70th day sober. I got a decent practice in last night and this is where I'm doing things differently from when I was busking before. Before, if I busked on a given day/night I didn't practice also. But I am seeing a real benefit from doing a practice as always before bed.
I was up at 3:30 in the afternoon, feeling very tired too.
I left for downtown about 5. First I went to Nijiya for coffee pour-overs (expensive but good, and better to be addicted to these things than to alcohol) and was going to get a bento but there were none. So I got a "super taco" at La Victoria on 4th.
I rode right over to Whole Foods and found that there were no petition-botherers there, and it was about 6. I set up and played for about 20 minutes and got absolutely nothing. I'd had to turn at an angle to avoid the sun and I theorized that it was enough for people to keep track of, trying to see while looking almost directly into the sun, not run into things like the bike racks, wonder if their cart was going to lock up on them, plus watch traffic coming in and out of the parking lot, to worry about some trumpeter.
So I packed up and rode over to the Old Spaghetti Factory and played there. After about half an hour I had $9 and I decided I'd get one more dollar then pack up and right then a lady dropped a $5. So I packed up and went back over to Whole Foods. The sun was still annoying so I got a can of black coffee and this time upstairs they had the Lagunitas alcohol-free beer, so I got one of those. One of the bartenders asked if it was me playing earlier, and said it sounded good. "Were you playing some Glenn Miller?" he asked and on the principle of never arguing with a customer, I said something like "Yeah".
I got back down to play at about 10 after 8, and started in. I played until 9:10, making $20. I might have done as well staying at the Old Spag., but I thought Leroy would probably set up there at 8 and I didn't want to interfere with him. I counted up my money, making $34.25 this evening, and put a dollar bill that had a tear in it into my pocket, thinking I'll give it to someone. That opportunity came up quickly, as, waiting at the light at the corner in front of Whole Foods, I heard a rustling in the bushes. A female zombie, thin as an Indian fakir, unfolded herself from, perhaps, a nap in the plants there, and I offered her the dollar "You need this more than I do". "Thanks" she muttered as she took the dollar in her unwashed paw, and *skipped* up the street. Can you buy very much in the way of drugs for a dollar these days?
I rode back through San Pedro Square and Leroy wasn't there. So maybe I could have stayed there all along and done better, or maybe I'd just missed him. In any case I've made $112 this weekend. It's been tiring but I think I'll get used to busking three nights a week and of course my long-term goal is not only to build a safety net in case things go sideways with my day job but to toughen up for when busking will be my retirement job.
Inheritor as I am of The Last Busking Blog On Earth(tm) I am always curious about what buzz there is about busking and "street" ways of making a living in general. For instance, I just finished reading a thread on Reddit by a bunch of people in Plano, TX discussing a "family" of man, woman, and kids who panhandle there. It sounds like it's Gypsies, and it's being suggested that they just go work at Amazon.
But there's a reason they're not working at Amazon, besides the fact that they may not have their papers in order, and since their kids can't work there, they'd have to pay for child care while they work there. The street won't fire you for not having fashionable enough clothes. The street won't dock your pay for taking a 20 min. break instead of a 15 min. one because you have to take a dump. The street doesn't care if you want to take a day off, or if you want to work a ton because it's an especially profitable day.
Working a regular job sucks. You have to dress right, eat right (woe unto you if you don't eat from the company canteen, the approved lunch trucks that come around, etc.) drive a car and it'd better be the right kind of car, and so on. All of this costs money. You can actually be fired for being poor and at one time I thought I was about to be fired for being too skinny. I think what saved me there was being an intern - I'd never have been hired there as a regular employee as I lacked the car, the clothes, and so on.
So this is why you have a panhandling "act" on the streets of Plano. I myself prefer to play music but everyone does what they're good at. If I were good at standing on my head, I might do that instead, and probably make more money.
It's a good thing that most people are merely concerned about the increasing number of homeless and beggars on the street, because there are actually much larger problems. I've found a series of lectures on YouTube by some people I've been following for years and some others who are new to me, but it appears that due to the global warming we've cause we are Utterly Screwed(tm), the point of no return having happened back in about 1950.
It's not going to matter if white cops in the US keep shooting black people or black cops in S. Africa keep shooting white people, or what kind of blustering blowhard is elected leader anywhere. It's not even that, locally, the blackberry patches I used to visit have been mowed down and likewise the purslane, that we're in something like a 1200-year-drought here in California, or that entire towns in Canada (Canada!) have been scorched off of the map. It's that the whole Earth is cooking, exactly as Svante Arrhenius warned us of.
I'd been into doom from 2005 or so. I discovered the Peak Oil theory, and gotten into doom and collapse in general, and the crash of 2008 assured me that I was on the right track. But the survivalist place I ended up living on came with a set of beliefs that one had to subscribe to, and like in the movie "The Postman", one had to believe that global warming was a hoax, and that while something was wrong with human society that would cause it to self-destruct, the Earth and Nature would be just fine. Green and verdant, just waiting for Right-Thinking Survivalists to repopulate, modestly of course.
In fact, the survivalist vision that I think reigned at this place, and that is in effect in survivalist groups in general, has almost a point-for-point match with the Nazi version of how the Earth would be lived on and managed, once all the pesky non-Aryan people were gotten rid of. A peak world population of nice white people living with tons of forests around, and waters abundant with fish, and everything managed just right - all white.
In other words, this dream - so common on Reddit - that all one needs to do is buy a few acres "in the country" and life will be fine, is false. The water may well - probably will - dry up at most of these places. Weird whipsaw weather from heat domes to strange and severe ice storms may make raising crops difficult to impossible.
The Earth is going to cook, and quite likely no vertebrates will survive. We're headed to a die-off more severe than any prior. How much of this I'll see in what time I have left I'm not sure. Things will be interesting in Hawaii but they're going to get interesting everywhere. It's become really apparent that there's no refuge in moving to the Midwest, or to Canada if I had the million dollars it would take to do so, or to any other country I can think of.
About all there is to do is to try to live life doing as little harm as can be avoided, and just go along with the program. For now there are groceries in the markets, and money spends, and people tip street musicians, and my Social Security checks will *probably* come through OK in a few years and I'll be able to get back to Hawaii somehow.
We are all on the beach.
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