A Bad Idea

I got back, got my practice in and had done a bit more than an hour's worth and it was time for Ken to come by, as he said he'd do, "Monday night". When he was 15 minutes overdue, I called him and he'll come by Wednesday, the usual time.

I futzed around and came up with a bunch of stuff to list, photo'd everything, and then decided I'd list the things the next day because listing Ebay things at 2-3-4AM is wierd.

So I got involved watching YouTube stuff, and had a few spritzes of my throat spray, which is mostly 120-proof Chinese white liquor. Then I decided the throat spray should be saved for an actual sore throat, and it's not healthy to swallow so much cherry flavored phenol however dilute, and I'd go right to the source.

Thus ensued the consumption of many capfuls of the liquor, and I got properly drunk.

This was not a good idea because I really didn't feel that much better or happier, and I woke up with a good proper hangover. I feel awful. Coffee and aspirin helped a bit, but I don't feel like eating much and certainly don't feel like practicing because it'll make my headache really pound, I fear.

There's a guy on the radio talking about "How Jesus Became God" or whatever the title of his book is, which I went right on Amazon and ordered. It'll get here at the end of April. It sounds fascinating; what hooked me was his saying that it was the Greeks who believed in an eternal soul, while the Jews believe in a soul but not an eternal one. That's a hell of a difference. So I really want to get and read this book, and then I can pass it on to Ken who's fascinated by this stuff, and then Suzy, Ken's wife, may want to read it too.

The virus has everything shut down but the idea is that things will come back in some form. And then it's back to thinking about where it's best to go to retire. Back in Hawaii I will be the hated "haole" regardless of the fact that I grew up there. Here in the SF bay area I'll just exist, at best. Life will be all about trying to avoid dying homeless in an alley. New Orleans seems tempting and being a trumpet player I'd be more wanted than unwanted. But it's part of the USA still and worse, part of the South. Converting to Judaism and retiring in Israel is still on the table. It means I need to get back to work learning Hebrew but all the tons of videos I've watched of Tel Aviv remind me very strongly of Honolulu when I was a kid, and there I'd be actively wanted. Playing trumpet/shofar would be a very nice icing on the cake.

(Shofars, it turns out, are not "tuned" the way bugles are and unless I find one that just happens to be tuned right, bugle calls do not work on a shofar. And here I'd been thinking my local temple could really use "Mess Call" being blown before the oneg, which is bread, wine, and generally a fair amount of food, served after the service.)

And the radio interview finished up, and it turns out it's for the latest book by the author, so I went and ordered that too. So there went about $40, but it's worth it if it helps me make a major decision like if I'm going to move as far away from Hawaii as one can get on this globe. I canceled the first book, since it's the latest that really gets into the things I'm interested in.

The thing is, the age of moving somewhere without deep thought is over. If I'm going to move back to Hawaii, as a hated "haole", I have to deeply believe in being there and the feeling has to outweigh the drawbacks of being a hated "haole". The same would go for New Orleans, which has cheap rents and crawfish and people using French words like they use Hawaiian and Japanese words back in Hawaii, but also has crime and angry black people and Southern politics. Israel's got angry Arabs and heredim (super-orthodox Jews who do things like not serve in the military and spit at gals wearing shorts) and is surrounded by enemies but from my research, seems to have more neat stuff going for it than any of the other places I've researched.

I managed to make a very nice bowl of miso soup with salmon in it, which made me feel better for a bit, and got the Ebay items listed. Ebay starts acting really weird late at night so doing the listings in the day or early evening is best these days.

I also got all my cans of fish etc organized into boxes that are all in one place. I'd keep everything in a military type footlocker upstairs except it gets too hot up there, but it's better to have my canned foods in a set of identical boxes that are all in one place, behind some other large boxes full of poorly-selling Ebay stuff. I've been following r/preppers on Reddit and the basic plan is to store stuff away in the face of a looming catastrophe like now, and only get into the "preps" when it's no longer tenable to go out to get things. In normal times, you buy what you'd normally eat and cycle through it, keeping a few months or a year's worth at all times so when disaster strikes you're already prepped.