giving me a cup of flour, the effect upon me had been huge.

I can now start to think differently. As in, having the capacity to run a business, publish things, buy and sell, connect to people, find a job, etc. all from my living room.

After waking up in the middle of the afternoon, a couple of hours after my usual time, I went to my laptop to discover that Youtube had auto-played videos while I slept and that the logic behind their algorithm which selects the "next" video based upon all of the previously viewed ones (perhaps taking into account which ones were watched all the way through as opposed to being ejected, as far as catering to taste is concerned) had brought me from whatever I had originally searched for, then watched, to a live performance by Jethro Tull.

Google must think that I like entertainers who are a parody of entertainers.

The guy (Ian Anderson) reminded me of the guy they arrested for the theater shooting in Colorado of people who were, I believe, there to see the latest (circa 2015) Batman movie.

The way the suspect was (over)acting like he had no idea what was going on, nor why he was being led in front of a judge in an orange jumpsuit, or that might have been his: "What did I do wrong? I was just making a statement; those kind of people need to die" look.
In any case, there was Ian Anderson, as Jethro Tull, acting like he was trying to act crazy, as part of some act, like he becomes Jethro Tull, who is crazy, when he is on stage.
"I love the crazy look in his eyes," I saw in a comment posted below the video, as I frantically looked for the "eject" icon.
Jethro Tull is just proof to me that, while "there are just so many talented people out there," there is at least one too many.
"Bungle In The Jungle" notwithstanding.
At that point, I intervened, and wound up watching a half dozen videos by
this guy named Rick Beato.
These are really interesting videos and they inspire me to work with my recording studio.
I finally shut the thing off when it was almost 10 PM, to go out and busk on a Wednesday night.
I had only three dollars and change in cash, and perhaps about 30 bucks on my Serve card.
As I approached a juncture which I refer to as "piss pass" and which is basically where the interstate passes over Canal Street and where a couple dozen tents under the bridge are evidence of about that many homeless people who keep a perpetual sign a-flying on all four corners of the intersection; this for people who have their vision; and for the blind, there is the strong stench of the urine of about a couple dozen homeless people.

Please tell me I never look like this, and not just because

it's a guitar, and not a flute that I play...

I spotted what looked like a crumbled up bill on the ground in front of the bench of the street car stop right before the pass, and pocketed it.

Then, right before the intersection of Bourbon and Canal, there was a half pack of American Spirit cigarettes laying in between the trolley tracks, which I added to the plunder that I was accumulating before even playing one note of music.
I played for what amounted to one hour and eight minutes, as metered by the recording that I made on my phone.
I made $25 on the strength of one twenty from a couple who had stopped to peer through the gate of the house next to Lilly's which is over my left shoulder, like so many tourists do -they seem fascinated with the house which is really just a big square one but it has a big front porch and a smaller balcony on the second floor offering a birds-eye view of the block.
I get the sense that the people who have done so are both getting a closer look at the house and checking out my music in a non-intrusive way. In both of the most recent cases, I was able to get a twenty dollar bill out of the couples who had stopped, by playing my absolute best at that particular moment. This could translate into the insertion of a humorous verse in whatever particular song I am doing.

So, I made the $25, then headed for the Unique Grocery Store, which has apparently been renamed "The Unique General Store," as per a new sign which runs along the wall under the cooler doors. But not before giving the dollar that I had found to one of the living statues, in the form of a light brown skinned guy who was standing "absolutely motionless" at the corner of Dumaine and Bourbon.

I then got a Bang energy drink, which I placed upon the back of the neck of the guy in front of me in line, which caused him to flinch, as if quite startled, and turn around. It was like he had been a tightly wound coil.

It was the guy whom I have seen just about every night for the past six years, who walks back and forth, back and forth, along Bourbon Street, apparently just walking back and forth.

He has a day job at a hospital as a nurse or something, and walks back and forth in the evenings, always knocking off at about the same time, and always going to the Unique Store to buy always the same bag of chips and the same drink, before getting on the street car to go home and regroup for another day of working at the hospital then walking back and forth along Bourbon street.

He is an extremely effeminate black guy who has just a touch of grey in his hair and walks like a woman. He is probably trying to sell his body.

He had started to acknowledge me a little bit with a nod of the head about a year ago, but that has cooled off.

One night I started to make up a song something like "He's the man who walks back and forth, and back and forth and..." which seemed to provoke him to shoot me a derisive look. It definitely stopped him in his tracks for a second, and I decided not to start making fun of him each night as part of my shtick, even though it would be easy to break into "his" song each of the dozen times that he does so on a given night.

But, I put the cold can on the back of his neck and he took it rather pleasantly, which made me think that he is probably just a shy person.

Then, I found, strewn out along Canal Street, right before Broad Avenue, about a dozen bottles of water. They hugged the curb here and there for about 75 feet. I stopped and bagged them up, wondering if they were suddenly going to become the property of one of the skeezers who had been standing about a hundred feet away and ignoring them as I arrived. It would be in line with behavior that I have seen before in skeezers; they don't show an interest in something until someone else does.

There was once a pair of brand new sneakers laying in the middle of Royal Street not far from The Unique Grocery or General Store, and I stopped and picked them up, finding them to be my exact size.

There had been the usual contingency of skeezers in front of the store, but they seemed to be treating them like they thought they must be nasty and smelly to have been thrown in the road like that. Or none of them wanted to break formation and stray from the pack in order to grab them; that would require thinking autonomously, not a skeezer strong suit.

No sooner had I discovered the sneakers to be brand new (and to even smell new) there was a skeezer in front of me, telling me how desperately he needed them and pointing out the falling apart sandals that were on his grimy feet.
He was going to snag them, but...

But what? They were my exact size, sorry skeeze-bo.
But apparently no skeezer thought he could close the gap between him and me before I had the bottles in my pack, and had shouldered it along with my guitar and was in motion.
"I can get one of those; I'm thirsty!" would have been just a transparent ruse in order to get within three feet of me so he could skeeze face to face, where he probably thinks he does his best "work."

Then, to cap it off, there was a can of vegetarian beans and another one of corn sitting on the floor outside my apartment. They had been used by a lady on floor 1F to prop the door open to allow smoke to escape. Her floor had been smoked up by Freddie from across the hall from her who had apparently put something on the stove then decided to take a nap while it "cooked."
The cans are still there. They are the type of food that is given freely by most of the organizations that donate boxes of food to the needy, as in those in need of door stops.
I'm going to eat them, then maybe smoke a free cigarette.
Tomorrow is Thursday, which is one of the days that Jacob is usually in the area.
I now go to listen to the recording of tonight's busking session. I am getting in the habit of labeling them with as many details as I can while renaming them from the series of numbers that they are named by default.

This Blog

Another in a string of minor miracles unfolded when I ran into my next door neighbor, Wayne at the Goodwill Store.

I was looking for a selfie stick type apparatus, so as to hold my phone closer to my head when I record my busking sessions.

Through serendipity, I left my phone with the "audio recorder" running for almost an entire day, last week. I think I turned it on planning to record Bob's radio show on AM 800, and then wound up forgetting that that was why it had been placed near the radio.  I threw it in my backpack before going out to busk.

The next day, I had the amusement of fast forwarding through almost an entire day of audio, hearing myself humming to myself: "Dixie Lilly," by Elton John, which was stuck in my head that day, then hearing myself pedaling my bike and mumbling about the skeezers along the way "Can I have something for free at your expense?" along with other clips of people that I had run into and exchanged words with.


But, the crowning jewel was the almost two hours of busking, when the phone, its microphone peeking out of the top of one of the pockets in the bag, captured the sound, and gave me a truly candid sample of how I sound when I don't think I am recording myself, and even when I don't think anyone is within ear-shot at the Lilly Pad.

I wondered how close I came to obtaining a recording of me being arrested, preceding perhaps 15 days of silence as the thing sat in the property room at the jail, because I wasn't sure if the situation with the cop had resolved itself.

It was a pleasant surprise. I didn't sound bad, to me, at all.

In fact, listening to it in the apartment, I was entranced by it and found myself in the same state of mind with the same sense of well-being that I get at the Lilly Pad; one of the few occasions when I don't fear death, and think that I am enacting my purpose in life, as if everything before and after is just preparation for it. No wonder I get butterflies in my stomach as the time to go out and busk approaches. Like right now. It is 9:38 PM.

So, I got the idea to record my busking sessions each night. My phone will hold something like 150 hours of me doing that.

Every once in a while the stars will align and it will be quiet there at the same time I am playing well.

Plus, there are the comments made by people, mostly positive (the "You suck!" messenger hasn't been around for at least a year) that could be used on a future CD as samples of some kind.

And, when I had my head turned in the direction of the phone, the vocals cut through the mix yielding a pretty decent live recording.

If I could just find a selfie stick, I would be able to elevate the phone upon it, perhaps leaning it up against the gate right by my head so it would be a foot away from my mouth and two and a half feet from the guitar.

I told Wayne about looking for such a thing. This led to a discussion during which I told him that I was thinking about buying more data for my government phone so as to use it as a hot spot.

Wayne said: "I told you I'd give you my password, so you could use my network..."

He was wondering why I had never asked him for it.

I had asked him, about two years ago. It was when Travis Blaine was staying with me. Whatever he had said at the time, I misunderstood as being "no."


I had blamed it upon the presence of Travis Blaine. I thought maybe Wayne was hesitant to give me the password, knowing that Blaine would also be privy to it. Maybe he wanted to tell me that he would give it to me some time when this strange "special snowflake" of a person who was crashing at my place for 20 bucks a night was not around, but didn't want to say that in front of him.

So, I now have access to wi-fi in my apartment, without having had to purchase data for my government phone (upon which my free monthly 2 gigabytes lasted approximately 5 days) or to start paying T-Mobile 52 bucks per month for unlimited data. And, to top it off, I am pretty sure Wayne is on a network that has "blazing" speed, with plenty of bandwidth, an all that. He works for Apple as a customer service rep, right out of his apartment, and was outfitted by them with "all the latest."

This might mean the return, after 4 months away, to blogging almost every day.

Now it is almost 10 PM on a Tuesday night, and, having received such a blessing as free internet ("If you ever need anything..." I had said to Wayne) I feel like I should go out and "give back" by playing my songs, exuding peaceful vibes, and showing at least the amount of appreciation to Lilly that using the spot for at least a couple hours would.

Last (Monday) night, I played for about the usual 80 minutes, and got a 10 and a 5 from one group to go along with a few singles on what was to be a 20 dollar night, rounded off.

I guess, if you are reading this, the internet connection works...

Watching The Tube

I have watched the bike tire on my bike slowly deflate, after the last repair, which involved Gorilla brand tape being used, in lieu of any commercially produced tube patching kit.

Oh, no! It's coiled and ready to strike my wallet!!

This was after I had Googled: "bicycle tire tube repair diy cheap" and was pleasantly surprised to see right near the top of the results, a claim that, whatever is in duct tape is better than what is in most tube patch kits on the market.
It seems impossible that air is escaping through a tiny pinhole in the tube and getting through the adhesive of the tape while under so many pounds of pressure, pushing the tape against the hole...
I must put the tube under water again and look for tiny little bubbles somewhere else on the tube.
In the meantime, I took the streetcar into the quarter last night.
This was after having texted to Lilly: "I'm coming down to play. I'm nervous," and having received back:
"That's fine."
And, after having busked for 1 hour and 33 minutes, and having had no interference from the law, I assumed that Lilly had indeed spoken to the officers -one of them stopped his van Saturday, about 100 feet short of me and sat there, as if on the phone.
I started to fish for my own phone, whereupon he began moving again, and rode past me with maybe a barely perceptible glance towards me.
I wasn't even sure if it was the same cop that had told me "You can't play in front of people's houses."
But, I made $38 bucks during that hour and 33 minutes; and then felt much relief as I walked from the Quartermaster back to Canal Street to catch a streetcar home.
It was similar to what a guy might feel upon getting out of prison, as far as there just seeming to be, once again, flowers everywhere as I walked, and I could smell them, and the houses all looked beautiful and interesting and; I recalled something that I had read in the "Awaken the Genius" book, which basically had to do with worrying at all about anything behind the logic of "didn't it all turn out to be nothing at all?" when it comes to things that, in the past, you might have thought were the end of the world.
I never thought that losing the Lilly Pad would be the end of the world, rather that, it might be high time for me to promote myself to the stage of Royal Street, and become an amplified attraction there with the prognostication being that, since I am loud enough at the Lilly Pad for the nearest half dozen people to hear me, and that yields me 18 bucks per hour then, if I expand that radius around me, and if my memory of geometry serves me, I think that with every increase of one decibel, you will allow PI (3.14) more people to hear you.
And, I would have accepted the challenge of having to tailor a repertoire of music-to-be-shouted-from-across-the-street, which is at least a hybrid of music-that-some-long-figure-under-a-solitary-shaft-of-light-in-the-shadows is likely to be.
So, "Born In The U.S.A." by Bruce Springsteen, would replace maybe one of my originals...
I imagine that, if I was a tourist in say, Toledo, Spain, and I came upon a group of indigenous buskers, singing "Born In Spain," I would tip them. There is something endearing about people being proud of where they were randomly born...
So, it turns out that the bike that Bob gave me, through Jacob is fancy enough that its tires are a strange and rare size which requires metric conversion to even begin to understand.
I am pretty sure that, since rubber stretches a lot, I just have to be within the ballpark, but still, tomorrow Bobby and I are going to go to the big, exciting Wal-Mart Superstore and look for a tube for a 700 centimeter by anywhere between 35 and 44 centimeter tire, and a heavy duty one would be nice.

I am staying in tonight. This morning, I woke up with no "sinking" feeling, for the first time in weeks.
It was my third day without kratom.
It felt like being in a safe cocoon. I felt confident and optimistic.
It usually takes me about 3 hours, or until I have had a shot of kratom, to feel that way on a typical day.
I do see a possible connection. But, also, I had been increasing the kratom usage, to the point of doing a shot before blogging and busking, but then maybe another one ten hours later, before doing music studio work. It stands to reason, based upon Newton's theory that that will lead to some kind of malaise, like waking up feeling like it might not matter at all that you ever existed, type of thing.

Harold/Callas Duet

Harold the cat is still trying to establish himself, but pairing him with Maria Callas,

perhaps the best singer to ever live, might give him a leg up.


Patrice Munsel lived to be 91

My Consciousness

Hotspot Returns
The sun is about to come up on this Saturday morning.

And, the hotspot has come up again on my phone, so I am doing this from the comfort of my room...

I didn't play last night.
 It was raining pretty hard off and on, something that I caught glimpses of in between nodding off on the couch and waking up at various times.

At one point, I must have gone into the bedroom to maybe lie down for a few hours half expecting to be woken by a text, perhaps from Lilly, telling me that she spoke to the State Police, and I was OK to play in front of her house, once again, or maybe from Jacob, telling me that he would stop by, during his Friday activities; which seem to include riding into New Orleans with Bob, his guardian, who does his Christian radio show on 800 AM, at 4 PM.

Neither occurred, and I wound up getting about 8 hours of sleep before waking up, full of energy, and ready to go, at about the time I would usually be in the middle of playing at the Lilly Pad.

It was still raining, otherwise I might have gone down and tried to play from 1 AM until whenever.

I think having my playing spot taken affected me at a deeper level than I was originally aware of.

It was easy to go with the "everything happens for a reason," and "when one door closes another one opens" B.S. for a while, but, waking up at midnight and wondering where my next dollar was going to come from was something I could feel in my stomach.

It's a familiar feeling from other times I have stayed in -like knowing that a party is in full swing somewhere, and I wasn't invited, type of thing...

Dixie Lily

And, then I started to put a few pieces of the puzzle together...the cosmic puzzle.

I had fallen asleep with the song Dixie Lily, by Elton John on repeat in the next room, faint enough in volume to have been almost subliminal.

That album, 'Caribou" was probably the first album I ever bought, as an 11 year old. And I would guess that I have listened to it at least 400 times, maybe more like a thousand.

It was one of those albums where almost all the songs took turns being my favorite, bumping another one from the same record out of the top spot.

Come for "The Bitch is Back," stay for "Solar Prestige A Gammon," type of thing..

I bought it using "my own" money, because, at the age of 10, I had started working. So, the purchase of it was not subject to the scrutiny of my parents. I was old enough to ride my bike to the record store and spend my own money.

They might have steered me away from the queer looking guy on the front cover, had they been plunking down their own cash.

I had started caddying, the summer after sixth grade, at a Country Club about a mile from our house as the crow flies, setting the same alarm clock that had woken me for school back even an hour further.

This was after having heard about the opportunity through some of the neighborhood kids, with one of them throwing in: "Yeah, but you'll never make it; you have to be strong enough to carry a Kangaroo bag for eighteen holes; you'll never make it through the front nine; you'd better forget it!"

No, I didn't know what a Kangaroo bag was, but  I would learn, along with the lesson that there would always be kids who would say things like: "You'd better forget it," like Jeffrey LaBelle had, probably hoping that I would fail for never trying, and would be relegated to riding my bike around all day, with wheelies and skidding and setting up little ramps to do daredevil stunts being the highlights of my summer vacation, with "bagging" candy bars from Baronne's Pharmacy being my main source of income, in other words, basically living Jeffrey LaBelle's life.
I Learn That People Will Work With You
But, caddying the first time, I found out that club members would lighten a Kangaroo bag for a particularly skinny 11 year old kid like myself, by removing a couple dozen practice balls from one of the compartments, jettisoning a second sand wedge that was only used on a different course which had courser sand, and perhaps detaching the heavy umbrella if there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

Eating healthy is only a matter of

recognizing certain shades of green

The members seemed to appreciate the fact that us kids were working over the summer vacation, and a lot of them, especially the one's who were in the "nobody ever gave me anything; I had to work hard for everything I have" camp, would kind of take us under their wing, and give advice that turned out to be pretty solid, like "If you're smart enough to go to college, do; cause there are plenty of kids too fucked up to even finish high school; let them clean your toilet!" Solid advice.

These were mostly the doctors and lawyers and wealthy businessmen of the world.
My dad might have been able to afford a membership there, but drove about 15 miles to play golf at the Westminster Country Club instead -a more "working class" place.
A membership at Oak Hill Country Club may have come at the expense of our family staying only one week, instead of two, during our annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod each summer, or the quality of schools my sister and I were sent to.

Westminster Country Club

This was one of the un-sung hero aspects of my father, and I am still just coming to appreciate him in his entirety, at this point in my life.  Besides, he probably enjoyed the company of the Westminster guys more.

At some point during the long drive to Cape Cod, dad would try to get us to be grateful for being able to take a two week vacation each summer, and would point out that some kids weren't so fortunate and would be stuck in a hot -not even house, apartment- all summer.

I was able to envision flies buzzing around paper plates of macaroni and cheese, and kids bickering constantly, hating one another because they were poor, and taking their poverty-stricken-ness out on each other, as I rode in the back seat of our 1969 Bonneville.

But, despite getting the picture, I still had trouble feeling the appropriate gratitude. I was just too much of a fatalist, and had lived no other life to compare the one I was living to; something I couldn't articulate from the back seat, but would, I guess, 50 years later, as I sit here.

By alternating between left and right shoulders, I found that I could indeed make it through 18 holes toting a Kangaroo bag (there really should have sounded -from out of nowhere- the cello notes from the movie Jaws, when I was told whom I was going to be caddying for and was told: "(cue the music) and there's his bag, right there."

In fact, as the weeks went by I no longer had to switch shoulders. I was becoming stronger than Jeffrey LaBelle.

I would have made, probably 5 dollars (the 4 dollar "caddy fee" plus a dollar tip) for an 18 hole round that took about 2 and a half hours.

After that successful outing, the question hung in the air: "Should I come back tomorrow?"

Wouldn't it ruin a summer vacation and defeat the purpose of it, to be getting up at 5 AM and working? Shouldn't I be luxuriating in bed until the sun was high in the sky?

But then I thought: What am I going to do, sleep late every morning and then just fritter away the days, riding my bike and running around in the woods, and "playing" with other kids? Like Jeffrey "You'd better just forget about it" LaBelle?

It was probably the thought of the others in the neighborhood riding their bikes around all day because they were bored and had barely any money to spend, outside of some allowance of maybe 5 bucks a week for mowing the lawn and taking out the trash that made me decide to become a regular at the caddie shack.

And, I soon had a reputation of being "an excellent caddie."

Part of this was because, unlike my stouter contemporaries, who might have found carrying a Kangaroo bag to be child's play, and could in fact caddie "double" (you guessed it; one Kangaroo bag on each shoulder -alternating them would be pointless) I was light, and could run faster than them.

If my golfer's ball came off the tee askance, and started to drift towards the woods on the right; even if I had posted up on the left of the fairway, I could sprint to the other side, closing the gap to where the ball would go by the time it arrived. So, I would be right there when it entered the woods and started to careen off tree trunks, rocks, etc. like a pinball, in a good position to observe where it came to rest.

After I gave the sign that I had found the ball and it was still in bounds, was probably when my guy, back on the tee started to think: "Yeah, he's an excellent caddie," and I would be getting the 5 dollars instead of 4.

I was intending to take this secret to my grave, but I guess I never counted on ever having a blog:
If my guy's ball had wound up in an unplayable lie (and it was going to cost him a stroke after he had to take a "free" drop in the fairway) it wouldn't be in an unplayable lie by the time he got to it. I was an excellent caddie, after all.


I never breathed a word of this to any other caddies, my best friend, my parents or my priest.

Now, you know...

I had my sights set on things that were not entirely out the reach of a kid who could take home 4 or 5 dollars a day.

This was 1974, and by the end of the summer I had purchased the Elton John album.

The next summer, a 43 dollar "Bullworker" isometric exerciser came my way.

By the summer of '76, I had been promoted (excellent caddie that I was) to a job working for the PGA professional, Jim O' Leary, cleaning the clubs that came in off the course and storing them, then cleaning the carts, putting them on charge in the garage if they were electric, but cleaning them even if they were gasoline, and then cleaning more things.
It paid $1.25/hr. (the minimum wage then was $1.90 but I was only12 years old, and I loved it).
By the end of that summer, a Schwinn "Le Tour" 10-speed bike was all mine, for I believe around $189, tax included, which blew away Jeffrey LaBelle's ride.

The last hurrah of that vacation was a 120 mile* bike ride to my grandmother's house in Vermont, which I made with my best friend, David Veautour (a Facebook friend, today).

We had both saved up for our bikes, with that trip in mind, without ever thinking of asking our parents if they would allow us 13 year olds to hop on our brand new 10-speeds at 4 AM one August morning and leave the state on them. As week after week went by with both of us talking about getting these bikes and riding all the way to my grandmother's in West Rutland, Vermont.
I think they figured the idea would run out of steam or we would be careless with our money. But, I think our parents decided that if we could actually (both; so the odds of our failing were 4X) save for a couple months and get the bikes they would let us go.

The Great Bike ride. 12 hours sounds about right. David and I had reached the halfway point, the Connecticut River (visible as "Rt. 91" above, which shadows it) at 11:30 AM, six hours after we had embarked (adjusted for a half hour breakfast) At that rate, we should have reached my grandmother's house in another six hours, in time for supper. But, doing the thing that the hare did vs. the tortoise, we felt like we were way ahead of schedule and started stopping to check out covered bridges, throw rocks in streams, etc and arrived at around 7:30 PM, an hour before sundown in those parts, and right around when my grandparents were ready to start worrying..

Plus, we had made shorter round trips of about 70 miles each after we got our bikes, to practice up. How practically we were thinking.
And I think the argument that I was about to enter high school, and could use a "coming of age" type experience might have been persuasion enough.

*Well, the Schwinn analog odometer on my bike read 124.1 miles, while David's had clocked 127.4, I believe it was. So much for analog odometers for bikes...   
 
But the Caribou album was a big part of the soundtrack of those times of being an 11 year old, entering the work force. I am just now starting to see just how big an influence it had on my formative self.

It was of a time when I was able to apply every cent I made towards stuff I wanted.
Like now.

And, of a time when I had gone, unbidden, out to work, and had found a source of pride and independence in it.
Like now.

And, of a time when I learned that some things are just between God and self; like, maybe you can pray for someone and they will get well, but if you were to tell them: "I'm praying for you," you would squander the blessing and divert it into your ego.

And of a time when, for some reason, things pertaining to New Orleans started to resonate with me.

Our sixth grade "Social Studies" book was broken into about 24 chapters, each one about a major U.S. city. Spanning from Atlanta to Washington D.C., we learned about the geography and the climate and the people and the industry, etc.

Mine almost opened itself to a spot just past the middle pages, where "New Orleans" was the title of the chapter. I kept returning to that section and flipping through it. The photos, I just stared at, trying to make sense of. There were people dressed in weird colors, bright whites mixed with golds and they were black, but not really black, more reddish, and they were holding these steaming bowls full of tiny lobsters and they were smiling these huge smiles as if very proud of the little lobsters.

Even though, I didn't know the word because I was 11, I was like; "What the fuck?" I still remember. I wondered if they would bite. I could guess that the tiny lobsters would.

When it came time for us students to each pick one of the cities to present an oral report upon to the rest of the class, I chose New Orleans. Shipping was a big industry, as it was a harbor city on the Mississippi River, and it was famous for its cuisine and jazz music, if I remember right...

Even on the Paul Simon album, "There Goes Rhymin' Simon" that I had gotten as part of "the top 15 albums in Boston," that I won in a contest held by WBZ FM in that city, what stuck out the most were the two songs The Dixie Hummingbirds, sang on, like: "Love's Me Like A Rock." I was just bemused by them..   

 So, "Dixie Lily" played in the next room as I slept, trying to ditch the problem at the Lilly Pad and escape to Slumberland, and I woke up feeling pretty depressed, because I had been run off my playing spot; and I suddenly felt unemployed. At best, I saw myself having to start on the ground floor and jostle my way into the Royal Street busking society, where maybe Tanya Huang would throw me a crumb and tell me I could have St. Louis and Royal before and after her. That would be a "He needs to be amplified" spot. Finding another quiet place near a bar full of wealthy tourists at 2 in the morning, not so easy.

Then I started to listen to the song more closely.

One of the songs that I had written in 1988 had a part in it that seemed to write itself. I just followed the melody where it seemed to naturally want to go. After I finished it, I remember even thinking I had heard it somewhere before.
It was from Dixie Lily.
With my song, the melody had seemed to already be in my head.

I initially determined that I had unwittingly quoted "When The Saints Go Marching In," -the part when they sing "...want to be in that number..." when the bass note descends a certain scale; my song had the same bass notes already in place, and I just sang what seemed to fit. I thought this was apropos, because my song was about a "holy" guy whom I know.

But, last night, it hit me, like the sadness in my stomach that, while there is an over-lapping of ideas in music in general*, it was more like the "plowing through the water, with her whistles blowing" part of Dixie Lily that I had been "hearing" when I sang those notes, and they had been close enough to "Saints" for me to posit that I had done that subconsciously because of the "saintliness"** of the guy I was writing about.

**incidentally, my lyric, over that very chord change was equally spiritual, at least in tone: "His lust hath defil-ed the place where he lay" about my buddy, there.

*who's to say that Elton John, in preparation for composing Dixie Lily didn't brainstorm or crash course on New Orleans music, and wind up kind of quoting (subconsciously) that part of "saints" but only Elton-ized it a bit, when he wrote that part of "Lily?"
  
But Dixie Lily, has been "in my head" since sixth grade...
The year of the tiny lobsters.

I think I may have been aspiring to re-write the Caribou album my whole musical life (while thinking I was trying to re-write Anthem of the Sun, by The Grateful Dead).

More

Listening in that vein, and with this new knowledge, I discovered yet another section of the same song (the little rhythmic variation right before he sings: "see her lanterns") which I'm sure is what led to my having made this one recording when I was 22, where I was trying to do this thing with the bass, and it sounded bad (I think I was accenting the wrong notes of pairs of them) It sounded bad enough to make me think that I was totally out of step with the universe, so bad that I began to associate with it at times when I was feeling like an awkward dork -that's what one sounds like-
I was accenting the wrong notes, but I was trying to do a chromatic bass run like in Dixie Lily...
It sounded like music that camels would dance to, or ostriches. And that stuck in my head (excuse the pun) in a negative way; for times of extreme self loathing; the "I hate myself" rhythm.
 
 

But then, the pondering began about the other little coincidence of my having actually moved to the tiny lobster place, and become embroiled in a friendship with none other than a Lilly who, like the showboat in the song, is a grand old lady (though she actually looks quite young).
Her daughter's are definitely "ladies like those on the big boats."
I'm not sure if I'm analogous to the fisherman in the little boat, but...
When I first drew this connection it was the line about "fancy breeding," which made me think of Lilly, even though I had been thinking of her off and on in regards to the situation.

And when Lily met me, I was living under the wharf where the Natchez docks. That is the boat shown in the video above when he sings the "fancy breeding" line that made me put two and two together.


So, I lay there with a video of Lilly and the girls in my head...walking up Royal Street, coming up the river, the lanterns that line the hotel on Dumaine Street where they always turn, flickering in the gentle breeze....
Until I finally had to get up and change the song; it had been on repeat for pretty long...

But it does make me wonder if I had some kind of date with destiny and things like Lilly's and steamboats are just little clues that I'm getting "warmer." It seems like, with everything that has befallen me in life, my solution to it took me closer to New Orleans.
From my first decision, back in 1993, to "just get the hell out of here (Massachusetts)" when I packed all my worldly possessions in a station wagon and drove 21 hours to be with, my friends from Massachusetts, ironically, I had moved myself considerably closer to New Orleans, and the ball was rolling. The Dixie Lily was reeling me in.

Then throw in an economic crash, which forces me to take up busking.
Then have me move to St. Augustine, because "that's where you need to go" if you are in north Florida.
And then have me find out that St. Augustine is where you have to go to hear people tell you: "You need to go to New Orleans," and well, I was at Stage 2, let's call it....


Lyrics by Bernie Taupin, for those who didn't want to watch the steamboat video...

Show boat coming up the river
See her lanterns flicker in the gentle breeze
I can hear the crickets singing in the evening
Oh, Dixie Lily, moving past the cypress trees

My little boat, she rocks easy
I've been catching catfish in the creek all day
Oh, and I've never ladies like those on the big boats.
must be fancy breeding lets you live that way

Dixie Lily chugging like a grand old lady...
Paddles hitting home in the noonday sun
Plowing through the water with your whistles blowing
down from Louisiana on a Vicksburg run


Papa say's that I'm a dreamer
say's them squitos done bit me one too many times
Oh, but I never get lonesome living on the river
watching ol' Lily leave the world behind

Dixie Lily chugging like a grand old lady...
Paddles hitting home in the noonday sun
Plowing through the water with your whistles blowing
down from Louisiana on a Vicksburg run

"Where's The Kratom, Google?"

I have a little bit of anxiety over the fact that I am in right now, and not out playing at the Lilly Pad.

I sent a text to Lilly telling of my intentions to play tonight, starting “around ten.”

The fact that she didn’t respond tells me that she probably came to no resolution of the police problem, today.

I know if it were me, I would dread having to go and deal with the officers. But, if anyone can frame that experience in such a way as to lead them to conclude that they can best protect and serve her and her daughters by ignoring me sitting on her stoop and playing late at night, it would be Lilly.

I really don’t know how she operates at the micro level, whether she plays the property-owning high tax amount payer, or the mother trying to raise perfect daughters in the French Quarter, and needing all the help she can get, to include arranging for the soothing sounds of guitar and harmonica to serve as a lullaby.

Or if she goes the route of informing them that I function as a watchdog on the block, ready to report on the comings and goings of persons in and out of the neighboring residencies, especially the one that is over my alternate shoulder to hers, with which owners she is embroiled in a Hatfield’s and McCoy’s caliber of feud with over the alleyway that separates the two houses, and in front of which, exactly, I sit, taking a symbolic position of neutrality between the two parties (or, having been placed there like a pawn symbolizing Lilly’s sovereignty over the alleyway, depending upon who is interpreting).

I keep Lilly informed about the people who come and go from the Hatfield’s place, especially those who have “Air-bnb” written all over them.
This gives Lilly more fodder to load up against them, more leverage to use in her struggle to acquire the alleyway. Even though the argument that, since they are illegally renting out their house, it follows that they are in the wrong about the alleyway doesn’t hold water, and the evidence of it would be suppressed by the Hatfield’s attorney as being irrelevant to the matter of the alleyway. Lilly might use that angle.

My biggest concern is that the cop will stand behind the philosophy of, if he allows me to sit and play there, then he will have to let “everyone else” do the same.

Lilly will probably argue that the ordinance revolves around protecting and serving her and her ilk, and that if the residents in the immediate area agree to waive their right to that protection against live music, then they should be able to.

In the meantime, I didn’t go out this (Thursday) night.

My cash is running low, but my idea is to play there in the late afternoon tomorrow.

That way, there might be a different state cop on the beat, who might give me a clue as to whether or not the whole force has been put on alert for buskers playing in residential blocks, or if it was just that certain one.

It would certainly be part of his stated duties every night to run off the "performers" further up Bourbon Street (who have to strum the guitar a foot in front of you and yell the lyrics at your face). The other cops who have done that, have all then taken a right turn at St. Ann Street, two blocks before getting to me. Maybe this particular of their route had been penciled in by whomever Lilly originally spoke with.

Perhaps this cop will start to turn their too, after realizing that there is almost never any action past that particular corner, as Lilly’s block tends to police itself, and that there IS usually a crowd of sluggish people blocking the street in front of Lafitt’s Blacksmith Shop Tavern, who have become desensitized enough by the sights and sounds around them that it might take a few flickers of the headlights to or a short toot on the siren to get them to move. Why not turn at the block before, and avoid that every night?

I am still working with the Awaken the Genius “mind technology for the 21st Century” book, and I can almost notice myself becoming more of a genius.

It just is a little appalling to see, from this vantage point just how stupid I have been in the past.
How long should it take me to learn to speak conversational Amharic, anyways, for example?

I have learned the value of rote drilling of certain things into the head; and know that repeating a phrase in Amharic rapid-fire after the example of a guy in a Youtube video for ten minutes can do wonders.
The rub lies in that ten minutes is a hell of a long time to be repeating rapid-fire Amharic phrases. It gets boring and mentally taxing, because concentration is required to get every syllable right.
After less than two minutes, I feel like I have absorbed as much as I could and want to delude myself with "OK, that's good," and then knock off in order to let the lesson “sink in,” or even better; so I can "sleep on it."

But, just like guitar practice, I find you have to break through that wall of resistance and enter into the hypnotic state that the rhythm of the practicing can induce.

But, I believe that blasting away at it, even to the point of becoming tongue tied and slipping into even worse annunciation than when you started is probably the fastest way to learn. Like the weight lifters who go to the point of "failure" when a spotter has to come along and assist just enough to get the bar moving again...
I think, as a general rule, when the first instance of thinking: "I'm tired of this" occurs, then you are about a quarter of the way through a productive session. Do 3 more similar sets...
The preceding is my advice, based upon guitar practice. It remains to be seen if I can likewise learn to speak Amharic. I do have a video where the instructor repeats each sentence about 80 times, taking just the first two words, then the first three, etc. Over and over.

Amharic is what the Ethiopian guys who work at The Unique Grocery Store on Royal Street speak.

As seen above, Amharic is the most popular African language spoken in 8 states.
I just want to be able to make small talk, and add to my Amharic vocabulary, which now consists of the equivalents of "How are you?" and "Thank You."

Another part of the reason is because of the great outpouring of encouragement, praise, and joy they exuded the first time I amazed them by thanking them in Amharic after buying something in the store, they really became abuzz over that. LOL.

Jack of all Trades
The studies of PHP, AJAX, DHTML, Javascript, JQuery, HTML and CSS are progressing at a snail's pace. I am still a way's away from writing a mobile phone application that would be a kratom locator app, and would integrate with Google Maps...

My knee-jerk reaction to seeing the cover of this book when I found one at the Goodwill Store, was "Cool, it's so simple, a monkey can learn it!" but it turns out the monkey is on the "endangered" list and the publisher is pushing an agenda to bring it some public awareness.

...while maybe making a sly foreshadowing of the future of DHTML programming professionals.
Music
Master of None

I'm going to post more of my music soon. I spent so many hours on projects (12-18) that I really got sick of hearing them; and by then they were looping in my head on repeat.
After distancing myself from them, I will be able to return and add the lyrics and instrumental solos, and maybe make songs out of them.
Right now, they could qualify as "electronic" music, I have concluded, after having downloaded a bunch of award winning music in that category and finding that most of it sounds just like me messing around with the Cecilia "ear bending sonics" application.

Jacob came by and visited today, and I later felt better, in general. I guess it had been kind of eating me up a bit wondering if I had offended in some way...

Man vs. Technology

I did it from the keyboard; first guess.

AND! It makes the tickety-tick sounds of an old fashioned typewriter!

I was sitting on the couch. And to bring up the foucuswriter program, I would normally have to lean over to the laptop and use the mouse; but I was feeling too lazy to do that, and the keyboard was in my lap.

I knew there had to be a way to do every darned thing on a computer without a mouse.

And, sure enough, I pressed the Window logo key, and up popped a screen inviting me to search "tags."

Well, I had nothing to lose, and typed in the first couple letters of focuswriter, and then appeared icons for all the applications that's names started with "f," with focuswriter being right there.

Then, I intuitively pressed the tab key and, presto, the highlight jumped from one to the next before landing on focuswriter, to which hitting "enter" was a no-brainer.

I think this was an example of the "hundredth monkey" phenomenon. I somehow knew which keys to press to from the keyboard because so many millenials have taken to their screens who have kind of known from birth how to navigate them -almost everything they try works; "you gotta hold this button down while you drag the other one" -that I have somehow acquired the knowledge, like the hundredth monkey in the parable did.

That phenomenon demonstrates that, once a hundred (in this case) monkeys learn how to do something -to rinse sand off of coconuts in the ocean, for example- then monkeys everywhere will acquire the same knowledge, and will be seen rinsing coconuts off a half a world away.

“Man vs. Technology” had not been appended to the list of catalogued “conflicts” that can complicate a story when I learned about them in 7th grade.

They were something like 7 in number, like the seas, and like the seas, the sum of them were once thought to have been discovered.

Man vs. Nature was always an interesting one, to me.

Ernest Hemmingway once said something like, it’s impossible to have a bad day on a deserted island.

The imagination soon supplies his eyes being gouged out by a huge island bird of some kind, or a volcano erupting and Earnest being boiled to death in the ocean as he tries to flee. What kind of day would that be?

But, Man. vs. Machine was, I believe, on the supposedly finite list of classic conflicts that are found in stories, I wonder if the novel Christine, by Stephen King would fall into that category. Not quite going up against technology.

But, the original “Dewey Decimal System” in the library has been modified to include such things that Dewey had never heard of such as books on UFO’s and aliens (isn’t it funny that, not until Man invented flying machines of his own did he start to see unidentified ones in the sky. Before that it was chariots in the sky. Actually wooden, huge ass, I guess, chariots, lit up for the occasion, but I digress) and topics like how to use asynchronous requests to a server to update a webpage like Google Maps, without having to refresh the page?

Dewey didn’t even leave any room for expansion, should anything come along that didn't fit in his ready made universe. He had it covered from Philosophy at the beginning, because man needs to know “Who am I?” as a prerequisite for everything else, all the way up to the fine arts; man's crowning achievement.  Until computers came along, that is.

The placing of books on theology second is a concession to the second question being: “Who made me?”

But, the new conflict, that 7th grade English teachers will be dealing with will be that of "man vs. technology."

It is Thursday morning.

I went out to busk last night, and was going to set up at the Lilly Pad.

I am thinking that I might have to be arrested and then have the charges dropped by the court, which would hopefully put me in a double jeopardy situation whereby they would decline to arrest me for something they already did but couldn’t make stick.

I don’t know if Lilly would tell them that she has adopted me and that I do indeed live there at 929 Bourbon Street, or what.

But, if she can’t get the individual cop to leave me alone, then maybe he would have to call the local police in order to transfer custody of me to them, who might tell him that I’ve been playing there for years and that they leave me alone.

But, I saw the same white State Police SUV cruising the mostly empty streets of the Quarter, looking suitably bored enough to probably mess with me.

So, I went down to Decatur Street, where I was reminded how lucky I was to be at the Lilly Pad near a bar that stays open until 4 AM and attracts rich people, rather than on Decatur Street where, after the beer and wine store closes, it becomes less busy.

Lilly said that she was going to go to the police station and “see what their problem is with someone playing music.”

She wanted me to text her.

That was at about 1:45 AM, and she had woken up and seen my message, telling her that I didn’t want to play because there weren’t enough tourists out to jeopardize my freedom over, and that the cop might make me put my hands behind my back and never allow me to call her; and that the guy might take it personally as if I had disobeyed a direct order, type of thing.

So, it was good that I went to Decatur Street, because Lilly didn’t see that message until she woke up 3 hours later.

But, I am supposed to text her to ask her how it went at the police station, I assume.

Hopefully, whatever she said last time will work again. But, then again, what would make me change up my life a bit and try new and interesting things, if not something like this?