the 2nd holocaust

 Well, it turns out ... holocausts are kind of  ... routine. I'm far more educated than most, in that I know very much about "The Holocaust(tm)" at all. But that only goes so far - just means I'm a good goy. Quite a while ago now, I found a long documentary on YouTube showing that genocides are actually things that happen and fairly often, and how much they're cried over depends on who they happen to and how much money and power they have. 

Hence, hardly anyone knows hardly anything about the Circassians, while the small-hats, whose whole guiding book is filled with little more than accounts of how they were able to kill off this and that group and it's OK their god said that's great and (pointing) go over there and there are some more people you can kill... ended up getting too greedy for their hosts in Germany, which naturally developed a proper immune reaction against them and well, of course to the small-hats this is the end of the world. 

But snipers intentionally aiming for children and members of the Press, A-OK! And so now there's a 2nd holocaust, arguably worse than the one the small-hats are always crying about,  and somehow this is all OK because they have all this money and power. Or so they think. 

I got up, packed things, and got going, taking said things to the post office, and I swung by the Filipino market because I'd not been there for so long. The guy there remembered me and said Hi, and I looked all around and just bought some ginger, and "Michael Savage" was on the TV. I mentioned he's Jewish and his actual name is Wiener (pronounced weener) and he wants you to send your kids to die for Israel. He said the Jews "have their hands in everything" and "all we can do is pray" and I said, "Also vote, and try to avoid giving them any money, don't buy their products". so that was a nice cheering little bit of Judenhass. 

I went to 99 Ranch and got a couple of things and they had bags of crispy fish skin for 97c so me and this little Chinese lady each got 4 of the 8 bags that were there. The chips are OK, but they forget to salt them. So I'll have to have them with some dip. 

I stopped by Tom's and we talked about things. I keep trying to get him to practice his trumpet and keep telling him to put something on the TV that's semi-interesting, and while watching it, just do basic exercises. 

Speaking of which, I had indeed played a full two hours last night and I'd noticed an interesting thing. I've found that when I was playing high notes like that one in "Danny Boy" or the high bits in the Sesame St. theme, which goes over surprisingly well, I was doing this subtle thing with the tip of my tongue, with the effect of making the mouth cavity small especially at the front, that was making the notes come out better. So I might be onto something. 

 

I play more locally

 It was a bangin' (tee hee) night for the illegal brothel, and I called the cops of course and they had a great time rousting everyone out, the rats leaving the sinking ship routine, etc.

I finally went to bed and slept until 1PM or so, then woke up again around 4. After all the transit time yesterday, I wanted to just busk locally. I headed for downtown around 5, swung by the Amazon place for bubble mailers, and got over to Whole Foods. 

The petition guy was there, and I gave him a bag of clips I had for him, that are a size he likes to use. Then I set up, did a little warm up then a song then checked the time; it was 6. So I'd play until at least 7. 

It went slowly at first, and eventually I got a dollar. Then I played for and ended up talking with a nice older Swiss couple who tipped me a $20. Then it went a bit better, but the main thing is, busking is really good practice. And I got tons of compliments. One (Black) gal came up and had no money but she's a trumpeter too, and said she'd get cash back and get me on the way out of Whole Foods, but of course that never happened. I can't really fault people for this though, because it's really easy to forget, do one's shopping, and not even think about it again. No biggie. 

Petition guy told me he had someone do something like that too, and he was a bit miffed. But I said it happens all the time, and I don't let it bother me. 

I ended up holding out until 8, so a whole two hours, and had made $42. So that brings me up to $100 for the weekend (actually $102 I think) and that means that more than half of my pay check stays in the bank this week. 

After I was done I went in and got some pork and cabbage and a pint of Guinness and ate and drank upstairs. By the time I was done with the eating part the only people upstairs were the bartender who was closing up, four rowdy guys at a table near me, and myself. Enter a skinny, kind of weird acting Black guy who kept going back and forth, and at one point the bartender asked him if he was OK. He was starting something with the four rowdy guys when I drank the last of the Guinness and got out of there. 

And the petition guy was still packing up. He'd quit the same time I did. So here it was about 9. A new player had entered the busking space; the skinny gal I'd shared the space with before, who has a cardboard sign so old it's almost more like cloth and she unrolled it. She sat on one of the bike rack things right next to my bike but I guess that means my bike was being watched. 

Petition Guy had a badge on a lanyard with one of those retracting things, with just a bar code on it. I took that inside and handed it over to Customer Service in case anyone comes looking for it, and as a reward for my little favor, found one more bubble mailer in the Amazon trash can, and a marking pen that writes perfectly well, too. I gave the marking pen to the skinny gal, and she thanked me for it. 

According to Petition Guy her name is Chloe and he'd bought her a bunch of food not long ago. He'd finally packed everything on this wagon he has, and I saw he was rolling it into the Whole Foods parking lot so I followed because I was curious what he'd driving. He's got a Toyota SUV with a V6 in it, which might explain why his mechanic wants 6 or 7 grand to put a new engine in it, since the present one has a cracked head and can only be used for short drives. Of course he's got tons of bumper stickers plastered on the back. 

The ride home was really nice and quiet, and I got back here, had plenty of coffee, and took some stuff apart while watching "The Best Days Of Our Lives", a 1946 movie about vets returning from WWII. I'd seen it on TV in the apartment I had in Waikiki in 2003, since the guy who'd lived there before had a really nice cable package then died suddenly which is how I got the place, and the cable company hadn't gotten the news. So it was a bit of nostalgia to see it again, plus it's a great movie. 

 

 

I play for the impoverished of Mountain View

 I took some stuff apart last night, made my usual online report and phone call to the police about the illegal brothel, yadda yadda. But if I'm up anyway, listening to stuff on YouTube, the pimps and ho's and johns aren't so bothersome. 

I slept so deeply when I woke up around 3:30 in the afternoon, I first thought I have to pack things to send, then realized it's Saturday and I don't have to do that, but planned to busk in Mountain View. 

I left here at 5:30 and by the time I got to Mountain View, on the #522 bus which is supposed to be faster but isn't, it was a bit past 8. 

So I was really only able to effectively busk for about a half hour, maybe a bit more. Now, people in Mountain View are poor. But there are a lot of them, and the main street, Castro Street, has been made mostly pedestrian-only, and the city has even put up things like ping pong tables, "corn hole", etc., all sorts of neat games to play for free, and of course walking is free. 

So the result is tons of people, and it's loud so I have to play loud, but not as many tips as I'd have thought. Still, in the half-hour I had to work in, I made $24.50. 

The main problem here is, 1/2-hour of actual earning, with two hours or more on each side of it. 

I played as late as I dared, until almost 9, and got on a train back to Diridon Station to walk back to Whole Foods where my bike was. I had maybe another 20 minutes I could busk there, and did so, making another $2. 

Again, it's money a person could live on, but the hours and hours of travel make the actual hourly pay quite low. My going to Mountain View to busk is like living in Hau'ula and busking at Koko Kai Marina in Hawaii Kai. At least once I'm out of here, I'll be living somewhere that's a walk or at most a short bus ride to Waikiki, the main busking venue. 

It had been another spendy day, as I'd checked places for those chocolate Quadratini things that seem to be straightening out my insides. CVS, nope. Ada's Market, yep, one overpriced bag, which I bought anyway on principle. Easy Foods had tons of them, a dollar or two cheaper than Ada's, so I got another bag there. Plus I'd bought two meat sticks and a bottle of coffee at Whole Foods before getting on the bus, plus when I was really all done and it was 10 minutes to closing at Whole Foods, I bought a pint of Guinness for just under $4. 

One back here, I counted my total money and I'm up still, to $72 or so. This isn't counting bus and train fares though, and I think there's an optimum way to "do" Mountain View. 

The optimum way is to walk out to the light rail station and take the light rail there. That takes a bit less than an hour, and the walk + the light rail ride is at least 1/2-hour faster than any other way and the cheapest. I could stay and play later without worrying about my bike being back at Whole Foods where if it's left in the rack after they close, will be stripped down and probably utterly gone. But taking the light rail back, I can get back later than 10 and just walk in. 

 

Ayman Mohamad Ghazali RIP you poor bastard

 I woke up at 3 this afternoon. Turned on the radio and the professional victims are filling the airwaves as usual, have "no idea of motive" of the latest attack on a Reform synagogue somewhere in flyover country. 

The long and short of it is, a guy came over here from Lebanon. Became a citizen. Did all the things he was supposed to do. He was 41. Living as an average American, he was not able to afford to had children. He had a niece and a nephew back in the Middle East. They were probably his love and his hope. 

Out of the 5 of us, my brother and my sisters and myself, none of us have kids. I guess none of us saw a way to avoid subjecting a kid or kids to the kind of despair and poverty we went through and opted out. Ayman probably made the same decision. But he loved his niece and nephew, probably wanted to make sure they were safe, maybe bring them here. Give them some kind of hope in life. And Israel killed them.  

The attack was amateur, inept. He had fireworks and some jugs of gas. Aside from knocking out one security guard with his car, the only harm was to himself. 

Ayman being from the Middle East would know what it took me a fair amount of time, temple attendance, and classes to learn: Reform Jews have the purpose in the scheme of things to act as a friendly face, but they are every bit as Zionist as Itamar Ben-Gvir himself. "My" rabbi seemed actually scared that Trump would not win. He could bag on Trump with the best of them, but that was all a cover. 

And so now the professional victims put up this big show of not understanding Ayman's motives. Middle-Easterners are just "bad".  And not understanding the despair of perhaps a guy's whole genetic line killed by Israel and what the guy might do, however inept, is a sure way to ensure these things keep happening. Which is perfect for the professional victims. 

I packed all the things, and headed out to the post office. After dropping the things off I rode up to Dai Thanh Market to look for Loacker chocolate wafer things and they had them. I also checked 99 Ranch and H Mart, and they don't have them. There's a chance Wal-Mart does. 

At H Mart I got some chicken and a can of black coffee and ate sitting out front by my bike. A tattooed scumsucker came up asking me for a cigarette, and I said I don't smoke, and then the security guy noticed it and told it to leave. But not before I suggested asking people at McDonald's. I mean, people who eat shitty food also do shitty things like smoke and cover themselves in prison tattoos... 

It was getting LATE. Of course I picked up shipping stuff on my way back, then got my things together and headed out for Whole Foods to do some busking, however late it is, for the practice if nothing else. 

I played from 9:00 to 9:45 and actually did surprisingly well. This being the kind of town where most people are in bed by 10, people who are out shopping past 9 at night can be called late-night people and I'd forgotten how generous late-night people can be. I also got to talk to some neat people. I played 45 minutes and made $34 and that's wasting a fair amount of time talking. 

When I got back here I counted up my total money on hand. I'd started the day with $62 or $63. I now have $68 in my wallet. A couple bags of quadratini - almost $10. A can of coffee and chicken - about $10. A bag of pork rinds - $3.69 or something. A pint bottle of Guinness and a little tub of Irish cheese cubes - about $10. It's been a spendy day and I'm still up by at least $5. 

 

Chocolate of all things

 I'd basically had the runs for months. I even mentioned it to Ken while I was telling him that celiac disease is in fact real and not a communist disinformation plot. 

I did my things, got a surprisingly good practice in considering it was again at 6-7 in the morning. The thing is, doing notes higher than C in the staff requires a pretty coordinated set of actions, and muscle tension, and all this while the body is just plain tired and wants to just go to bed and rest. 

I practiced while watching a movie called "Area Of Interest" which was interesting. It was based on the idea that a fellow named Hoess, and his wife, in command of Auschwitz, would not only live it up, but experience some kind of deep guilt and then one of their daughters would sneak out at night to stash apples where the prisoners would find them. 

In reality no doubt the real-life Hoess and his wife lived it up, and experienced no guilt at all. It's a pretty close analogue to the experience of someone administering a concentration camp, or "reservation" the remnants of one of our "Indian" tribes are in, or the wealthy administrators/owners of one of our for-profit prisons. Hell, kill off enough people, even children and especially children, and you're a hero. Abraham Lincoln was a noticed "Indian fighter" and Andrew Jackson, who was behind the "Trail Of Tears" and such enterprises, is on our $20 bill. (Benjamin Franklin, who didn't want "Swarthy" people in our country at all, is on our $100 bill.) 

I finally went to bed and woke up at 2 in the afternoon, did things and got going at the usual time, dropped off packages at the post office and deposited my pay check and now I know last week's check was good, and everything adds up. 

Then I went to Whole Foods to lock up the bike and took the #522 bus, the "rapid" one, to the music store which got me there in an hour, the time from my door to theirs the law-of-nature 2 hours. I asked about the soft flute case Craig had shown me last time, and instead he showed me another one which would not work. And I had to wait a half-hour for him to finish a lesson. 

I took the bus back as far as Lawrence and went to the Korean market where they sell really good packing tape, of which they had 3 rolls so I got those, and some cookies that looked like they were chocolate but they were really not. 

But was it ever a day for zombies! It's the warm weather. Crazy people on the bus, at the bus stops, etc. 

I got back to Whole Foods at long last, emphasis on long. I had some chicken and broccoli and a pint of Guinness, and by now it was about 9 in the evening. Keep in mind most people in this town are in bed at 10 and almost everything shuts down at 9. So I didn't get to sit upstairs, but rather had to sit downstairs and watch the antics of ...zombies. 

I got done eating and drinking and riding home, saw a ton of police cars etc at Diridon Station. It was, as could be guessed, a zombie going nuts, yelling a ton of things no one could understand. The thing's zombie dog was taken away by Animal Control and the zombie eventually ran out of energy and ended up in the back of at police car, still yelling but a lot less loud now, and still not yelling anything coherent. 

At one point, riding back on the buses, I'd gone to sit at a seat near the back and there were a bunch of hair clippings there. Someone had given themselves a hair cut there? I said something about getting on a bus and not realizing it was a barber shop, and someone said something like "Sit here" and it was a guy from the Jewish temple. The guy who plays trumpet. We talked a bit, he's still playing trumpet, I'm still same, yadda yadda. Nice enough guy, on the surface and that's what the Reform Judaism crowd is for - to put a happy face on the genocidal cult.  

But the main thing is, the day before yesterday I'd found a bunch of "Loacker" chocolate cookies behind the gym and well, they're good so I'd eaten them all. And today was the first normal "movement" I've had in a long time. 

Now, I'm going through about $3 a day in kim chee and Yakult, which hasn't been helping. If I can eat Loacker chocolate wafers with my breakfast and they cost that much, fine. No headache at all. One big difference is Loacker stuff is made in Italy and has to conform to EU regulations. American chocolate and even Japanese chocolate does not. 

So along with my Guinness and hot-bar dinner, I got a 1/2-lb can of Guittard chocolate powder, which is a local product, made just up the peninsula in San Francisco. No additional ingredients, just ground-up chocolate. I've no problem with having Loacker wafers as part of breakfast, but I'm thinking I can use this powder to make my breakfast coffee a mocha, and that might do it. 

 

Predictably

 I got some practice in around 6-7AM this morning and as could be predicted, it didn't go very well. 

How I'm hoping for when I'll hop on a plane and decrease the number of buskers in a 50 miles radius by 50% by leaving. 

Since I'll be turning 65, I'll be eligible to "audit" classes at the University of Hawaii, and I'll have all day to just play music, practice music, pick shells, go fishing, etc. 

I woke up around 3:30 I think, maybe more like 4:30, had coffee and nuts, and had packed all but one thing last night (a large flat roll of wire was a challenge to find but I eventually found it) and just packed one more small thing, and got out of here the usual time. 

I went to 99 Ranch first for a couple of things then the post office, then dropped off the big box at FedEx and in H Mart, got a package of sliced cheese and a can of cold black coffee and sat in front, enjoying half of the cheese and the coffee, and a little package of two Walker's shortbread cookies that were in the free box. They go well with coffee. 

Ken came by, later than usual but at least he came by and I got my pay check. When I go to the bank tomorrow I'll find out if the check he gave me last week was good. I was going to try to do things where I'd check with my bank today, but I didn't have time and had that big box to  take to FedEx. 

Ken and I talked as usual,  and at one point when on this idiotic "I don't like 'gluten-free' being pushed on everyone!!" thing. I fired up Google and showed how celiac disease is real, and went on about how if I see gluten-free written next to items on a menu, I don't consider that to be pushed on me; I'm glad to see that those who need to avoid gluten have some things they can get on the menu. Furthermore, I told him how I've had the weirdest thing happen, where I have diarrhea every day. It's not that big a problem, I "go" after breakfast, have my ass explosion, clean up, then I'm good until the next day after breakfast. But it can't be healthy and while talking, looked up all this stuff about celiac disease and decided I might try avoiding gluten for a while and see if it fixes things. 

Maybe I should have told him his diabetes isn't really real, and instead of insulin he needs to pray to Jeebus or some shit. In any case, he seemed to come around to admitting diseases that are real, can be real. Fucking Boomers man. 

He also mentioned, now that I found out, and told him, that the lease here is up on August 31, that he wonders what the landlord will do in terms of how much the rent will be, how long a lease to sign, etc. I said that it's not just me leaving in about a year and half, it's also if his day job lets him go, then he'll want to operate this business full time. He agreed that's what he'll want to do. 

In any case, although I keep repeating that I'm "white-knuckling it" and holding out until September of 2027, I'm getting prepared to leave earlier if things turn to shit here. If I leave a few months early, that's only a small time window where I'd not have Medi-Cal and not yet be on Medicare. Not drinking, and maybe being off of gluten, means I could assume I'd be healthy for that small period of time. 

 

 

The ol' 198th mitzvah ....

 Look it up, I still can't link it. It's a juicy read! 

It may be time to switch to Upscrolled, "It's not Zionist controlled!" and for blogging purposes, whichever one The Archdruid Greer is using these days. Wordpress I think? 

I got to work listing the 20 things I had photo'd last night and just kind of "ran out of gas" and had a stomach ace, which totally had nothing to do with the big batch of mushrooms I dumpster-dived and cooked up, and the 3 Romaine lettuce hearts from the same source I ate like potato chips, raw. 

So I kind of "ran out of gas" and slept until 3:30 in the afternoon. 

No practice, didn't even brush my teeth.  

I had my brekkie and packed what I could, and got out of here at 10 to 6. Dropped the things off at the post office and bounced back to H Mart where I locked the bike, and took my bag of change with me to Ross, where I bought a couple of pillow cases, and Sprouts, where I bought some olives and some expensive Swiss cheese from ... Switzerland. 

I walked back to H Mart, where I wandered around for the longest time .... I dunno, I was in a "meh" mood and everything was "meh". I eventually bought a package of frozen scallops and got out of there. 

Behind the gym I found a good $15 or more worth of Loacker chocolate wafer things, there goes my diet for now I guess. At least $15 or more worth of them is still not that many.  

So today's freebee was the Loacker chocolate wafer things, and today's excitement was a horrible screaming zombess, that was staggering along through the intersection I had to go through to go from H Mart to Sprouts. The thing was screaming incoherently, as you'd expect the undead to scream, and could still be heard from an amazing distance. Zombie virus ain't no joke.