Here is George outside the Duck Inn. So, I finally did a single on the Circle, or at least awfully near by. (Young Circle is a quarter block east and there are not that many businesses right over there.) That’s a little victory, getting a paid gig downtown for what I do. I had four people show up to hear me play, so that’s a bigger following than the Hippie, who tends to get zero.
Well, it could mean the end of an era, but I am going to leave the dog wig place for a while. In such situations I don’t usually return. The place has become too much like a job where I don’t get paid enough for what I do. Everybody has begun to rely on me so much that I can’t get my own job done. Y’day I mentioned the stacks of unanswered emails. Any one of those could be the potential million-dollar customer. Yet nobody even knows if they have been given the courtesy of a reply. While management should have been praising me for finding the problem, instead the attitude was why didn’t I do something about it? Um, that’s what happens when you fire the person whose job it was to answer the email.
I should record the major issue so the World will stay on my side. My responsibility ends at keeping track of the orders, inventory and costs. I have nothing to do with sales and absolutely nothing to do with pricing. The pricing person also got fired and not replaced. From that moment onward I was relentlessly harassed for prices that I do not have.
Sorry for the shop talk, but not much else went on today. I took George along for the ride and introduced him to more people. The gig at the Duck Inn was experimental, to see it would bring in a Tuesday crowd. It was hard to say, since there was no foot traffic to come in. Except these three Army types, an older couple and a weird Rumanian guy who kept getting in everybody’s way. Like, he walks up to me and wants to shake hands while I’m playing.
There were not even many cars in the streets. It is some Jewish holiday tomorrow but those things are usually barely noticeable. Face it, the town is dead. It has been kind of dead since a few years ago when they decided to force all the old dives out of business and replace them with these plastic high-priced valet parking night clubs. The place has become like Tsawwassen, with a restaurant for every twenty-six people. These local places seem to be very well-funded.
Entertainment can’t make a difference when the crowd isn’t going downtown. A couple of people from the Friendly Inn dropped by to cheer me on. The Duck Inn is one of those long, narrow pubs built into an older store front. Maximum seating capacity but no place for a stage. These small local pubs all have food service which ads more competition to area, yet this has not resulted in lower prices. They’ve all hit a floor at around $6.95 for the cheapest meal, beverage extra.
Next door is a Middle East café which pipes that sing-song music out into the street. The novelty effect is great; I read an article saying people puff tobacco through a hash pipe, so this is likely the place. Around mid-evening they have a belly dancer come out and do a sidewalk show. I could see her over my shoulder through the window but it wasn’t the real thing. Back when Hawaii was a nice place to vacation, I saw a demo from a belly dancing class and the moves are definitely westernized.ADDEDUM
The scan of my Chinese writing was meant to be a filler so I at first deleted it y’day It seems it was a popular item, so I am republishing. For anyone that just got here, I wrote the Mandarin (Chinese) numbers from one to a hundred earlier this morning. The numbers are read down the page in columns starting in the upper left.
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