Sunday Busking 101

• I Am Shot With Paint Balls On Bike Trail
• 101 Dollar Sunday Some Comfort
• Harold the Cat Returns After Day Away

I was relatively early on my journey into the Quarter Sunday night.

I had put $164 bucks on my prepaid card the night before and was going out, hoping for any amount of cash to help stave off my having having to spend any of that.

Since Sunday at the Lilly Pad can be busy earlier than on other nights, it was only about 9:15 as I set out on the bike trail.

I was hoping that one of the auto dealer conventioneers, who might have visited Lafitt's Blacksmith Shop Tavern on Thursday or Friday, but not tipped me, and had then went and done other things on the other nights, none of which giving him as much satisfaction as his visit to the oldest bar in America, would be returning to it, and upon arriving, would have his memory of the good time he had refreshed at the sight of it, and seeing "everything the same," right down to myself in the same spot, playing, would give me a generous tip.

I'm always very careful when I ride the bike trail, making sure that nobody (no matter how much it appears that they hadn't even seen me coming and weren't even paying attention to me) would come within a proximity to me where, with a sudden dash at me, they might be able to lay a hand on me.

As I approached the bend in the trail which wraps around a basketball court, I saw 3 young black men getting out of a car which was parked in the corner of a lot, where it might look like they had put it in order to be as close as possible to the court.

They were headed towards it, and were going to have to cross the bike trail to get there. I increased my speed enough to make sure that, unless one of them was that Bolt guy who ran in the olympics, and unless he can run just as fast wearing boots and a trench coat, I was going to be able to skirt them. They were conspicuously not paying attention to me, which had put me on alert.

And the fact that they even moved towards the bike trail right as I was coming along, instead of having waited at the car until I had passed, just to save me the consternation engendered by seeing 3 black teenagers, apparently about to cross the bike trail to play basketball in trench coats and boots.
As I made my closest approach to them, they did indeed make a charge in my direction, stopping about 10 feet short of the bike path, before I could pass them.

The first one, the one in front, a tall, skinny not very dark black kid, pulled what turned out to be an automatic paint ball gun out and fired at me, striking me in the side of the face (see photo).

From the angle suggested by the bruise, and the fact that yellow paint wound up coating the inside of my right eyeglass lens, I would say that he fired after I had passed him and was moving in an away direction. This might have been what kept me from falling off the bike.

I then felt some considerably less forceful projectiles from the guns that the other 2 had produced, hitting me.

Other than the ball that hit me in the side of the face and one more, I believe from the same guy with the most powerful gun, which hit me in the calf hard enough that I wondered if it might not have been a small caliber bullet, I mostly escaped injury. I hadn't expected weapons though, and had to admit that, they would have probably killed me if they were "real guns."

101 Dollar Sunday

If someone were to have told me, on my way out to get shot and then play at the Lilly Pad, that only 2 people were going to tip me that night, would I still have gone out?

Of course I would have; suspecting trick question all the way.

I played for almost 2 hours Sunday night, and made 101 bucks.

This was after having stopped at the Quartermaster, where my story made headlines, and where one of the guys who works there helped me wash the blood off my face and put a band-aid on it.

And then, it was a clean cut, well dressed guy who sat and listened to me basically enjoying myself, like someone who had 172 dollars on his cash card, and who had just cheated death might.

I had started my tip jar out with 2 fake 100 dollar bills.

When the guy dropped something (or I thought he did) in the jar, I said "thank you," and kept playing.

When I stopped and leaned forward to see just what he dropped in there, I had to laugh, he hadn't put anything at all in there. There was just the 3 fake 100 bills that I had started off with...

But, wait. I had only started out with 2. One of them was real. The bandage on my face only briefly came up in the conversation, so I didn't feel like I had gotten it as a sympathy tip. That would make me a bandage skeezer; they're some of the worst.

Three days ago, I calculated that I had only made $110 the past 7 days. Now I have made $350 in the past 7 days.

Now, it is Monday night. I have a strong urge to go out and busk more.

I might have close to 300 bucks at such a time that Rose and Ed pay me back the 40 on Wednesday.

There seem to be 3 categories of expenditures that are competing for the money.

A Laptop

A laptop would give me a veritable Swiss Army knife, and I really should get one while I have the money.

It would be a word processor, video camera, recording studio, and would allow me to put a lot more energy into this blog. If I get a wi-fi connection, then I could basically sit in my room with the power of the worldwide web at my fingertips; able to post music videos to Youtube right from my apartment. Hard to imagine that this is all going to be ancient and obsolete technology in say, 25 years...

The Apartment

I could use:

• Bath salts
• New woofer
• vacuum cleaner
• cleaning agents
• potting soil
• blender

My Business

• There is a spotlight for 20 bucks at the Walgreen's that has a beam adjustable from a spotlight to a floodlight, and it puts out some ridiculous amount of lumens, made possible by cutting edge lighting technology.
• Batteries for the current spotlight that has to be shaken and/or whacked before it will come on.
• Guitar strings
• Harmonica
• Guitar capo
• A small amp/mic combo, to boost vocals and put a bit of reverberation on them?

The idea now is to take my mind off of spending money by going out to try to make more on this Monday night.