84th day sober. I was up into dawn sorting a bunch of connectors to put onto Ebay and then listed a small part of them - all the sorting will pay off tonight when I can put more onto Ebay easily. I didn't practice because I felt so damned tired and instead read a bit of the Bill Mauldin biography and went to bed.
I woke up at about 1:30, decided to stay in bed and went back to sleep until 4. I had a headache, so it was vitamins and coffee and sunflower seeds and ... aspirin. It eventually went away enough, and I took off for downtown a bit after 5.
I stopped at Nijiya for some coffee pour-overs and this stuff that's supposed to keep the toilet from smelling bad "one drop" it says. That was about $10.
Then after leaving a few rolls of Necco wafers and a jar of almond butter in each of my three regular little free libraries, I got over to Whole Foods. I didn't pick up any books, but I'd picked up 10 graduate level math books from in front of the Goodwill on 7th so I had those, in a cloth bag, hanging off my handlebar.
At Whole Foods I made up a plate of tabbouleh, hummus, yoghurt sauce, etc., to be my breakfast/dinner/whatever and that was almost $10. I ate outside and then went back in to pick up a can of coffee and a liter of Whole Foods water because I use the liter bottle to keep water cold in the fridge.
So I had my little can of coffee to drink during sort of breaks in playing. I decided I needed to make $40 today to make my goal of a $100 weekend. So I'd just play until I'd done that.
I played from 6:45 until about 8:45 and it went fairly well. OK, I've decided, if $40 or better an hour is not going to be routine, then fine - I'll just play more than an hour. At one point I counted up and figured I needed about $6 more, and played a bit longer with eventually a guy with a big cargo bike I had a conversation with kicking in $1.
I could tell it was getting to be time to go when a scumsucker came up. I was crouching down, counting, when this skinny druggie looking white guy came up and first asked for a smoke, and I said Sorry, I don't smoke. Then it was a light and I said I try to carry some matches for people who ask but I didn't have any right now. Then it was "some water" and I told him he could go upstairs to the "beer garden" and ask and they'd just give him some water, and I went back to my counting and then took the bills and put them in the zipper pocket on my trumpet case and closed it and stood back up with my foot inside the loop of the strap, and old big-city busker trick. By this time the scumsucker had gone to ask the cop something or other, and I went back to playing.
Eventually I had someone toss $7 in, and I played the Lawrence Welk "Goodnight" song and that was my night. I'd made $44.10 making, for the weekend, $111 and change.
I rode for home by way of San Pedro Square. I'm now thinking that Whole Foods is not that much better a place to play than The Old Spaghetti Factory, they're just different. It's a lot less noisy at Whole Foods, but at the Old Spaghetti Factory, or rather, in front of some empty store fronts just up from it, it's a lot more resonant. As I rode through there I noted no other performers and there was enough of a crowd that some money could be made, but not for me as I was done for the night.
My endurance is building up, plus I'm noticing how easy it is to "sound out" things I've not played before and of course I don't have printed music for.
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