Wild at Heart and Crazy on Top.

I was out for maybe 45 minutes last night until one of my strings broke. Replacing it would have been a cinch but I'd taken out my boxes of strings at home, searching them for a G and lamenting that I'd used all of them already. My current G string (for my guitar, thank you very much) is coming apart at almost every fret, and I was certain it would blow off and lash my face at any number of my outings lately. However, not to be figured out so easily, the Universe willed my D string to break instead.

On Tuesday night, a girl slipped the following note into my guitar case:

hi!
(I'm not a sketchball)
I saw you getting out your guitar with your harmonica around your neck and wondered if I'd be lucky enough to hear Dylan. Then it was the first song you played. (let's be friends?)

She included her name and e-mail address as well. I appreciate the note a lot because it seems like something I might do if I liked a street performer, and simultaneously didn't wish to be mistaken for a creep. I'm really afraid of that. I remember realizing one day in high school that someone who feels things as strongly as I do (in this case, it was love) tends to be regarded as a creepy person. And I didn't want that. At the same time, I don't really know how else I should do things. I guess it's nice to be so passionate all the time, but it gets less nice when you get labeled "crazy."

Not that I particularly care what people think. I used to wear polar bear pajamas and hawaiian shirts to school while singing along with the Devo songs playing in my blue Sony Discman that I'd outfitted with industrial strength velcro in order to attach the unit to the fuzzy ceiling of my 1989 Honda Civic so I could avoid track skipping on bumpy roads. In case you're wondering, it didn't work.

Nevertheless, I don't like the idea of being discredited. That's why I don't ever want to be an alcoholic, drug addicted, child molesting, fascist, hallucinator who's a fan of Gray's Anatomy: it totally discredits anything else you might have done. People won't trust you around their wines, medicine cabinets, children, flags, senses of reality, or television sets...and that's no good at all.

Things got so hot and stale in the 50th St Station last night that I very nearly passed out. I love how I can put off busking for days at a time when the weather's nice, but once the thermostat creeps up to the triple digits, I'm out strumming my stuff every other night. Take that, Global Warming!