"Where Were You?" Type Situations

High noon occurs around 1:15 p.m. around these parts...

The sun may be directly overhead at 12 o' clock wherever the time line is drawn, over by Pensacola, Florida, but it takes another 80 minutes or so before it is looking straight down upon Sacred Heart...

It seems that my work is cut out for me; clean the kitchen and do the Wim Hof deep breathing exercises; then it will be incumbent upon me to go out and play at the Lilly Pad; even though the carrot on a string in front of me will probably the prospect of finding alcohol and tobacco and weed on the ground.

There are so many people smoking weed out there -you can smell it just about once every hundred yards you walk- and the preferred smoking method seems to be shifting away from the "blunts" made from emptying the guts out of a cigar then using the outer leaf to roll; towards the "tubes," which were very popular with my Russian friends back in Florida, 20 years ago. Their word for a tube like that was Kazbak with the long "a" vowel sounding like "bake."

But the tubes are easy to spot laying on the ground all over the Quarter, and usually still have the last couple puffs still in them; from people not wanting to smoke them all the way down and taste the paper in their last toke.

Lilly has been calling me and asking me to go down there to play; just to be present in her block; pulling on my heart strings by telling me that her younger daughter, Angelique, can hear me, and it calms her down and helps her sleep, and that it warms her own heart to know that I'm "out there."

This kind of puts a bit of pressure on me as, if I tell her around noon that I'm probably going to be out there by 4 or 5, then I start to feel negligent if for any other reason, I decided not to go down there.

It feels like a job to some degree and I sometimes feel the same reluctance to go to work that I did when I had jobs that required punching clocks and being stuck there until the end of a particular shift.

When I was homeless, it would get boring just sitting under the dock, hearing the bustle from the nearby Quarter, and all I would have to tell myself was: "If I don't go out to play, I won't have anything..."

And, sure enough, after emerging and walking to the CVS for "the morning energy drink," and consuming it; I would usually berate myself for having lain there so long staring out across the river.

Then, there would be the walk down Royal Street, stopping to chat with up to a dozen different street performers, so that the sun would be sinking low at such a time I would play my first few songs at the Lilly Pad, before taking the first 5 bucks I made off to a nearby store for "the evening alcohol drink." Then I would basically play and drink; and it would follow the pattern of playing pretty well and making around 18 bucks per hour, until such a point where I would start to get sloppy in my playing; and then would go off to gather up food, on my way back to the dock, where I would build a small fire and have a feast. There would typically be beef tenderloin fillets or lamb upon the tin foil over the fire, to go with any number of those prepackaged salads that come with greens and some fixings intended to impart a theme to the thing. A Mexican-style one might have cheddar cheese along with a few chips and some salsa, in the package, type of thing. There was always plenty of sushi, as Rouses Market would throw a black plastic bag out nightly, which could be located in the dark by squeezing each bag in their dumpster until hearing the tell tale sound of sushi containers crackling -only one kind of plastic makes that sound... 

Sometimes I would have a half dozen containers to go along with the tenderloin on the grill, and would be done cooking and have extinguished my fire by the time the Natchez steamboat returned, after making its last run, at around 1:15 a.m.

Then, I would eventually drift off to sleep, to be woken by the calliope playing around 10 in the morning, drumming up passengers for its 11 a.m. departure; when both the Natchez's and my day would start. This was pretty much 7 days a week for me, as I would have been bored silly staying under the dock all day any day...

I think I figured that I was living on about $280 a week back then (2011-2013) which means I was adhering to the grueling work schedule of playing around 15 hours a week.

Today, I still feel the gravity imparted by my having told Lilly that I was going to resume playing every night, once again. Now, she can give me a "Where were you last night?" call at any minute. I am dual minded on this. On one hand I benefit from the feeling I get after I  robot-ically go out on nights when I don't really feel like it, after telling myself: "This is my job; it's all I have to do to hold up my end of 'the bargain'" and I wind up having a great night, usually telling myself: "And to think I almost stayed home and missed out on all this..." as I pedal homeward...

Then, on the other hand I kind of started busking so as to be my own boss and not have to deal with any "Where were you?" type situations...