A Sinfully Decadent Concoction of Apple Juice, With Honey and Lemon Juice, With Pinches of Cayenne and Himilayan Salt

I basically went out and busked tonight, and, though a success on the level of having had a couple dozen people tip me, they turned out to be all in singles; which to me means that the value of one dollar is deemed now to be insufficient ("give the dude a couple, cause everything's expensive now") and, while I felt I could have played better; and actually did do so, later on in the evening at Patrick's, but more on that later.

At the point when I got a windfall of tips from about 20 people who had hung around, I had the misfortune of having chosen a very difficult song that I hadn't played in years and which is amongst the most complex things that I do on the guitar; and then to throw the harmonica in, it really felt like juggling on a tightrope and then having to do it on one leg, type of thing.

I decided to try to play a cool harmonica part while playing the complex guitar part just barely. I managed to do so for a while, but the difficulty level was further upped when it came to trying to remember the lyrics of all the verses that I haven't sung in years. Finally, I just cut the song short.

I have to set up a metronome and run through that part over and over at home. I wish I had aborted mission, and switched to a much simpler song,
There are just some musical parts that need to be practiced to master, even by their composers; I'm starting to believe.

The highlight of the evening, though came after I was done busking and I went to Patrick's house. I had felt sorry for him and had picked up some bud on Canal Street.

On my way out to play, I had stopped there to see if I could get a small bud off of him; the excuse I was making in my mind was that I was about to give in to temptation to drink; and so, to fortify my resistance to that urge, I figured I could consider the bud to be going in an entirely different direction than booze. Kind of like; never mind the E&J brandy, you've got that bud.

But I found Patrick to be in a glum mood; he said that he had been having mixed fortunes, and to balance off one good one, was the fact that he was out of weed. He wished he had a bud to give me, because that would mean he had a bud; but he didn't.

But, he did have pain pills and offered me a couple of them.

I told him, after I had swallowed one of the things, that I would get some bud when I was down in the Quarter if he was still going to be up at 2 a.m.

"I'll be up all night," he said, making me wonder if pain pill popping can keep you up all night.

After the all one dollar bill night, I arrived about 20 minutes before 2 a.m. to see Patrick's lights on; a brief knock on the door and it opened to reveal the lovely Zeppelin, whom I greeted by name with just a slight pause as I had to think a second which rock band it was she was named after.

I smelled bud and figured that Zeppelin had shown up with some.

"Geez, I didn't have to buy bud," I lamented.

But, we had a pretty good conversation; I was trying to explain to Zeppelin, after she had adamantly asked Patrick to change the channel on the TV because the (preacher, incidentally) guy on the tube looked too much like Donald Trump for her to bear; how it was her phone that did that to her. And about the Big Tech giants and the mainstream media being part of an anti orange man campaign and how she had been brainwashed by a constant barrage of negativity.

She couldn't name any f***ed up things that Trump had done, after giving, as the reason she wanted the channel changed that "...all the f***ed up stuff he did, except for one particular example having ultimately to do with funneling money into his hotels. 

I gave her the example of the cashier at Shell who, on her break was in front of the store, vigorously puffing on a cigarette and huffing out: "I know one thing. We need a new president!" and when I pressed her for her reason, as it was just a month or so before the election, she looked at me kind of as if astounded that I wasn't aware of everywhere and everything, as she put it.

"Everywhere, everything, everything you see, don't you have Facebook or Youtube?!"  

"That girl did nothing but stand there staring at her phone in between customers."

So just be careful that your aversion to the guy hasn't been planted there subliminally by social media and everything else everywhere and everything you see, Zeppelin," was my advice to her.

I wound up being able to play the hell out of some guitar and harmonica, there at Patrick's. I might have been showing off for Zeppelin, maybe without even realizing it...

So, after having amassed over 20 one dollar bills that could have easily been sprinkled with fives or twenties; had I not decided to try a song I hardly knew, I am now home.