After Ken left last night, I had more chicory coffee and practiced through two episodes of Treme on Amazon Prime Video.
I picked this up from the movie Trumpets Republic, where the champion Balkan trumpet player was shown practicing while watching some awful Balkan TV show, and realized, you know, the guy got those killer licks by spending sheer time doing them, and TV shows are not only entertaining but they provide a good timing method.
Ken had brought some mail by, including a book I'd ordered called "AKA Doc The Oral History Of A New Orleans Street Musician" by a "Dr. Saxtrum" who of course has a few layers of other names until, as he notes, after he dies his real name, unknown even to most of his friends, will come out at his funeral.
It's a hell of a little book. He traces his life from the 1950s and really got out and around. I can't recommend this book enough, especially to the prospective New Orleans busker.
Or, like Street Musician Daniel and many transplants, you can just head on down there, make a career out of wangling a free living off of the taxpayer, hate everything about New Orleans from the people to the cuisine, and go on occasional rants about the damned fags and the niggers, who are all in it together against you. That's always an option.
One thing that comes up often in Dr. Saxtrum's book is the conflict between blacks and whites in New Orleans because it came up so often in his life. There was basically all the kind of petty and at times not so petty shit I had to deal with being white in Hawaii. It's well worth studying to try to understand social divisions like this. There was even the "passing as white" thing in branches of his family, and what cemetery you could be buried in.
Of course that's the same shit as Hawaii, we were next to starving to death at one point when we lived in Punalu'u and you could count our ribs from across the street, and there was a Christian church across the street from us, and they've never have thought in a million years of helping us kids with any sort of food aid, even leftovers. They had parties and banquets right across the street from our hungry noses, and I was scrounging around for coconuts to husk and eat, and hoping I'd not get caught and my head bashed in .There's a little cemetery there and I'm sure it's not polluted by the bones of any hated "haole"; you're just supposed to feed them to the sharks or the dogs but only if you don't like the dogs.
Louis Armstrong notes how in the 19-teens, any black could be "impressed" into service by any white, in that if they saw you walking down the street and needed help loading a wagon or something, they'd call you over "C'mere boy!" and you had to do what they said. I can't compare my experiences with the experiences of blacks in the US which were worse and sanctioned by those in power, but it was the same understanding when I was a teen and one morning these Hawaiian neighbors - we never talked to them and were afraid of them because it was understood they could do anything with us and there was nothing we could do; I remember their name as Kealoha but I'm not sure now - the neighbors' daughter, about my age but bigger because she was better-fed, ordered me to help her try to start a car she was trying to get running. Rich enough to own a car, and my getting to school didn't matter; what does it matter if a "haole" goes to school or not? So I had to help her work on this car until she finally gave up in frustration and after asking her if she was done with me, I then got on the bus to school. I was late, but there was nothing I could do. That's a hell of a feeling.
Yes, my youngest, and my oldest, sisters live back there, but in both cases they've married well and are in their little protected bubbles, which hopefully will keep them safe. Myself, I like to get around and circulate. I'd always been an explorer, since I can remember, going far up and down the beach, far beyond what you'd expect a little kid to wander. It's a miracle I wasn't "disappeared". At least I had sound instincts and knew to stay out of sight.
I just don't think whites have to live this way in New Orleans. Sure there are bad areas, but you don't have the government, the school system, the cops, the post office (not going to explain here) everything against you. There's *one* busking venue in Hawaii, of a few blocks in Waikiki, and if the non-white-powers-that-be decide I can't play there then I can't play there. New Orleans has a bunch of different areas and streets, and a soft spot for trumpet players.
So as I've told Ken, at least the plane is to give New Orleans a try, and if nothing else it can be a "polishing" process, before I retire in Hawaii after all. Then I'd have the "protective coloration" of being "from New Orleans" and could tell people we, in my family, are "part French" which in Hawaii is pretty damned exotic. That's how it works in Hawaii; you try to pass yourself off as anything non-white you can, like "Portuguese".
So I got my practice in last night, and I note that I'm getting stronger, being able to hold longer tones at high-C and do some notes above it.
I looked through the wad of mail I'd built up, thinking my mail-in ballot was in there, but it's not; just the form to apply to vote by mail. I thought I'd put that I want to be a permanent vote-by-mail voter the last election. So I have a choice: I can bust out some money from savings and walk 1/2 hour to the light rail, take that to the transit center that's between Santa Clara and Alameda counties, and from there just get a cab to take me to my polling place and vote. Then reverse the steps to get back. It could take as little as 2 hours each way.
I looked over the sample ballot I have and I don't know shit about 99% of it. Because Ken's home address is my legal address, I'm legally a resident of Alameda County, the politics of which I don't know shit about. I live, and have lived, in Santa Clara county for years counting before the economic crash and afterward.
That's a huge, huge complaint I have about this area. It's hours and hours of travel to do anything. I looked it up and it would actually be easier to live in Baton Rouge and do everything in New Orleans, or live in New Orleans and have to do everything in Baton Rouge.
I decided I'll work on Christmas and on New Year's Day and all those other holidays, but election days are now my holidays, and headed out. I walked over to M8trix and changed a couple of $100 bills into $20's, and had a "double down" which is a nice bacon and eggs breakfast, and was even able to get tomato slices instead of hash browns, so it was a good "keto" meal.
I went over to the light rail and took it to Baypointe, which I like to call Baypointy. Then another train to the Milpitas BART station, and called the local cab company. Their receptionist is a robot, and I told the robot where I was and I was supposed to get a text back when the cab they assigned to me started out, but I never got the text. I'd decided if the cab didn't show in the 25 minutes until the #217 bus showed up, I'd just take the bus. It was a matter of just traveling up Warm Springs road, a bit past Ken's house where I legally live, to the local fire station where I went in and voted. They told me lots of people didn't get their mail-in ballots and I was able to vote with a "provisional" ballot.
I walked back out and waited at the bus stop going the other way, and bus with another number stopped and the driver picked me up and said he'll take me to a stop where I can get the #217 or the #66 because he's not sure how late the #217 runs. So he dropped me off at by the Walgreens a couple miles down the road, and after 20 minutes or so, a VTA (Santa Clara county system) bus showed up. Great, I figured, I'll ride this one right downtown and go from there. It did indeed go downtown but it crossed Santa Clara at 11th street and I got off there at a bus stop that was kind of creepy. A guy on a cruiser bike kept going around aimlessly, and two cops in their cars were parked in the parking lot behind me, zoomed off on a call, then came back. Weird people kept going around in weird ways.
So when a #23 bus came by, I got on and rode it down to 7th street and a bit less creepy stop with a decent looking Pho restaurant to look at the menus of. And pretty soon a #22 came and I rode that right to the front of Whole Foods on The Alameda.
I went in and got baked chicken and broccoli with garlic and some fizzy water and ate that upstairs, then went back in and got walnuts and stuff and then walked over to the light rail station that runs alongside the Diridon train station and waited with all the weird people there. There was a couple, the guy skinny as a rail with a very tall bicycle, and his girlfriend very fat, with blue hair. They spoke the usual underclass patois, all about cigarettes and such subjects. He mentioned something that sounded like he saw a bike he wanted to steal at the train station but it was locked too well, darn it. There was a crazy older lady and her crazy little dog running around, with her calling out "peepee" which I guess is the dog's name, but some other crazy guy was wound up in it too, and the fat gal went off to help somehow so that when the light rail came they missed it but I didn't.
I got off at Airport/Metro and walked in. It's been so dry that the plant life is way down from what it was. There was a whole happy little ecosystem along the sidewalk with ground squirrels and those wasps that knock out spiders and pull them back to their holes (I saw one doing this) and all kinds of interesting birds and bugs and things, and now it's a construction site and the area along the sidewalk is either gravel or wild oats that choked everything else out except for the odd mustard or thistle.
They're saying it will be an early fire season this year and it may be, but usually there's more fire risk when lots of green stuff grows over the winter and then it dries out when it gets hot. There's not that kind of growth this winter.
As I got back to the shop here, I noticed a ton of police cars where the bridge goes over Bayshore, and checking Reddit, it seems there's been a big fire where 10th street starts, burning a few shops in a row. A fire could start at any time, sure, especially when considering oil, solvents, etc but at this time of year things should be damp if not outright wet. So maybe it really is an early fire season...
And we're all going to get the coronavirus so the powers-that-be should be working more on how to care for those it affects badly, rather than freaking people out by holding out hope that if they wear a mask and cross their fingers right they might not get it.
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