No Pinga! (sung to the tune of "Goldfinger," the Bond movie theme).
Esteban was from
Puerto Rico and he tipped me 10 bucks during the second of what would amount to about 7 songs that I played in an attempt to probe his musical tastes and entertain him.
But, as can be heard towards the end of the recording that I made that night, when I said something like: “Yeah, he was putting the gay move on,” it turned out that Esteban’s hanging out most of the night was somewhat tied to that agenda.
He was kind of heavy set and in his thirties, and talked about the places where he has been and the languages that he knows how to speak, namely Spanish, Italian and I think one kind of obscure one, such as whatever they speak in Moldavia “but only there,” he added.
He has been all over the world, but seemed slightly bored with it (the world) from what I gathered.
After I finished playing he invited me to sit with him on
Lilly’s other stoop, where he was waiting for the return of Terry, a large black man who has been a fixture of the block for at least the past 3 years.
He wears military style clothing and is in his early thirties and in pretty good shape.
Esteban had promised to smoke a joint with Terry when he returned, and was including me in the offer.
But then he drunkenly instructed me to hold my hand out, ostensibly to assist him in breaking up the bud in preparation of rolling it.
But, after I held my hand out for that purpose, he took hold of it, as if I hadn't positioned it right, and, telling me that it had to be more in the shape of a bowl, began to manipulate it into that shape.
That being accomplished, he started to break up the bud in my hand, touching it way more than what would seem to be required in the process.
His breathing became more heavy, and one of his legs had apparently gotten out of his control and was touching one of mine.
I made the quick assessment that I wouldn’t be being homophobic or politically incorrect, were I to distance myself from him at that point, so I stood up and, after looking down the street in the direction from which Terry should have been approaching already, and stating that I didn’t see him and really didn’t have time to wait any longer “My cat was already meowing for food when I was leaving,” I bid
Esteban adieu, who, to his credit gave no sign that he felt that he had been snubbed. Or that he felt like I owed him anything for his having hung out for an hour and a half and tipped me ten bucks.
Saturday morning, 2:41.
I am listening back to the recording that Jacob and I made at the sight of the job he was “working.”
The job is for Terminex, the termite people, and involves sitting next to a house over which a huge orange tent has been erected so that it could be fumigated.
Just to make sure nobody is going to try to walk past the “deadly poison” signs, written in several languages and enter the house and poison themselves, Jacob is on duty at ten dollars cash per hour, watching Youtube, listening to music, or in the case of tonight, playing the acoustic bass while I played guitar and a next door neighbor, who happened to play the didgeridoo and a strange variant of the Jews harp which consists of a reed which is not played with the teeth, but rather the lips, did so.
We jammed while recording on Jacob’s phone and Josh’s phone, as that was the neighbor’s name, but only until such a point that the guy’s wife called and the phone shut off the recorder when he answered it.
But, I was focused upon my own playing a bit too much, perhaps, and wasn’t noticing how good the didgeridoo, harp and the bass sounded, until I listened back to our recording.
But, by free styling a few verses about "deadly poison," we were able to come up with the jam that I am hoping to post here soon, but not through the hotspot that I'm using now. I burned a third of my data posting the last song that I put on here.
But I think our song was a nice little anthem to warn the neighborhood to “Beware, there’s poison in there,” as one of the lines goes.
It is now Saturday the 10th of August.
I can’t believe how fast this day has arrived from around 20 days ago when the data ran out.
But now, I am on a short juice fast.
I was pushed to the point of it, due to the fact that, as these past few weeks were flying by, my accomplishments were nowhere near keeping pace.
It really boils down to the potent bud that I have been getting which I have pretty much determined, through experience to be, as Jay Leno termed it: “ambition be gone.”
Early Friday evening I was about to go to the computer room to catch up on a few things, and then go out to busk.
A look at the web cam on Bourbon Street revealed a lot of people.
But, I was bored out of my mind and thinking that getting stoned would be better than being bored.
Although, I did recall all the times that I had smoked that kind of bud and then, not until three hours had passed was I pulling myself up from a comatose attitude on my bed, and shaking the cobwebs off, drinking coffee and trying to give myself a pep talk which would get me out to the Lilly Pad and playing.
Those times, I had consoled myself with the theory that arriving at midnight and playing until 3 AM could be just as good, if not better, than playing from 10 until 1 AM.
But, sure enough, there I was waking up at 11:30 PM, after having dozed off listening to one of the self help dialogues, out of the “Awaken the Genius” book.
I dragged myself out there, feeling dopey and lethargic and, most ominously, not even having any song playing in my head, that I might try to do once I got out there.
After an hour of trying to psyche myself into playing, without the benefit of anyone having thrown a random tip in my basket in order to kick start me in that sense, I concluded: “The next time I hardly feel like playing music at all, I’m not even going to come out here.” and I left.
The barricaded area of Bourbon that is being dug up is within 50 yards of the Lilly Pad. It is possible that they have scheduled the construction around the
“Red Dress Run,” which is to take place tomorrow for which
Lafitt’s Blacksmith Shop Tavern is kind of a landmark of, either being the starting or the finishing point of the “race.”
I am very much hungry right now, but the fasting seems to be the right thing now. Especially since I have been sabotaging my own efforts lately, at getting things done. I should have been putting daily blog posts up, along with posting some of the music that I worked for about 16 hours on.
It’s just that the music needs a final organizing. It is reflective of the scattered energies of a stoner at this point. I had gone to the computer lab with the intention of posting some of it, but during a cursory listen to it, I noticed an annoying glitch that I hadn’t noticed before? was too stoned to have noticed? was so stoned that it sounded cool to me in a quirky, annoying way?
Who, knows. But right now I am starving, but will just drink 8 ounces of apple juice, to be followed by 8 ounces of water a half hour later, and so on, for the next week or so, I hope.
The Ever Pending Trip To New England
Maybe this will put me in good shape for making that trek to
New England, right at the start of the
Southern Decadence festival that I have perennially hated so much since I came to
New Orleans.
I think the time I went to
Baton Rouge and wound up being thrown in jail for 45 days was an improvement upon what I might have had in store for me had I hung around here that August.
67 megabytes a day is about my allotment of them, using the free government phone that I got just for being a recipient of food stamps.
Maybe where you are, they set up tents across the street from the food stamp office, or nearby a Wal-Mart or dollar store, offering "free phones."
It would be naive to think that there is no ulterior purpose behind the government providing these phones for free.
The reason given to me when I first got one, back during the
Obama administration, was that, even a homeless person has a basic "human" right to have access to services provided through dialing 911.
There were murmurings about the government tracking the things, or monitoring them for illicit drug related activities.
It's hard not to imagine some huge map on the wall of some war room with pinpoints of light representing each phone nationwide and intensely bright around all bridges, and some director of Homeland Security or something, telling the president: "There's your homeless population!" and then them plotting some way that voter registration apps could be sent directly to all the phones -an ambition that left the White House along with the democrats...
It is most likely a way for them to count the number of homeless people in the nation. And especially in regards to assigning representatives and calculating electoral votes based upon population (maybe Florida is actually bigger than Pennsylvania, if you count all the homeless, type of thing).
It can also be guessed that the typical carrier of a government phone will vote democrat, too.
I have just burned today's data by looking at a dozen photos on imgsrc.ru and then watching most of the video
"How To Make A Hosepipe," which was linked to
Alex in California's blog.
This gives me kind of an idea about what I can expect to get out of my 2 gigabytes of free data through the thing.
