I drank too much

After all the busyness of mailing packages, and shopping, and finding stuff, I got back and relaxed perhaps too much. I didn't practice, I drank too much, and went to bed. I can tall I drank too much because apparently in the night I'd gone to the bathroom without making it to the bathroom. Now I especially need to do laundry.

Shortly after I got up at 3 or so, there was a massive bum fight/screaming match outside. It was between a male and a female bum, and as usual I could not understand what was being yelled in their lower-class dialect, but could only tell that they were very angry. They took off in one of the bum-cars I see around here at night.

I've taken to reading r/preppers on Reddit for obvious reasons, and one thread about safe, secure feeling one gets from having food stored really struck me. One person said they grew up food-insecure, so they've always stored food etc. I guess I'd have to call how I grew up, *very* food-insecure, because by the time I was in my teens we'd become so poor that any food that came in was eaten right away. There was no saving up food. I lived literally hand-to-mouth.

Later, out on my own, it was sheer luxury to buy a package of hot dogs and have the whole package to myself. To just go and eat a hot dog, just like that. And I thought I was poor, but looking back, my eat-it-before-someone-sees-it habits had me eating restaurant food when I should have been stacking flour and such things under my bed and cooking my own meals and stacking away money even when I was living in a rooming house and making $400 a month.

I can go back over the decades, pausing at each one and thinking, "And I thought I was poor".

I tell people, "Save, save, save your money". Right now, I don't make a ton of money, but as much as I've been spending on "prepping" I've still got a fair amount of the stuff. I just spent $8-odd on Amazon on a 10-pack of P-51 Army type can openers, to keep a couple or few for myself, give one to Ken, and hand the rest to homeless people. And almost $40 on a set of those really ugly "Crocs" shoes, the "Bistro" model, as I've known for a while that Crocs are popular with kitchen staff. I need something cooler to wear around here than my "Bear Paws" which are like low-budget Uggs, and I couldn't stomach paying $80 for another pair of Vans.

Playing trumpet is a regular phantasmagoria of droplets, so I'm not sure how soon busking will again be a thing. This brings me to something I was thinking very seriously about yesterday. Maybe I should be a sign painter after all. There are a lot of arguments for it. Takes less lung power. Can sell signs online. Doing signs in Hebrew would do wonders for my learning the language. Background in art - it surprised everyone that I went into electronics instead.

And I came around to the same brick wall I always have: Art was something I was expected to do, and then had to do, to earn a little money to feed myself and my sisters. There are just too many bad memories and it's also why I could never go back to Hawaii. After WWII, were there droves of Jews going back to their old towns where their families had lived for centuries? Hell no - they got to the US or Palestine/Israel as soon as they could. Someplace completely new.

Long ago I knew a guy in the amateur radio community who wasn't the smartest guy but well-liked because if anyone needed a favor, he'd do it. He'd been a violinist, and now was retired, living there in Punahou Towers, there in Honolulu. I visited him once and he had a violin hanging on his wall that I looked at wistfully. Would he teach me? He'd been a "Concertmaster" so very good, but he never wanted to touch the violin ever again. He'd put in his time, done his bit, and now he was done with it. I wish I'd known to look to see if he had a tattoo on his arm.

Playing the violin had enabled him to survive, no doubt. Just like art, whether a portrait or a very carefully done counterfeit car safety inspection sticker, enabled me to survive. I've felt so bad about myself over the years, beating myself up because I "should" like to do art, but I have to accept that it's a very real thing that one should have to use a talent or an ability to survive and not really like it, just use it as a tool that one wants to toss aside as soon as they can.

To me, it'd be absolutely wonderful to be highly skilled at the violin. But my retired violinist friend was possibly forced to practice by a starving family, or who knows what horrors. I was never even that great an artist, so it's not like some great talent died here. I was told I was talented, endlessly. But really it was just sheer exposure; constantly being given art materials. Both parents were frustrated artists, so it figures.

But what really gets me is, the people dying of the virus that are being mourned are the musicians. There are a cross-section of people dying of every occupation, but the ones people care about are the musicians. A guy's a fireman, so he's basically a hero for a living, but he plays trumpet in the evenings and that gets him in the news. He probably learned by grinding through the Rubank books in high school band, and he plays a few songs in the evening with "meh" skill level and he's on the national news.

Between having drank too much and God knows what else going on, I feel like crap. I managed to clean myself, top to bottom, and tried on the pair of shorts I picked up from the pile of free clothes on 6th street. Perfect fit.  The one bright spot in a lousy day/night. I didn't practice and I'm not having dinner because it seems like my breakfast hasn't settled down.