P(l)aying The Bills

Why Didn't I Just Go?!

A look at the webcam on Bourbon Street last night revealed a sight to behold indeed...but I can't look back..I can't think of what might have been...

I saw Buffalo Bills shirts on almost everyone on my screen.

It wasn't really crowded, as far as Wednesday nights go; but the Bills shirts meant that the town had been taken over by people who had come down here for tonight's game.

I could have made so much money off them; I packed my gear up at about 9 p.m. and thought about how I could be there playing before 9:30 and then could go until after midnight. The temperature was in the 60's -a rare occurrence on a November 24th. Maybe a sign of climate change for the worst; maybe it would melt the polar ice caps and New Orleans would be under 12 feet of water in a few days; but, I could have a good night tip-wise before that happened.

But, then I thought about tonight's game, and how the Caeser's Dome will be full of football fans, there to watch a nationally televised game, and how half of them would be Bills fans, from Buffalo, New York, and how I would relate to them.

They would be the people that I am used to, the ones I grew up with; I would be able to get them to throw money in my basket, just by saying the right things and playing the right songs. And, they would be able to look at me and see that; despite my having grown my hair out and lived in the redneck south for almost half my life; I was still one of them.

Even the snobbery that is the hallmark of the elite, who can afford to fly to New Orleans from Buffalo for a vacation and to watch a football game, would become a non factor. 

It wouldn't be like one of their own had eschewed a college degree and the corporate ladder, and chosen to sit on the sidewalk with a tip jar and play music -those types they would punish if they saw them in Buffalo. 

"To those that have, more will be given, but to those who have not, even what little they have will be taken" would be the philosophy of these Buffalo Bill jersey wearing tourists, had they encountered me in Buffalo.

But, take me out of that environment and place me on Bourbon Street and I become like an exotic animal in a zoo, one they will want to feed, just to see how it eats. The fact that I have been transplanted here from where they come from will only awaken in them some sense that I could be them, had they had the courage to turn away from the status quo and had refused to become a cog in the corporate wheel, but pursued a different dream instead.

"I could never do what you do, I'd be afraid of not making anything. I guess I need the security of a steady job with a paycheck I can count on every week," they often say, as they are putting a large tip in my basket.

But, so much for not looking back..

People Really Live On This Kind Of Stuff?

I had picked up the large box that I had won in the Sacred Heart Apartments annual turkey raffle and unpacked it.

Just as I had done last year, after winning one of the things -they raffle off 30 of them to among the 120 or so residents; but in previous years, you had to sign up and not everyone wound up doing so, so the chances were about 50% that you would win one. 

This year, they automatically entered every resident. This was probably done as a way to push social justice because some of the residents here are probably too mentally ill to sign up for the turkey giveaways, and so had probably never stood a chance of winning. Being entered automatically means that some people who might not have even known there was an annual Turkey Giveaway might get one.

Now we will have to see if they are too mentally ill to bake the thing without setting the fire alarms off, or without taking the bird out of the plastic wrapper, type of thing.

$244/Hr.

But, I thought about how I planned to play outside the Caesers Dome and how I wanted to be well rested and ready to do so. That was always something that I marked on my calendar for all 10 of their home games and it was usually a guaranteed 35 dollars, with up to 88 bucks being made one game.

It's a different kind of busking, though, which is kind of a break from having to meticulously perform songs so that people nearby can make out the lyrics and pay attention to details such as harmonica solos.

When the swarm of people are going past it is more a matter of being heard, or at least seen by them, whereupon maybe those 30 people out of 2,500 will throw something in the basket. It is over relatively quickly with the bulk of the crowd rushing past in a noisy herd, and then 20 minutes later maybe one or two stragglers on an otherwise empty street.

So, about making 88 bucks in 20 minutes, if I was into skewing statistics, I suppose I could brag about making up to $244/hr. busking,

That's what I was thinking about when I decided to go into the turkey raffle box and make French toast using the wheat rolls and the eggs that came with it.

Everything else in the box made me shake my head over "How can people live off stuff like this?"

The turkey itself is something that I can get away with eating, if I make sure I am doing some physical activity, to burn it off.

But, there was a 3 pound bag of white flour, another one of white sugar, a package of margarine (made of hydrogenated oils) and a gallon of cow's milk.

Cows milk! I can say that I've never bought a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread in my life (Except for a brief flirtation with a couple loaves of "Dave's Bread," which I bought thinking that it might not have the hydrogenated oils or the bleached flour of typical bread, but still found that I wasn't feeling 100% after eating it, which had as much to do with the butter and jam that I loaded it up with, as with the bread itself).

And, I have never had a regular doctor in my life either. 

I went to one in 2001, when I was having heart palpitations, but that turned out to be from drinking up to 7 energy drinks during the first part of each day, and then switching to red wine at night, with cigarette smoking throughout...

And then, there was some virus I got in 2010 that apparently lived in the mucous membranes but made my skin extremely vulnerable to infections, so that every little thorn scratch turned into one. The doctor at the emergency room made it a point to tell me that anyone can get that particular virus, rich or poor, and that it had nothing to do with me living in the woods.

I will say that, since the age of about 40, I have been to an emergency room a half dozen times, for "emergency" tooth extractions. 

During those visits, I would be subjected to the scare tactic of being told that tooth infections are a systemic thing and that my heart and my other organs were being taxed by the infection, and that it could spread and infect my bones. I don't know if they still push that, or if the theory has gone the way of putting leaches on people's skin to suck the bad blood out of us...

I do know that some evil group of people are hellbent upon making tons of money selling pharmaceuticals; and that the FDA is being funded by the very businesses they are supposedly regulating, if Russell Brand's research and reporting is to be believed.

That would make some sense out of President Nottrump begging everyone to get, what is it now 4 doses? 

You can't mention natural (I-word) in a blog post, or it will get taken down, nor blog about anything in pill form that would make people's chances of dying from the uggabooga almost nil; or about the same as winning the Lotto (but without the Power Ball, Fauci might point out).

I have been having people after me, wanting me to send them friend requests on Facebook (because I apparently ignored the ones they sent me, even though they were all "beautiful women") and recently Russell Brand "himself" asked me to contact him using a special "WhatsApp" number.

The tip-off that these are bogus is that every response to a comment I made was a very terse "You are spot on!" or "100% true!" or "Excellent Point!" and then, the request for me to message them somewhere so we can "share ideas," or whatever.

"Spot on!" can be cut and pasted on to millions of people's comments on the web. Had the person (or robot) actually personalized it by referring to at least one tidbit of the comment I made, maybe I might have considered contacting them. So we can meet in person. Right..

A Trojan Bird?

But, the turkey raffle box almost came into my apartment like a ticking time bomb.

Instead of going out to make the money that I knew I could have made off the Buffalo Bills fans, I stuffed my face with French Toast slathered in date syrup and honey and a sprinkling of cinnamon and salt. Then, I soon just wanted to put the self help dialogues on and lay down..

Waking up, feeling the effects of the French Toast, and realizing that I was out of cat food and almost everything else, but that I probably could have made 50 to 80 bucks on a night that was an unusually warm 63 degrees, could have sent me into a tailspin that I might still be in.

But, instead, I used the secret of The Law of Attraction, and came up with 3 things that I was happy and grateful about.

The very next thing I did was to step outside Sacred Heart, to go look for tobacco in the ashtray at the bar up the street. I had avoided walking past Harold in the parking lot because I didn't have any food for him, and he had been out all night, since I hadn't gone to play and make plenty of money for food for him, but had filled myself with food and gone to sleep instead.

I encountered an older lady in a wheel chair, who lives here and who asked me if I would go to the store to get a pint of vodka for her (the sun was just about to come up, so I guess it was almost drinking time). She said she would give me a couple cigarettes for the trouble.

She handed me a 5 dollar bill, telling me that the vodka came to exactly 5 dollars.

That sounded to me like she was getting it from one of the mom and pop stores where they are at liberty to round things to the nearest dollar for convenience, rather than at a chain store like the Shell station where the sales tax needs to be explicitly added to the purchase price, verifiable through the receipt, and will almost never land on an exact dollar amount. It might be $4.98 or $5.03 and I was skeptical.

I thought the old lady might have been assuming that I would reach into my own pocket to cover the tax, rather than returning to Sacred Heart with her 5 dollars and telling her: "Sorry, this wasn't enough..." As if she was counting on me being a good enough person that I would hate to see her be disappointed; and would take pity upon her because she is an elderly lady in a wheel chair.

I suppose I should have taken pity on her, it dawned upon me, as the sun was about to rise on Thanksgiving morning...so I pushed the thought out of my head that the old lady was playing me for privileged white boy who was going to cough up the tax on her vodka, and was able to get into a happy and grateful frame of mind.

As soon as I had done that, from out of the doorway emerged a second figure in a wheelchair; an older black guy who, upon hearing that I was going to the store, asked me if I would get him a bottle of Smirnov and a pack of Kool cigarettes, giving me 11 dollars, and telling me that I could keep the change.

At the store, the lady's vodka indeed rung up at $4.99 plus tax, but the change from the guy's vodka and cigarettes was just enough to cover it, with 16 cents left over.

I got back to Sacred Heart, where the guy gave me 4 of his cigarettes and the lady 1 of hers -enough to keep me going using the one hitter into which I put only a pinch of tobacco every 45 minutes or so, as I sit here on the computer, for most of the day. 

Back inside my place, with a hungry Harold, I decided to try again one of the cans of Fancy Feast that a lady had bought for him at Winn Dixie, but which he didn't seem to like the first couple times I tried it. He ravenously ate it, along with a second can. I have 20 of them left. Hopefully he scarfed it down because he was 8 hours behind his feeding schedule but found it to be to his liking, even though the smell of it might have dissuaded him the first time. 

Soon, it will be time to leave for the Caesar's Dome, to set up in the spot that I discovered about 7 years ago, which is under a staircase that throws the sound outward a bit, and is across the street from where the cops would tell a busker that he couldn't play, and in between two other spots that have uniformed people patrolling them. The one little piece of property where I play just happens to have nobody in charge of running buskers from it. It's kind of a handicap access ramp behind a building. How I ever found it can probably just be chalked up to the dumb luck and serendipity that has been hovering over me ever since I decided to start busking, back in 2007. But it also ties in to the fact that I started my day by helping out a couple people in wheel chairs and will wind up playing right by a wheelchair ramp. Either you believe everything is connected, or you don't I suppose...

In 2007, I was in Jacksonville, playing in front of different Kangaroo and Circle K stores according to a schedule that I had to keep of which cashiers were working inside at which time. Some of them seemed to resent the fact that I was out front making more money than what their hourly wage was for cashiering; while others applauded me for my initiative, and offered me free coffee. It all depended upon the cultural values of whatever countries the cashiers emigrated from.

If I were to use that as a rough barometer, should I ever want to tour the world as a busker (beginning in about a year, after I start getting social security and get a passport) I should think that I would do well to busk in Morocco and Spain and Italy, but not so much Russia or Albania; and stay the hell out of Puerto Rico; those cashiers were bitches...

It's been a long strange trip to go from looking for a Kangaroo to play in front of, to looking to travel the world with a guitar on my back; but I suppose that is the life I am attracting to myself.

Time to brush up on "Marrakesh Express..."