You Are Also Quite Awesome

Today was a quick one. Two hours and 75 bucks. I can't complain.

I was playing on the N train platform at Times Square when this hot chick walked up to me and said, "You are quite awesome." I didn't know how to try and get the conversation going, so I awkwardly said, "I'm sure that you are also quite awesome at things." She looked at me weird and walked away.

One interesting thing was when I was in the middle of a piece and this woman was walking toward me. She was holding a newspaper and the cover was folded all weird. She was messing with it, trying to get it folded right, but she was having trouble. When I saw her struggle with this, I fucked up the passage I was playing right away. Isn't it wild that simply watching someone mess something up will cause you to also mess up. It's kind of like when you were in high school and your friends said that they were gonna cut a class, then you're like, "Fuck it. I'll cut that shit too." But that's more of a conscious thing, so I guess it's a little different.

One other thing about messing up is that I have a conundrum whenever I see a beautiful woman start to walk my way. Do I concentrate on my playing and not get a good look at her or do I check her out and risk fucking up? Then if I mess up, I make it more obvious that I was gawking at her. To look or not to look? One of the most important questions in the history of man.

First

Hey everyone. So, hello people I know and people I don't know. My name is Matt and I'm a busker (street musician) in New York. I've been playing guitar down in the subways for seven years and it's kind of ridiculous that I haven't started a blog until now. Alrighty.... here goes.

Okay, it's 2010. I started this shite in 2004 and I remember after ten months of busking thinking to myself, "Holy f#$%! Ten months?" It really is like a drug. It doesn't really make me happy, but I keep doing it over and over again.

Today was the typical combination of good and bad stuff. Here was the first crappy thing. These two kids walked up to me. One was about 8 and the other was around 18 or so. I'm assuming that they were brothers. The older one was wearing tough guy sunglasses and had a look on his face that screamed, "I am the shit and don't you forget it!" Anyway, they walk up to me (this was five minutes after I started playing) and see that I don't have any money in my bucket. But I did have a few of my business cards laying in there 'cause sometimes I leave random stuff in my money bucket. So, the 18 year old with the bandana and tough guy sunglasses reaches into my bucket and takes all of my business cards that I left in there, which was probably ten or so. Those cards are about 5 cents each, so he pretty much took fifty cents out of my pocket. This was a big douche move by the guy, but I wasn't about to start and argument with him. But right after he takes all of my business cards, the 8 year old says to, presumably, his older brother, "Mess him up!" With 'him' being me, of course. I want someone to explain something to me. Why are so many kids so obsessed with violence. Video games, movies? I don't feckin' know. The mindset of these kids was pretty much, "Let's steal pointless shit from this busker that will never do us any good and then beat the fuck out of him just 'cause we're bored."

Then about a half hour later, this behemoth of a dude walks up to me and kicks my CDs across the platform. At first I thought he may have done it by accident. But he didn't. He never even looked back at me to see my response. He just kicked my shit all over the place and kept on walking. I hope he ends up as the middle-man in a human centipede. The only positive here was that some old dude was watching me when this happened and then bought my CD 'cause he felt bad for me. I'm not sure that he wouldn't have bought it if the guy didn't kick my CDs, but if I had to bet I'd say that he would've just given me a buck.

Then on the train ride home, these kids were selling cute little stuffed Tyrannosaurus Rexes to the straphangers. Or I should say that they were trying to sell them. These kids were walking up to every single person on the train. If someone was listening to their iPod and couldn't hear them say, "Would you like to buy a Tyrannosaurus Rex?" then the kids would simply place the little stuffed animal directly in front of their face. Imagine you're sitting on the train minding your own business and out of nowhere, it's like Jurassic Park 4 all up in your grill.