Ugly Bugly

 After taking a lot of packages to the post office and FedEx and getting back here and cooking and eating dinner, I got involved taking a large HP test instrument apart. There were two of these things I guess might be called electromagnetic positioners (linear type) on top and I was just going to move those, then I decided, why not take them apart? 

So I took those apart, because the bearings and their tracks and the positioners and their tracks are pretty universal, it's just the big, heavy "beds" of the things that are heavy and were likely made for one applications for one company. Hard to sell. But the parts, in their their greasy glory, sure. 

Then I lugged the big HP thing up into the office here and got to work. That was pretty much the night's work. The guy who picks up the scrap I leave out here was surely happy, because I heard him pick up the scraps from the positioners and the outer covers of the HP thing, and then when I was done with the HP I had an even bigger, possibly almost as heavy, pile of scrap to throw out. And pretty soon he was picking up those too. It's a nice service he provides. Yeah I could be turning in the scrap myself but it's a hassle and if there's any side thing I need to do for money, it's busking. 

I call big pieces of test equipment that are heavy and hard to deal with or ship, "ugly buglys" and this was possibly the most so that I've ever dealt with. It was some work! 

I went to sleep on 3 beers instead of on 4 or 5 or 6, and woke up feeling better. In the last few days I've realized, with absolutely no interest in buying my musical instruments that I want to sell off, that I'd be best off selling the clarinet back to West Valley Music and donating the reeds, books, and aftermarket mouthpiece and ligature to San Jose Jazz. Donating the shakuhachi and shinobue flutes to the Nichi Bei Bussan store in Japantown, donating the concert flute I'm not keeping to San Jose Jazz, and as for the glass flutes, maybe West Valley will want them also. 

And putting the time and energy into busking. I need to go to sleep on zero beers, because if Guinness is making me feel a little bit better, than I need to have maybe one Guinness with dinner and that would be it. But probably it's made me feel a bit better because of B vitamins and/or iron so I could just obtain and start  taking nutritional yeast, and look into what greens are good for iron, like beet greens maybe. 

Waking up at 1 in the afternoon, I had time to pick out 20 things to list out of the parts I'd freed up last night, and to list them on Ebay. Then I packed things that had sold and took off at the usual time. I took a quick look at the dumpster on the other side of the building and there was a nice checked-bag sort of luggage, so I put that on the bike trailer, took it back here, then headed out to do my mailing/shipping. 

Besides visiting the post office and FedEx I went to both 99 Ranch and H Mart but didn't buy any beer. I have enough around here to taper off on. I used the last of my money to get the 2 for 1 after 7PM special at H Mart, those little crabs that are fried whole. I'd not had those for a while. 

I picked up some packing boxes and stuff on the way back, and on the ride back here, I saw two bums on bikes on the intersection of Brokaw and Zanker. One bum, with two bike tubes hanging off his bike handlebar, had finished talking to the other one and doubled back and rode off, and as I got closer I saw the one still there was good old D. L. or Diabetes Legs. 

My God he's even fatter and I didn't think that was possible. Also his legs look like they're just about to rot. It was all Heyyyy good to see you, didn't know you were still around, etc. He said he had to go use the bathroom somewhere, something about staying in Milpitas, I dunno, and rode off. The guy lives on 2-liter bottles of soda.  

I was finishing off the crispy crabs when Ken called. Suzy's had some kind of back surgery and he can't come over tonight so will come by tomorrow night. I said that's fine and tell Suzy to get better soon. 

On my way back from 99 Ranch I'd taken the trouble to ride back on the "wrong" side of the road, on the sidewalk, to check out a large suitcase I'd seen lying there for the last week or so. It looks OK so I grabbed it, so now I had two to choose from. 

I had a look at them, and I like the one I found first, best. I found out why it was discarded; it's missing a wheel. I thought it was just a two-wheeler. That doesn't bother me that much. I could put another wheel on it somehow, or just use it as a two-wheeler. It looks pretty good, Hung Phat brand, and still had airline tags and stickers on it from a recent flight. I can't beat the price, and now I don't have to worry about the logistics of buying one at Ross and getting it back here. Thank you, someone at Silicon Valley Precision Machine, for taking a flight and losing a wheel and thus supplying me with a workable checked bag. 

In other news, Marvin Naylor lives! His web page is very wonky, and it takes some real digging to find his actual latest post. All I could find was the last post I'd tried to comment on, failing. I was afraid the guy had keeled over dead or something. But no, he lives, you just have to dig at every possible angle to find any sign of this online.  In a way this is right and just, because the internet is pretty much a fucking load of nonsense and what matters is what you go out there into the world and do. 

 

 

Americans crave the stupid

 Americans crave the stupid; they yearn for it with all their hearts. Why else would Americans be moving to places where the stupid is thickest like Texas and the South in general, especially Florida? 

In Hawaii, this translates to moving to the legendarily lawless and crime-infested Puna district of the Big Island, where at least until recently you could buy land for a few thousand an acre, the catch being that then you have to live in Puna. 

I just got an email today from my friend Pat who does indeed live in Puna and cannot comprehend why I'd not want to move there myself. This is someone who had a couple million around 1990 when that was real money, pissed it away in record time, managed somehow to buy one of those "unpermitted structures" in Puna, and has been living there in misery, with a mystery illness, a freeloading girlfriend, neighbors he's enemies with, and the poverty that comes with living off of Disability with absolutely no desire to work in any way, not even under the table, since. 

He's also a vegetarian who can't stand for me to mention fishing, who keeps 3 cats (which amounts to the meat consumption of 1 human) and feeds those cats on food shipped in from Australia, since apparently buying fish off of the locals isn't something he's going to do. 

So we're discussion the failing colonial project of "Israel" and he just came back with all those Fox News bullshit, how "they" are going to institute sharia law, yadda yadda. 

Being out in the sticks, he can only get AM radio, no FM and no TV, and who knows how rudimentary his internet is, if mine is slow as shit here in Silicon Valley, he's probably down to text and the occasional .gif. Right-wing web sites tend to cater to people with old computers and outdated skills so he's probably on those, like Breitbart etc. All day every day because ... work is a dirty word! 

The thing is, like myself, he grew up on the island of Oahu. Unlike myself, he didn't go through the kind of poverty I did. Maybe that's why he never became as "local" as I did. I'm going to assert that if you're fishing on the reef for dinner, doing odd jobs to buy S&S saimin with spam and green onions for dinner for yourself and your siblings, if your idea of a good time is beach combing especially at 4AM to find Japanese glass floats, etc., you're local. 

Pat never had to do these things or would be inclined to. He may not have even gone to public school, and I know he went to the Catholic summer camp. He always had enough to eat. He graduated high school and I'm sure he has a college degree. 

He's also so "fair" he practically glows. He has no "local" accent, so for the longest time I assumed he was pretty fresh off the boat from the mainland. 

The thing is, though, he knew a ton of people, had a ton of connections, could have found a cheap way to stay around the Honolulu area which is a pretty intellectual place, and he intentionally moved to Hawaii's answer to Bumfuct East Texas. 

He's basically replicated the lifestyle of those leeches, the 1970s hippies who moved to Hawaii to leech off of welfare and food stamps. And he didn't have to end up this way. 

Of course Dave T. in Honolulu is if anything even worse, he's lost his houses, tons of electronics equipment and collectible records, valuable coins, etc., because he wouldn't let Pat and with Pat's arrangement, myself, help him. I was ready to jet over there to Hawaii a few years ago because Pat tried to arrange to have Dave let me clear out a room in one of his houses to live in, and help him sell his stuff and prepare one or more houses to sell. I thought this was a great plan because I'd not have to have $20k or more on hand to make the move. 

That all fell apart, and if Pat is a right-wing loon, Dave is the same, in spades. Dave's Chinese, or more precisely Cantonese, probably third-generation American and fell for all the right-wing radio and loon sites Pat's apparently into. 

Getting back to the email, I told Pat that no, sharia law is not coming to Puna, and no, the news about the "Israelis" shooting children and reporters isn't just an invention by what he called "al-jazzera" but is solidly documented.  

Too dumb to know you're beat.

 Here it is Monday night and, well, it's a Monday what more to say. I woke up earlier, around 1 in the afternoon and I need to keep "marching" my wake-up time back to a reasonable level because I really need to be able to show up at the DMV with a ton of papers and my passport and get my "Real ID" taken care of. The email I got months ago isn't very helpful except to give me an idea of what kind of papers they want; the passport takes care of proving I'm a citizen, and tons of stuff with my address with it will prove residency. 

Our Most Zionist President is proclaiming more victory over Iran, they're in their last gasp yadda yadda. I wonder if the Vietnam debacle was like that? I only remember all the stop signs on Portlock Road being spray painted with the word "WAR" so they said, in effect, "STOP WAR" and being a little kid, I just thought that (a) it was normal, and (b) we're at war somewhere and that's normal too. 

There was Army/military stuff around, our going to A.L. Kilgo's to look at all the neat military surplus stuff, and it was always a fun thing when Dad steered the station wagon to the part of town where there were Quonset huts, like the one Kilgo's was set up in. I love Quonset huts to this day. 

Later, when we were staying at the luxurious Schofield Sands, one morning we were awakened by tanks coming down the street, right out the window, at 7AM. If there's anything a kid loves, it's tanks coming right down the street, right out their window, at 7AM. My mother was less than thrilled. We waited eagerly to see if the tanks would come back by, but they didn't. 

So those are my real-world impressions of the Vietnam "war" and they're not much to build a thesis on. But of course we got our asses kicked out of there, and my point is, apparently we charged in there for real in around 1965, and were probably proclaiming all kinds of victory and "We've got 'em now!" from then on, and could not see that we'd get rousted out of there in 1975. 

We were not smart enough to see that we weren't going to win, and why would we think we would not win? We had all the planes and war materiel, all the high-tech, etc. We even had a little of what our enemy had, which was determination and guts. They just had much more - they were fighting for their homeland and against utter extermination. 

This is the situation we're in with this Iran thing. The Iranis are fighting an existential war. As the saying goes, Whenever you think you haven't accomplished much, remember the US in Afghanistan took 20 years to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. Iran is Afghanistan squared. 

So here I am now as an adult, seeing a fiasco not as funny signs and neat machinery but as the possible end of the US as biggest bully on the block. 

I'd packed things last night, packed more things, and took them to the post office and Fedex. At least I have to pack more things. 

Oh and last night I got a practice in, hurray for me. Practice is going well. It seems that some of my troubles with higher notes are not just a lack of conditioning, perhaps, but also a lack of relaxation/coordination of all those little muscles and systems I don't have names for. 

 

 

RIP Abe Foxman

 Where RIP = Rest In Piss. Or maybe in a big vat of boiling excrement, as the small-hats insist Jesus is, for his horrible crimes of empathy, love, and universalism. 

Abe Foxman was one of the leaders of the small-hats' parasitism, insisting everything's "antiseptic" even the air, haha. As the saying goes, he left the world a better place, by leaving it. 

I slept in until about 3 in the afternoon. I packed one thing that the buyer wants ASAP, by UPS on their account, and those never go well especially on a Sunday. So I just sent it FedEx and they'll likely get it tomorrow because they're really close to here. 

 

Richard Wagner was right

 The small-hats destroy music. I woke up at a quarter to 3, turned on the radio, and they've got some interview, big puff piece, on a small-hat who somehow won the Pulitzer Prize for composing some opera about the little match girl or something. 

The guy's not musical. He can't sing, he's "not a good keyboard player" and the singing he did, as he admitted, is off key. He seems to be using computers to do a lot of the actual composing. His explanation of how he composes, I thought would be like I would do if I were a composer, you develop it in your head, hear it in your head, can zero in on what the flutes or the tuba would do, etc. He would be better at it than I am, being a composer and all, but no, his explanation is singing tunelessly and using computers for this and that. 

But he's a small-hat with small-hat money, whose parents sent him to Stanford to become a doctor because what better profession for blood-suckers than to be able to actually suck blood, literally as well as figuratively in the form of money. But I guess he sensed a better con. And he's working on an opera about the book "The Wealth Of Nations" because what subject is dearer to the small-hats than money? 

I will have to study, and listen to, Wagner more. A real, creative, composer who gave us the language of modern music. 

I was up all night listing stuff on Ebay, and the illegal night club did its thing but wasn't enough of a bother to call the cops. 

I was up around 3 this afternoon, and packed a big capacitor for one customer, who then ordered another one so I packed that also. I took those to FedEx, stopped in at Sprouts for some Guinness in cans (there seems to be a situation where it's only possibly to buy it in those tall cans or in these weird bottles with the same nitrogen mechanism in them as in the cans) and followed my route finding packing stuff on the way back, which got me a lot of packing stuff. 

Dinner was Mama green curry ramen with hamburger and a whole bundle of cilantro. It seems like an inexpensive way to get a lot of greens for less than a dollar and I like it. 

H Mart where I picked up the bundle of cilantro,  was super busy and it made me wonder if I should try busking there. There's the "island" in the parking lot where the gypsy kid had been busking a while back, and lots of people going back and forth. The only problem being the wind, I'd need to put something pretty heavy into my tip box to keep it from blowing away. 

My friend Pat on the big island has been emailing back and forth with me for a bit, and he mentioned a Phil I think, who often has a room for rent around the Manoa area. I said that'd be perfect. I said I don't know how things will go here but I'll have at least 2 weeks' time before I hop on a plane. And that I don't mind landing in a hotel, it's just that hotels are expensive so it's not really sustainable long-term. 

This is promising though. Pat may be a doofus but he knows people.  

 

Friday payday woooo

 I spent most of last night getting things ready to list on Ebay, then hit the sack around the usual time, about 6 in the morning. 

I woke up around the usual time too, around 2:30 in the afternoon. I had 3 small things packed and in the bike bag and only had to have some breakfast and clean up a bit and got out of here a bit before 4. 

I dropped off the packages at the downtown post office, and deposited my check in the bank, and my math and their math were very, very close. Close enough for me! I think I pay a $3 or so charge for getting a mailed monthly statement if I have less than X in my account and if X is 4 grand, that could explain it, but I think X is actually only about $2500 and I think it's just slightly buggy math. Off by less than a dollar in 5000 dollars is a tiny bit. 

I went to Whole Foods and got some food and a beer and cash back, then when I was done with that I got some other things and cash back, so that I'd taken my "allowance" of half my pay check out. I ate upstairs and got curious about a fake rock they had there. I took a look and it's a mouse trap. Some utility worker guys were at a nearby table, talking about work stuff, and we got talking about the rock and rats and mice in general. 

The 2nd time I'd gone into Whole Foods to get things and cash back, a guy thought I worked there and was looking for something. I said I don't work there but what's he looking for because I know the store pretty well. He had "low vision" so finding things was hard for him. I said "Follow me" and we went over to the cracker section where I found his black sesame crackers right away. He thought they had some medicinal value, it seems. He has to get up to pee too much at night, he said. I said that sounds like (hedging my bet) pre-diabetes. He said he's got diabetes all right. Low vision, 35+ BMI, yeah... pretty easy diagnosis here. 

I went over to TAP Plastics for a plastic bottle and a squirt top, because I've found that "Lime Away" is a great product but not the bottle it comes in, which not only had a hard to use dispenser top, but leaks. 

Then I rode over to the Amazon place, only finding a couple of bubble mailers but Oh well it's two more than I started with. I also found Leroy busking in front of the old Johnny Rockets. 

Leroy's looking (and sounding) great these days. He's got a shirt with his name and a saxophone and music notes on it, and is playing his new Selmer which has a nicer sound than his old horn which was actually turning green in places. He's also using backing tracks which are a big help. His guitarist friend had gone back to New Orleans. We talked about this and that; he told me the Starbucks is gone now, and how, online, there's the legend of the Starbucks cup in the Johnny Rockets, sitting there for years now, like the whole place is trapped in time. 

I rode down to Walmart and got a bunch of things, stopped at Nijiya on the way back for garlic, and got back here. 

I feel like I haven't played or practiced for a month. It was warm, then it got cold again. I find it hard to practice unless I've got everything else done, but that's not working. The ideal time to practice would be,  I figured, after the daytime things are done, but before it gets too late. There are too many hinky characters around here now to risk being heard in the wee hours of the night. 

And, for three nights of the week, the illegal night club is operating and I don't want to be heard by the sketchy people associated with that place. So there's a time window of something like 9 or 10, until 1AM. Tonight after eating dinner I brushed and flossed and chewed sugar free gum and got some practice in. It went well too, considering the time I've taken off. I got a solid hour in, and now, for the rest of the night, I can do Ebay stuff which isn't noisy and not much of a tip-off that I'm in here.  

Registering to vote

 Ken came over last night, and I got my pay check which he says won't bounce. We talked about stuff, and it was pretty much just the usual. 

I woke up the usual time, around 2:30 in the afternoon, and packed things. I can't deposit my pay check until tomorrow so it was the usual route of post office, FedEx, stopped at Sprouts for beer, found packing stuff on the way home, and got back here. 

I'll deposit this latest check tomorrow, and my level of worry is down maybe by one notch. I'm still worried because Ken's not paid that $1000.95 he owes the landlord, and we still have our present lease running out on August 31st. 

So the plan is still to be able to step onto a plane September of this year instead of September of next year. Maybe Ken will be able to make things hold together and maybe he won't. 

The guy makes pretty exactly 10X what I do, $200k to my $20k. But being a devout Suburbian is expensive. You have to have a McMansion or at least as big a house as you can possibly afford. You have to have N+1 cars where N is the number of people in the house. You have to eat in restaurants a lot, take regular vacations whether you can afford them or not, and you have to have several credit cards that are at or near their limit.  It's a very distinct, and expensive, subculture. 

Another piece of mail that went out was my voter registration. I've been sent two forms with different serial numbers, so I filled out one (disposed of the other) and sent it in. Of course among other things the form asks for one's race. because race is everything in the US. 

I wrote in "White" because although I am certainly more than "one drop" Tatar that doesn't count the way being "one drop" Negro would. "One drop" Negro would have gotten me life on a red carpet, with free college plus extra pay for going to college, plum job offers, etc. 

Now ask yourself, would Japanese, over there in Japan, their nation, enact laws putting Japanese at a disadvantage and, say, Koreans or Filipinos at a huge advantage? Would Spaniards set up laws against themselves, and in favor of Ethiopians? When has any group that's doing fine, enact laws to sabotage themselves? 

The answer is plain and clear and can be expressed in a single word: Jews. The very group whose signature move is to infiltrate a host country, then open its gates to an attacking army because profit. This ranges in practice from physically opening a medieval fortress' gates to taking over the media of a country and brainwashing people, as is done in these modern times. 

In any case, growing up where being white is a disadvantage, and living in a time where it's the same (moving to California didn't get me away from anti-white discrimination because Da Jooz run the whole thing, not just the state of Hawaii) I've had to become canny. 

Going onto Ebay has been a lifesaver because Ebay has no mechanism to pay a seller more of less according to their race. Being self-employed is pretty much the key to getting around the ZOG rules. 

But in Hawaii there have been extra nuances. For instance, selling trinkets in Waikiki. You can't do that if you're white. If something physical changes hands, you're going to spend the night in jail, if you're white. If you're non-white, go ahead it's fine. But in playing music, nothing physical changes hands. Plus, being white and being a musician is actually kind of good because there's the "exotic factor". 

The most valued tourists in Hawaii are the Japanese tourists and Asian tourists in general. They spend money, they're polite, etc. And imagine growing up in Japan and seeing on TV etc all these musicians who are white, and then in Hawaii there's one in the flesh. 

I've been astonished seeing white guys playing guitar not only barely tolerated but considered as OK as anyone, on the strip in Waikiki, on YouTube but that appears to be the situation. I think there's always been less racism against whites in music in Hawaii for various reasons. Firstly, music is not considered a prime occupation, and also a lot of musicians that Hawaii musicians admire are .... white. Get any old local musician guy talking and he'll gush about white guys like Chet Atkins.  

So this is why busking and doing things like maybe playing in some bands to fatten up the sound, playing Taps, stuff like that factors so largely in my plans. 

There are tons of other things I can do but I'm not even counting on Ebay any more because although once back in Hawaii I'll be out from under the rigid non-compete situation I'm in now, it appears the small-hat that runs GameStop (running it into the ground apparently) is trying to buy Ebay for some reason. And given that the small-hats own and operate our financial system, this may actually happen. The problem is the particular parasite proposing this has no knowledge of the history of Ebay, and wants to try changes that have been tried and failed utterly. 

So Ebay may ... go away. Etsy will presumably still be around, and there are tons of other ways to sell stuff so I'm not that worried. But it will be interesting. The small hats are over-reaching and over-reaching and the anger is building, like a tsunami that is only inches high when it crosses the high seas and then when things start to pinch and the water gets shallower....