Playing close to the financial kill line

 The Chinese have a clever saying for how Americans live. They call it the "American kill line" and it's a term from video games. A player is close to the "kill line" when their personal power is so low, that any attack or misfortune will kill that character. 

Americans live this way. 90% of us are one or two missed pay checks, an auto accident, an injury or illness, away from becoming losing everything and living on the street. 

So why tempt this with bad money management? 

The day started with my checking the two envelopes the mailman had put in through the slot, one being a water bill that's overdue and needs to be paid by the 30th, and one an electric bill that needs to be paid before this Tuesday. For the water will, the 30th is far enough in the future to not worry about right now, but while I can work here without water and things just get less convenient, without electricity I can't do any work and that means Ken loses the sales that keep this place going. We piss off some customers, our rating goes down, etc. It's not good. It's approaching the kill line. 

I had 4-5 small things packed and on my way up to the post office I thought this out. It turns out there are places I can pay the electric bill, including the Walmart I go to all the time. They don't take checks but they take cash, which is good because if I pay using my card I'm afraid the electric company will set my card to be the payment account and I'll have to get Ken to reimburse me each month. It's enough of a hassle to just get paid. 

Since I've been lazy and not kept a cash stash lately, I figured I'll do cash backs at places and in that way amass the $248 I needed in short order. Since I got a bit of an early start, I went up to Dai Thanh Market first since they close at 7. 

It turns out Dai Thanh does do cash back, but it's limited to $40 and the cashier really didn't want to give me $40 cash back on the $3 purchase of a can of black coffee and a couple small bundles of cilantro. So I just forked over $3 cash and moved on. 

I went over in front of Tram Coffee where it's fairly quiet and told Ken about the bills and that I could pay the electric bill and he could just pay me back, since things are tight right now. He thought that idea was great, and "I can just pay you back next week". So now to just collect the cash. 

99 Ranch is now limited to $40, so that's new. I got $40 there, cash back on some boiled peanuts. 

I stopped at H Mart to hang out and eat my boiled peanuts and drink my can 'o' coffee, then went over to Sprouts. They ought to allow $100 back since Whole Foods does, right? Wrong. They're limited at $40, although I did that twice, getting some beef sticks for the weekend and then some sausage I've wanted to try. 

I went over to Lowe's next and gt some batteries which I need anyway, and yep, limited to $40.  

This is ... not so great, I thought. I might as well ride over to Whole Foods while it's cooler and the traffic is calmer, so that's what I did. I got some hazelnuts and $100 back there, and counting is all up, I have enough for the bill and "walking around" money besides, plus a $20 bill to put in a new cash stash I can add $20 to each week.  

I'd spent the night taking stuff apart, and as usual had put the scrap metal out front. Overnight people had picked through it but when I left there was still plenty out there. So when I came back here I thought I'd have to hitch up the bike trailer and take the stuff out by the side of Old Bayshore so it would get picked up, but when I got back here the stuff was all gone, so that was great.  

The thing is, Ken told me last night that one of his bank/checking accounts was closed on him because he'd gone into overdraft too many times, and he's changing over to the same bank his employer uses, in the hopes that his pay checks won't be held for so long. So he's been paid, but it's the usual thing with people who don't manage their money well; delays and holds and deciding which overdue bill to pay first etc. 

I wish I'd understood the money game better when I was young. Don't set foot on the huge scam that is every college campus, as college is only worth it if you're already so wealthy that you can afford to toss 4 years of your life and these days, maybe a quarter of a million dollars down the drain. You make the same minimum wage with a degree or without one. And save, save, save money. Never have any debt, and save, save, save, And amass self-sufficiency skills, survivalist skills, etc. But at least I don't manage money as badly as Ken, who seems to never worry about it because somehow, it's always coming in. Except it's not, as much, these days. 

I practiced before bedtime last night, and will spend tonight taking more things apart, and practice, and am glad to be in out of the rain, which started as I was almost all the way back here. 

Wednesday, might actually get paid

 I know, I know, it's high tech (or at least selling high tech stuff on Ebay) so getting paid is not a given. 

I just have to keep holding on until mid-September 2027, then I'm outta here. 

I'd been up all night packing things and was too tired to practice and slept in until 4. Then I woke up, packed more things, and got outta here. 

I dropped off the things, and got some char siu at 99 Ranch which turns out to not be so good, kind of dry. I ate half and ended up freezing half. 

I checked as usual behind the gym and didn't find anything, other than two bums with their bikes and stuff, looking for stuff also. One guy had a big roll of stickers, and he said, "Cheaper than buying tape!". I offered some whole wheat English muffins I was going to leave for the birds to the cheaper than tape guy, which he was glad to get and offered his hand to shake - it was black with grime. I kind of made a little "hi" gesture and said something about germs, that I'm just getting over COVID. Then the other bum came up with some kind of ice cream things, for him and the first bum, which was great. It's nice that the frozen yogurt place is smart enough to buy 'em off with some cheap treats, and keep in good odor with them. And sugar's bad for health so I'm happy to see bums living on it. 

I found a bunch of packing stuff at the circuit board place then, headed home, took a detour to get around some road work and thus, checked the "trackonomy" place, and found a bunch more good stuff there so I had a big stack of stuff on the bike trailer haha. 

I got back and put it all away. Whew that was a lot of things to ship, too! Probably 30 things. 

Ken came by, and I got my check for 4 weeks, so $1600. I'm not supposed to deposit it until next Tuesday, but at least he brought me a hamburger, today. 

It turns out the vacation had been on a cruise ship, yes it'd been paid for by his wife who has her own money and who was a travel agent, and it hadn't been to see the eclipse but just for the heck of it. Ken's own finances are as dodgy as ever, hence the check not supposed to be deposited until next Tuesday. Plus he dated it for the 2nd of August when it's the 2nd of September, but that's not too far out of date. 

Plus Ken's driving his truck because, he told me, he was driving his Toyota Corolla and somehow managed to pop the tires and ruin the rims on one side, due to hitting a curb at about 35MPH. It's a place he turns in all the time but this time .... oops! 

So yeah, it's maybe one more year Ken can hold himself together and then I'm outta here. And I managed to put in a comment, as we were talking, about how good an idea it is for me to stick around here for 4 more years, exactly the length of the new lease, until I'm 67. Not that I will do this, just that it's a good idea. 

 

 

Americans are cars

 I've been thinking this concept over for a while, and over the long term it holds up very well. Americans are cars. 

Someone online did a whole run-down on this; the point that stuck with me was that Americans think of their cars as their bodies. This explains reading all the time things like, "I scraped my oil pan" or "my girlfriend needs new tires". 

It also explains why, when say a bicyclist is bothered by a driver or even lightly bumped, and hits or slaps the car, it often results in an angry chase, the driver getting out to start a fight, etc. 

It explains why Americans are so averse, as a group, to exercise and health. Who needs those when all you have to do is press a gas pedal? 

It explains why Americans are LOUD. It's been observed that cities are not loud, cars are loud. American cities by definition are for cars, not people, and are full of them. Hence American cities are quite loud, and so are Americans. Louder is better, and this is why the quality of music is based, here in the US, by how loud it is as much or more than any artistic merit. 

It's why a friend of mine down in Los Angeles bragged to me about buying a new Rivian, possibly one of the ugliest vehicles ever devised, as if it's some life-changing event. As if I could give a damn what the guy drives.  

I follow Reddit sup-reddits like r/homeless r/povertyfinance and so on, and I read every day how people who are very poor, which it's very easy to become here, are killing themselves to keep one or more cars going. 

I wonder if this is yet another arrangement encouraged by the small-hats since if the US were not so car-centric, we'd not need oil from the Middle East so much and we'd not fight their wars for them. 

I think it's likely also a big thing with Boomers because the Greatest and Silent generations would have grown up with cars, but also many forms of public transportation and also, walking, bicycles, etc. 

The people = cars thing may have gotten a big boost in WWII because an army fights a lot more effectively if you can put your soldiers in vehicles vs. doing everything on foot or even by horse, which the German Army for all their neat tanks and so on, was very much horse and foot propelled. 

So the Boomers would have grown up with parents who were very pro-vehicle. And during the "golden 30 years" from 1945-1975, it was pretty affordable to exist so that you were only a person if it was you + a car. 

My older sister, born in 1957, one told me how rough her life had been, that she only had a small car when she was first out on her own. Somehow I bit my tongue, as I didn't have a car at all, and wouldn't until I was almost 30. 

I was 12 at the end of the golden 30 years, and ended up very skeptical of cars. A car was a thing that sucked up any money that was around, so that my mom's boyfriend had money to try to fix whatever car was sitting on our lawn at the time, but we kids didn't have food (unless I went out and earned some by weeding someone's lawn or something). So from my formative years I was car-skeptical while also yearning to have a car and hating that I had to take the bus, walk, etc. 

I like to think people younger than me are even more skeptical.  

 

A year might be stretching it

 Things are deteriorating so fast, I think that I've got a year left before it becomes very difficult or impossible to go back home, is optimistic. 

The internet is shutting down, for instance. Reddit is becoming impossible to read unless you're signed in, and you can only sign in if you're  in complete agreement with their politics. (And what people think their stance is, isn't. You have to be Zionist as hell, for starters. And you have to be a classic American liberal which means you show a facade of being Left, but in reality you're Zionist Right. To further complicate things, Zionist Right has very little to do with the actual political Right, and everything to do with being a good goy.) 

As another example of how the internet is less useful than the Pennysaver, there's no way to, using the internet, tell when downtown Sunnyvale will be monopolized by everyone's favorite band, Loud Band. I tried. So I just went there last night and it turned out to be fine. 

In fact, on my ride home last night I went through San Pedro Square and Loud Band was doing its thing there, and it was really loud. I like to ride around a bit, not least to see if any other buskers exist and I can say they're just about completely extinct here. 

I got 30 things together last night and photographed them and listed 10, and went to bed. I woke up around 4, but since I didn't have to leave until 7, it was OK. I had one thing that supposedly had to go to the Middle East and I'd tried mailing it on Friday with no luck. I tried again and it's still not possible so I just canceled the order etc. Another thing had to go to Canada and I simply could not find it. So I had to cancel that order too. That left a big order of 15 things to pack and get to FedEx. 

I had time to go to Lowe's for some Windex and since they have self-checkouts that take cash, I brought a bunch of change. I saw they had a sale on Dawn too so I got that, and found that the machine was "not processing cash at this time" so I paid using my card. At least the next stop was Sprouts where I got a bubble mailer and some cheese, that last for $5, and their self-checkout *did* take change. 

Then I dropped off the big box and got a cold coffee in H Mart and sat and enjoyed that along with some "seaweed peanuts" from 99 Ranch. I'm 2 lbs down from last week so  I'm doing something right. 

 

Last busking day of August

 I tried to get going a bit earlier today, but in the end I left at 5 anyway. But it was at 5, not some time after 5, and I got over to the bus stop pretty quickly too. But of course the 2-hour rule can't be broken under any circumstances, so this time the #522 buses didn't seem to be running at all and I rode a #22 and got to the Sunnyvale Whole Foods at 7. 

It went OK I guess, except that in an area where 8 or 9 at night is considered really late, I need to start getting there earlier, maybe leaving here at 3. 

I played until 8 and made $35. Then it started feeling really dead so I walked back to the bus stop, stopping at Baraka Market for some olives, and got back to the Sunnyvale Whole Foods at 9. My bike was knocked over but nothing was harmed. Probably some kind of drama, as the bums are thick on the ground these days and bums love drama. 

When I'd arrived there and locked the bike, there was a bum-ess sitting right in front of the bike racks, very much on Whole Foods property, with the usual piles of bum-junk, and a really cute dog. And a sign, unreadable of course, because that's some sort of a law, that beggars have to have a sign that's unreadable. So maybe she'd gotten in a fight with another bum or something. 

Anyway, I actually set up to play some more. I started at a quarter after 9 and figured I'll try it out until a quarter to 10. It was really dead though. I probably only played until a bit after 9:30, making $8, then went in and got a bag of hazelnuts and had a nice conversation with Kenny about busking.  

They deported Milo

 Haha they deported "Milo Yannoupolis" or however the guy's name is spelled. Honestly, if he was going to stay in the US he'd need to Anglicize his name, pronto. 

Anyway he's a "far right" clown who was all for deportations, and the leopard ate *his* face so it's pretty funny. Back to the UK for him. I wish they'd find an excuse to send *me* to the UK, I can even pass their little online "cultural citizenship" test without any studying. 

I practiced last night and it went really well. I'm not sure how well high notes are supposed to work with the traditional deep cup type mouthpiece I'm using. I think it's leading to a better development of my embouchure where a traditional 3C trumpet mouthpiece is more of a "cheater". My thinking is, if/when I go back to a 3C, I'll be able to run circles around where I was before. 

I left here at 5, and rode right over to Whole Foods and locked up the bike. I had $4 on me so I got one beef stick, since that's the game (I'd left the $20 bill I had at home). 

There was a guy begging, standing about where I'd stand if I were playing there. He called out to people, "Do you want to donate to a charity?". He was not wearing any kind of a vest or anything, no booth or even a chair, and I'm sure his ankles and feet, in slippers and looking like they'd not been washed in months plus the guy might have diabetes, were quite convincing to the charity-donating portion of the public. So I'd just locked the bike and got my stuff together and got out of there so the guy would know I was not going to set up and interfere with his .... charity work. 

I got to the bus stop just as the #522 bus came so that was nice.  I got to the Sunnyvale Whole Foods and started busking at 6:45. There was a hitch, though. First, it was kind of windy, but mainly, there was some kind of really loud festival or something going on nearby. 

I set up in the parking structure and that was OK. The festival sounded like it was at least partially a Dolly Parton tribute and I could not compete with that. I played for an hour and made $26. I decided to get out of there and get back to my "home" Whole Foods and it would probably be late enough for the bum to have made his money and gone. 

I walked out to the bus and didn't even get a yogurt drink because I was going to play some more. At the bus stop there was a big Black guy with one pant leg sort of hitched up or taped up or something like he was riding a bike, but with no bike in sight. He was staggering around and talking and yelling to himself, and threw a pair of pants out into the road. Then went and picked up the pants. Then  threw them again. 

A chubby Indian or probably Pakistani guy came up, to wait for the bus too, and then a couple of gals who made the mistake of walking over by the bus shelter which this bum had sort of claimed with his erratic behavior. He hassled them so much they walked back, past myself and the other guy, and I guess just away somewhere. 

The guy came up to us and started demanding to know when the bus would come, which I didn't know, how long I'd been there, which was maybe 12 or 15 minutes. Then asked the other guy and I said he got here after me. He asked where I was from and I said Sunnyvale born and raised. Then he said he was San Jose born and raised and I said "My condolences" and then he wanted to know my age; he's 58. I said 85 and when that didn't seem to fly, I said "We vampires live forever" and made the kind of smile that shows my fang-y teeth haha. 

The bus showed up and the Pakistani guy and I got on, and I tried to tell the driver, through the barrier, that this guy's causing a lot of trouble and bothering everyone, and to not let him on. Too late, though, as he'd gone in the other door. A young, fit, but small Hispanic guy said he'd threatened him, too.  

So now it was up to the bum to, of course, come up to the driver and do his best to get in her face, and I'm sure she was thankful for the barrier. He walked to the back of the bus and then came up and ranted some more, walked back again, then up to the front and got off the bus. 

So the bus went on, and in a short while I was back at my "home" Whole Foods and I wasn't sure if I'd set up and play, as it was windy, but I thought, What the heck, let's do this. 

So I set up and played, and it went fairly well, considering. It was a little bit windy, it was 8:45 when I started, and there was some kind of custom car show or something going on so there were people with vintage cars - but somehow, modern sound systems - coming through every once in a while, blasting their tunes. And presently a ton of cops came down the road, sirens going. 

I'd made $26 in the hour or so I played in Sunnyvale, and made $27 in the 45 minutes or so I'd played there in Sunnyvale. Really I'd just made $7 in $1's when the bunch of police cars went by, and a lady spent a while digging around in her purse and seeming to think over things a bit, then put in a $20. I took that as my cue to leave and I packed up. 

Also, a weird gal with some kind of speech impediment that causes her to talk about 2X as fast as needed, wanted to donate something but off of her EBT as "All I have is my name". And EBT. As well as I could understand her. I said I sure don't want to take someone's EBT money but she insisted. So I said she could buy me a bag of hazel nuts as I buy those all the time and they're only about $6. 

She then hung out by the carts for a while, then came back up to me and said she's going in to get the nuts, and I said, OK. But then school of cop cars went by and the lady dropped in a $20 and I was set to leave. So I packed up and looked around for her inside Whole Foods and didn't see her. She seemed really scatterbrained and probably forget what she was in there for or something. So I just got two beef sticks for tomorrow and got on my bike and rode off. 

I wanted to see what all the cop cars were going to, and rode up The Alameda and all I could tell was they had an area blocked off to car traffic and it seems pretty serious. 

All in all things seemed kind of crazy today and sure enough it's a full moon. 

 

Does "israel" have a right to exist?

 Yes, I say, in the sense that it existed during the Ottoman Empire. If the good guys had won WWII, the rest of the small-hats would have been sent there and they could live as "dhimmis", or hosts of Islam, allowed to practice their "religion" such as it is (it's hard to call a regime of parasitism a religion) and not allowed to prey on the human population allowing them to live. 

When I started seeing the gaping holes in the supposed logic behind modern Judaism, I thought, Well, if I were really devoted to this religion I'd not mind living as a dhimmi, paying my dhimmi tax and being allowed to live humbly, do my reading and prayers and all that, and I would feel good that I'm not harming other human beings. 

But herein lies why I could never become a Jew, even though I thought so at one time. I see humans as humans, I see the natural world as something worth treasuring and caring for, and could never internalize the parasite view of the world, where all people other than fellow parasites are things to be used, the natural world a thing to be used, etc. 

To give an example of the right way for things to be done, the Amish/Mennonites are very devoted to their religion. So they've found a way to live that doesn't step on the toes of others. One could say they pay a "dhimmi tax" in that they have to pay income tax, register their carriages etc., but they do these things and life goes on. They're not taking over anyone's banking systems or media, or medical "industry" or loan sharking, or distributing drugs, or importing immigrants who won't fit in, etc. They are not parasites. 

I photo'd 20 things last night and listed 10, found things to pack today when I got up, and when I got up I packed them and was off to FedEx and the post office. I practiced last night but I was tired and it was a short practice.