tales of the city

The train station I get off at downtown frequently features a homeless man torturing a broken violin for money. I don't know if this guy has been deaf since birth and never learned the concept of music, or if he has simply achieved transcendent levels of not giving a shit, or what, but what it looks like is cargo cult behavior: like he noticed that some other bums had instruments that they messed around with and then they got more money, so somewhere he got a beat-up violin and a bow with one or two unbroken strings left on it, and now he rubs one against the other to fill the escalator with deranged nightmarish noise and puts a hat out. It's hideous and pathetic. He doesn't seem to collect very much.

But today he wasn't there. Instead, a totally different guy was there, a white guy wearing clean clothes, playing smooth beautiful music on a violin, and for extra cough-up-the-goddamn-money, the violin case with the money in it was being guarded by an adorable small fluffy tail-wagging dog.

I know it's just a different guy who is 5,000,000% better at his job. But my very first thought was "OMG, he finally found the Blue Fairy and she turned him into a real busker!"