69th day sober. Up around 3, I'd practiced last night before bed, listed 10 small things on Ebay, etc.
It's funny; yesterday there were two different bums who stood out to me. One was walking on 1st street past me while I waited for the light on my bike. Leroy was playing just down the street, and this bum was a skinny black guy in the usual motley assortment of clothes and rags, with his chest bare. Also, he was black. I braced myself for a stink when he went by and ... he smelt lovely. Like some kind of coconut soap and nothing else so it's not like the soap was masking some basic funk. It was a very pleasant experience as he wheeled his cart by.
The 2nd was one of a couple of trashy white guys at an outdoor table at Whole Foods, that I walked past to get out to my bike. They were laughing and carrying on in their scratchy bum voices. And at least one of the guys had a stink that trailed past him like a long tail. Phew! How can the guy stand to reek like that? And how do his friends/partners-in-crime stand him?
In fact in all my life I've only known of one stinky black guy; it was a guy who did some work on the USS Bowfin and I think he actually had mental or substance problems. I hope he got things straightened out for himself.
I only had 3-4 small things to send out but the way Ebay is tracking shipping times, I needed to get them out today. So I packed a couple of them that weren't packed yet and got out of here around a quarter to 6. On the way back from the post office I did about $40 worth of shopping at H Mart, including a dish of fried fish cake and green onions and some kind of vegetable, that I used to get all the time.
I might want to get out of here earlier on Fridays because the scumsuckers, who seemed to be laying low during the shutdown, seem to be out in their prior numbers and after the workers have gone home the scumsuckers tend to consider the area "theirs" as, if you're not a worker, why would you be around here unless you're homeless also?
Going out busking doesn't seem to be much of a problem because I head straight to downtown and come straight back in. I even take a different route coming back, going up First Street to Brokaw and in.
I got back here and put my groceries away and ate, and got out of here about 7:30. I started playing at maybe 8:05 and played until 9:15. It felt slow, and I worked on some new tunes like the theme from M*A*S*H and that "Leaving On A Jet Plane" song. I finally decided I'd tired myself out enough, and packed up. I'd made $29.30. I got a lot of nice "Thank you"'s and people were nice. In fact when I left Whole Foods after I was done and had bought some things, the cop there smiled at me so when I was all packed up and ready to go, I said to him that it must be tiring having to listen to my trumpet and the guy said that actually, he enjoyed it. That was pretty cool.
He also said the petition-signature gatherers and so on were still coming around, and quitting around 7:30. I'm thinking I should start playing a bit earlier, and it sounds like at earliest I might be able to get there a bit after 7 and wait for the petition guys to pack up and leave, or maybe I'll be able to play and it won't disturb them.
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