Buy your uke on a blue moon

 Up around 2:30.  Before getting up I lay in bed thinking: If I'm to get a banjo-uke, the time to buy one would be as soon as possible, not after the 12th of November when I'll have put in a month of voice exercises. Because not only are the exercises working, but it may already be too late to get exactly what I want because not only is the virus going to make for a bad winter but everyone will want one for Xmas and that plus messed up supply chains means it may already be too late. 

According to what I can find out from Guitar Center online, they're flat-out of banjo ukes in this area.  Since Guitar Center's computers often have no idea what's actually going on at Guitar Center, I will go out into the orange air and check in person. 

But while having a little bit of coffee and Alka-Seltzer then some nuts and vitamins, I vacillated back and forth ... did I really want to go out all the way to Guitar Center today? Maybe I should just do some Ebay stuff. But no, this is Saturday, the day I'm supposed to do things different than a normal workday, and relax, and have fun, whatever fun is these days. 

So I finally got out of here around 5, and went over to Nijiya and got instant coffee, lime juice, a nice eel on rice bento, and an Asahi beer. First I went over to the little blessing box and took out a drawer pull I had with a screw and some washers, and replaced the missing drawer pull on the door. I'd been meaning to do that. 

Then I went over to the Issei building and had a nice little beer and eel-on-rice picnic. That was nice. 

After eating, I rode my over to CVS and bought two bottles of vodka. Then I went my old route to Guitar Center: Race to Park to Shasta to Stevens Creek. Boy, is Steven Creek depressing, with all the janky used car lots, tattoo parlors, etc. And pretty soon was at Guitar Center. 

First thing I took 4 little folded up brochures from Ukulele Jams in Japantown and pinned one up on each section of their pinup board. Then I looked at the ukes. No banjo-ukes, or any unusual designs really; just lots of fairly plain ukes, some with jacks for an amplifier and most not. I picked out a nice little Cordoba 15CM that's fair nice and plain except for a cheerful little abalone ring around the sound hole. And one of the guys there helped me find a concert ukulele gig bag, in a silly leafy pattern but eh, at least I'd be able to carry the thing. 

Except after paying, he got the gig bag out and we tried to fit the uke in. It wouldn't fit at all. "Wait a minute," the guy said and led me to the back of the store, where there were some gig bags. There were some fancy $60 ones, and then one plain one that was $24.95. "It's the same price so you can just take it" he said. (It was actually $5 more.) So I put the uke in it and it fits fine, put it on my back and was outta there. 

 (Now that I think about it, I bet that one that didn't fit was simply a soprano sized one that got put in a concert sized one's box. The other box may well have held one that would have fit fine. But the way things went, I got to avoid the silly leafy pattern.)

The ride back was interesting. The traffic around Santana Row/Satan's Row was nuts. Tons and tons of people going there. There was an interesting zombie at the intersection there where I had to wait a while; a Black female (not the same one either, this gal was taller) gesturing at traffic with a finger pointing down. So I "helped" by also gesturing at traffic with a finger pointing down, and when she noticed me I said, "They'll get it if we all do it" so she switched over to waving and then wandered off. 

Once I got away from Satan's Row the traffic got easier, and I rode back to Whole Foods where I  picked up a few things like some Parmesan rinds, a little salami (kind of like salami but a really classy kind) and cheese thing on sale, and a big sloppy can of PBR. I also helped the meat counter guy a bit as he was putting things away and they had some "flanken" beef ribs there, maybe 5 of them. I said I'll just take what there is there, and thus saved him the effort of putting them away for the night. 

The ride home was kind of nice, of course except for the zombies. One staggered by as I was packing things onto the bike to leave Whole Foods. It made typical "Blargh" type zombie noises and wandered off into the street. That zombie turned out to be harmless, but with the really "gone" ones you don't know what they'll do. 

As I got close to back here, under the bridge, I noticed my fancy-schmancy Urban Outfitters cloth bag had had one handle actually break. I stopped right there at the traffic island where cars come off of the freeway onto Old Bayshore and fumbled around, taking the broken bag, hanging by one handle off of the handlebar and fishing out a Target plastic bag to put the things in. I hear a zombie or zombies yelling as there's a zombie camp nearby where they live in a collection of junk cars. Shit, I thought, they see me stopped here and might mob me. There was a gap in traffic so I was able to dash past them out in the lanes, but it seemed the yelling and screaming was them fighting with each other, not aimed at me. Whew! 

So I got back here and buttoned the place up and am in, and safe. I'll have to do a mailing run on Monday of course, but I think I can avoid doing one on Tuesday even if it means a big load on Wednesday. 

I had seen a few trick-or-treaters out and that was nice. Also the "blue" moon was actually a very pretty warm silver color. And funnily enough, there was a "pop up" food truck selling food right on Commercial street which is usually just things like a trucking company, a car repair, electrical supply, yadda yadda and lots of zombies. I bet the zombies just "loved" the generator noise from the lunch truck. 

As for the new uke, voice comes first. So I'm still sticking with my plan of voice exercises for a month then perhaps adding in learning simple backing on the uke.

A chilly 70 degrees

 Up at 2:30 and it's a chilly 70, maybe 72, degrees. After a long summer when it was always above 80 even overnight it really feel chilly and I'm wearing a sweatshirt along with one of my new pairs of sweat pants. The air quality's "orange", just below 100 so I guess I get the damage I'd get from cigarettes without having to buy the things.

I know San Jose is considered to have some of the best weather in the nation, but compared to Hawaii it's awful. I woke up with a headache again, am cold, my lips are all chapped up and I'm glad not to be practicing trumpet these days. I've also got some "stuff" in my chest and wonder if I should try out the free covid testing at the fairgrounds on Tuesday or even on the weekend. If I've got it, I'll have to say, great, because I'm not really sick just have sniffles and some stuff in my chest. However, if I've got it I'll have to tell Ken and he'll have to just pass my pay check in through the mail slot for the next couple of weeks. 

Stuff in my chest hasn't prevented me from doing voice exercises last night and singing a couple of songs. The Frank Sinatra number about how they've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil is hilarious. And I believe it's working; I guess I talk so little normally that it's no wonder my voice would get tired just in the talk sessions Ken and I do. So even if I'm never a singing busker, voice exercises are a very good thing. 

Alka-Seltzer and a little coffee took care of the headache, and I finished the packages I'd prepared and was out the door at a quarter after 6 for the post office and fedex. There was a lot of traffic so I don't know if tons of people are leaving town because it's Friday or are taking a week off because of the election early next week. 

All went well in dropping things off, and I got some packing foam pieces, a tomato, and some lettuce on the way back and got all buttoned up and secure for the night here. Now begins what passes for a weekend for me.

Bad air headache?

 Up a bit after 2. The air quality according to "Purple Air" is around 100 so maybe this headache's due to bad air. 

I did voice exercises last night; one of those 20-odd minute "daily workout" things. As I've said my plan is to do this for one month then see if my voice is stronger. So I must do them until November 12th then evaluate. From what I'm reading in the comments in the exercises on YouTube by "Jacobs Vocal Academy", if people stick with it, it works. At the one-month mark, I can star looking into getting a ukulele to accompany my voice and start learning simple songs like Christmas carols. 

I'll admit I'm in danger of being side-tracked. There's a guy on Reddit's r/SanFrancisco sub-reddit, who calls himself "Gorneaux" but his real last name's Gorney. He does these really neat watercolor paintings of buildings and things around San Francisco and I'm always happy when I see his latest. He paints in a simple style I really like. There's also Robin Galante, and there's a third artist I can't think of now. But back to Gorneaux, his origin story is thus: He's got pretty heavy-duty fine art academic chops, having gone to come pretty heavy-duty art schools, but his interest was in sculpture. His father falls ill in San Francisco so dutiful son Gorneaux comes home to care for him, going back to live with Dad in the Sunset district. The Sunset has neat buildings and wonderful light, so Gorneaux gets into sketching and painting, joining a group called the Sunset Sketchers. Having been largely a sculptor, color is new to him and fun. He's now got a fair business going with commissions, prints, etc. He's my age give or take a year or so. 

With his latest offering, a painting of a beloved sushi bar, Gorneaux talked about books that inspired him, including one by a German guy. The German's origin story is interesting also: He's passed off at a one-time punk band drummer who just happened to fall into art somehow, but in reality he also has heavy-duty academic training and has illustrated something like 60 children's books. But his book on "Urban Sketching" looks interesting enough that I've got it in my Amazon cart and may buy it. I can always give it to Suzy, Ken's wife, for a Christmas present.

I had a little coffee and aspirin and that took care of the headache, and left here on an empty stomach at 5 after 3. I had four boxes of this Indian (like made in India) "Masala Tea" which is in packets with the milk and sugar included, so due to the sugar, not on my diet. So I put two boxes in the blessing box on 6th in Japantown and two in the one on 6th. 

Then I did my bit at the bank and got a scare because the gal handed me the receipt from the customer she had before me, showing only about $500 in the account. She got that straightened out and got me the right receipt and there's my $4200-odd in there. Whew! We got talking about survivalist things and I tried to explain things like keeping a "deep pantry" and so on. Gal just said, "If something happens, I'm coming to your place! and I said that first, where you think I live is nowhere near where I really live and I don't tell anyone where I really live, and that the whole idea behind being a prepper/survivalist is to stock up so you can help yourself and help others, not go begging from others. I explained that a lot of what I have stored is for others, not myself. (Others being Ken and family, who'd not be very interested in my canned fish and black squid-ink spaghetti but would be in the #10 cans of corned beef hash and lifeboat rations I've tucked away.)

Next was Whole Foods, where I got a package of prosciutto and a couple little string cheeses and one of those beers that looks like I'm drinking an Arizona iced tea.  I ate and drank over at "my" corner across from what I think it a rehab place, and it was a pretty nice little picnic. 

I walked over to Marshall's and picked out three pairs of sweat pants, but when  I got to the register one didn't have the Marshall's price tag on it so I just got the two that did have Marshall's tags on them. I've just tried them on now and while they're a little tight they're not too short or anything and will be great for winter time bike rides because they've both got enough pockets to carry my wallet and keys etc. Lots of cyclists wear these expensive tights in the winter and I bet these are more comfortable. And do theirs have pictures of Michael Jordan doing his famous jump shot? I think not.

Then I went into Target and got paper towels and some dish soap and Tide pods, and noticed that the Windex is completely gone. It was all gone at Lowe's the last time I was there, too. 

I carried my load back to the bike and stashed it all away, then went to CVS for vodka and re-stashed everything on the bike, and went over to the Amazon hub and picked up the Alka-Seltzer I'd ordered. 

I stopped on my way back at TAK Market for a tall can of PBR and some "Beer Nuts Bar Mix". I was going to get a beef stick but they were out of the kind I like. All in all today was really uneventful. The cool nights have the zombies holing up by the end of the day or something. There wasn't even a nasty wind to fight coming home.

No-Coffee Headache

 I woke up at 3:30 with a headache from having no coffee last night. I had a little, and some aspirin, to make it go away. It really only takes a day or two to get off of coffee, and the odd headache is no big deal. 

And indeed a little bit of coffee, aspirin, and ice water did it. Then I finished the packages I'd started, and filled out my ballot. The run to the Post Office and FedEx was uneventful, and I found some interesting "lifeboat rations" Coast Guard approved, an onion, and some broccoli. 

I got back here and had some scrambled eggs with (scrounged) green pepper. It's getting cooler at night now and I just looked through all my clothes and for some reason I only have one pair of sweat pants now. I had several pairs and all I can find are one, and that one about my least favorite. I don't know what happened to make all but one pair disappear, but I can't get through winter with just one pair of sweat pants so I guess I'll have to go to Marshall's tomorrow and see if I can find some. 

Ken came by at the usual time and again I got an extra $50 on my pay check which is nice. He also brought by some stuff to sell, the most interesting being a large lot of 8-inch floppy disks, in a big black and yellow tub. I put the disks into a couple of banker's boxes and will use that tub to keep my larger tools and such things in. It looks like the kind of tub that would hold hammers and saws and things like that. 

Windy grocery run

 Up at 3; out of here at 4. Of course it being the end times and all, the wind's howling and the ventilation things on top of the building screeching. 

I did a quick run over to Nijiya in Japantown for eggs, some beef, broccoli, such things. The wind had me really slowed down coming back but the few zombies out were easy to dodge and I was soon back here eating some fried fish. 

I'd also bought a bottle of cold iced coffee which I'd say is less strong that what I brew, but it's still coffee. And I think I've come around to the realization that caffeine makes me feel worse, not better. Maybe this is why I associate drinking diet Pepsi with being depressed. I've gotten into real jags of drinking the stuff in the past, and of course the caffeine adds up. Maybe it's an age thing but I'm ready to go caffeine-free. 

That's going to be a huge change because I've liked coffee for so long. I first discovered the joys of coffee in college, although even then I noticed that I didn't get any net energy from it; it just moved the time I was up, and in the morning the time I got up, later. I'm not that big a fan of soda, and not enamored of going back to drinking dark tea either. I used to drink "refrigerator tea" all day but switched over to a little lemon or lime juice to flavor ice water. I think if I want something hot to drink I'll go to green or jasmine tea. 

Not being dependent on coffee is a good thing though. It's one less thing to budget for. If I am to move back to Hawaii in 4 years I have to assume I will be living a very "poor" lifestyle at least at first. My plan is to be able to pay my rent 6 months or a year up front, and then support myself busking, under-the-table odd jobs, etc. while I let my Social Security checks just go into my bank, because those will be my lifeline and rent money. If I can avoid being dependent on coffee, alcohol and things like that it will be a lot easier. And indeed, when I left there in '86 at around the age of 25, I'd had maybe 3 beers in my entire life and was very cautious about coffee. 

So I packed up a big signal generator and put just that one box, 35 pounds, on the trailer and took it up to FedEx. I actually overshot the intersection because I forgot I wasn't going to the post office too, circled around, and dropped it off at FedEx. My reward from their dumpster was a brand-new "Bankers Box" of the same line as the ones I have a lot of. 

With a movie

 Up at 3 or 3:30 not sure. Breakfast was some natto (yes, those slimy fermented soybeans even some Japanese people don't like) and almonds, a tiny bit of coffee, and ice water. It's a chilly 73 degrees now, at what's about the warmest part of the day. 

I've discovered that I can do voice exercises while watching a movie, the same as I was doing trumpet exercises while watching a movie. 

I was out of here at a quarter  after 6, and on Old Bayshore had to dodge a new kind of zombie, the Trash-Can-Dragging-Zombie. It paid me no mind, just dragging one of those tall blue trash cans with wheels that sometimes turn and a flip-up top. It guess it had somewhere it had to be. 

Otherwise the drop-offs were routine. I picked up small boxes, a garbage bag of foam sheet for packing, a green pepper and two tomatoes on the way home. I stopped to chat with Arnold the security guard, first about the safety vest then other things. He'd seen Bikini Girl too and had called the cops. I said I'd almost called the cops because I was worried she might run out into traffic or something. The cops never showed, anyway. 

It came out that Arnold has a law degree while his sister(?) never got her GED and is some kind of regional manager for Safeway making "six figures". 

I came back in here by the front way to check for Rev-A-Shelf boxes by this one place that tosses them out, and as I came in a zombie in a dark SUV or van went "EURGH!" at me. I wanted to get rid of organic trash so after unloading the trailer etc I loaded that up and went out the back way and around. The zombie might expect me to come back the way I'd gone, but probably not to come around again the same way. This is the one thing I've taken away from Carlos Castenada books: Never be predictable. After dumping the organic stuff in the blackberry patch I came back around and this time the zombie vehicle had two zombies, one that might be female, moving things around, and one probably male, on a bike. I dashed by and back to here. I've got the place all buttoned up now and theoretically safe for the night. 

I can see in the video camera that the zombie(s) are fooling around with flashlights, probably searching for drugs they dropped. I've seen this a lot on on the YouTube channel "Everett Tweakers HD" which is an intersection in Everett, WA where there were tons of tweakers and nighttime crumb'O'crack hunts were very popular.

Caffeine

 Up at 3. I'd actually woken up at 10AM and wondered if I should drink a little alcohol to get back to sleep, but instead took some kava and eventually went back to sleep. 

One thing I think I've figured out is, if you're quitting alcohol, best to quit caffeine too. Caffeine seems to contribute quite a bit to "shaky" feelings. Naturally, coffee flows freely at AA meetings... 

I headed over to Japantown and got a small fish bento and a bottle of cold green tea, and ate over at the Nissei building. It's worked out very well. The steps are comfortable to sit on, I'm out of people's way, there's a trash can nearby, and I get to watch the tranquil street scene. A couple of old people exercising is about as lively as it gets. 

I dropped off some books at the 6th and 5th street little libraries, and went to Whole Foods and locked the bike there and walked over to CVS. I bought a bottle of vodka, Pledge, and a can of corned beef. When I'd walked back to the bike and put those away I realized I'd wanted to get some Alka-Seltzer. I'd found some in the dumpster where medical stuff like that gets tossed out, and gotten into the habit of drinking it in place of taking a couple of aspirin. 

So I walked back over, and after having to ask where it's kept, I looked at all their Alka-Seltzer and it was all "Cold" or "Night Time" or "Extra" or some such and all had extra things in it like acetominaphen (or however it's spelled) and other medicines. All I wanted was the fizzy drink with the equivalent of 2 aspirin in it. 

Then I got cheese and nuts (but not ifs and buts) and such things at Whole Foods, and then rode over to the Amazon hub and picked up my safety vest. I rode over by the foot court in the "SoFa" area where there are outdoor tables and fairly good lighting, and tried it on. It seemed a little big, but that's OK for later when I'll be wearing a jacket. I wore it riding home, and it adds a little warmth too which is nice as the weather is cooling. 

When I got back here and after putting things away, I went on Amazon and ordered some plain aspirin-only Alka-Seltzer. Because why not take aspirin in fizzy liquid form? 

I've spent $178 of my last paycheck which is Meh if I'm trying to only spend half of each check, but fine if I'm trying to save 1/3 of each check. And I've got $60 cash in my wallet because I pressed the wrong button and got $20 back at Whole Foods when I intended to get no cash back. And this isn't counting the $260-odd in cash I have stashed away in small bills because for some reason these days small bills are good. 

I did more voice exercises last night, not a ton, but some. If I can do these every day until November 12th which will be one month from when I started, then I'll see about getting a "uke" and work on some Christmas carols I guess. Today by Whole Foods there was a guy on the sidewalk with a pedicab with a big plastic sheet between him and any riders, and I asked him how business was. He said these days he just takes it out once a week "to keep it from freezing up". He's hoping for the bars to open up, and I said I think the best model for this is the 1918 flu which means it'll be bad for 2 years and still around the third year and then fizzle out. "We just have to hang tight for a couple of years".  So he's playing it cool with his pedicab and I've got to play it cool with anything that seems like busking. 

I'm really going to need to get out among people and put in those times when I sound like crap though. I remember going busking with my cornet in Morgan Hill where I made something like $4.50 and some guy came by with his 6 or 7 year old kid, who gave me some pointers. They were good pointers too.  Or time time in Mountain View where I slept at a friend's on the floor (he lived on the living room floor himself) and played for hours on the main drag there, in a drizzle, and about all I could play was It's Only A Paper Moon. I think  I calculated that I'd made $4-odd an hour. The thing is that it takes time and toughing it out and with uke and voice I'll be starting at just about zero again.

Buddha's Wish For The World

 Up around 3. I watched the Borat 2 movie last night and it was OK at best. The first one was great because as he points out, nowadays everyone in the USA knows who Borat is but in the first one he was able to "zoom" lots of people. 

I did more voice exercises last night too ... I'm doing routines called "warm ups" for the most part because I want to have an easy beginning and a lot of any kind of musical instrument is tons of fundamentals, over and over. 

Today I read "The Buddha's Wish For The World" which was given to me at this sort of benefit dinner in late 2019 by Rinban Sakamoto at the temple. I've just held onto it since then and since I started this habit of taking a day off of the internet and reading a book, I'd worked my way around to it. It's by Koshin Ohtani, the Monshu which is the present-day direct descendant of Shinran Shonin, the founder of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism.  The only thing I can say about this "religion" is, they did the math. If you think deeply about such things, you have to come to the same conclusions they did. 

So it was a nice read. As soon as I'd heard about this virus going around I stopped going to the temple (and they shut down soon after) because there are a lot of older people there. At one of the get-togethers I talked with a nice older couple who didn't look *that* told but told me "We met in camp" and I had to remind myself it wasn't some Scout camp in the 60s or 70s but would have been an internment camp in the 40s. I don't know how long it will be before things open up there again and it's safe, but I look forward to it. 

Now that it's cooled down to a brisk 75 degrees it's felt almost chilly so I need to start getting my winter clothes washed and into rotation. 

Free .... free as a bird

 Up at 3. 

"Free As A Bird" by The Beatles is stuck in my head these days. I came upon it from the George Formby video "Leaning On A Lamp Post" where in the comments it's mentioned that this is the banjo-uke music at the end of "Free As A Bird" so naturally I had to check it out. 

I finished the packages I'd set up last night and left here at 6:20. I go out along Old Bayshore these days as it's a very simple route and normally fairly zombie-free. That was not the case today, though. As I pulled out onto Old Bayshore I heard a sort of rythemless banging and thought it was the wind, except the wind's not strong enough to bang anything around like that... 

It was a Black female zombie clad in a red bikini and a few rags, playing the pipes on the side of the Smithfield building like it's a drum set and muttering to herself. I sped on by. 

The drop-offs went fine, I came back with some nice medium-sized boxes, and stopped by the dumpster by Grill-'Em but it didn't have much. Riding back from there, around that parking lot I use to get around the tight turn drivers like to cut it close on, there was a short, stout zombie carrying a sack over its shoulder. I had to waggle my stick at it to get past, which I did, quickly.  I then passed the Bikini Zombie again, now off the drums and gibbering a stream of word-salad at the world in general.

I got back in here and took off again with my organic trash which I put in the blackberry patch, and a box in a torn cloth grocery bag I wanted to get rid of at the dumpster on the corner of Queen's Lane and Old Bayshore. I was just pulling up to it when a zombie walked right up on me! Zombies favor dark, dull colors in their clothes and their general filth tends to make them, their clothes, and their surroundings blend into one mucky sort of brown/grey, and if it's not a muttering zombie, or a shuffling zombie, they can come right up on one. This one was like that; a fast walker. Luckily I was still moving and on the pedals so I muttered something like "fuck this" and accelerated quickly, in a large arc taking me away from the zombie which I watched over my shoulder. It seemed bent on a straight-line path, towards what I had no idea - maybe to try sleeping on Galli Produce's loading dock? Perhaps attracted by the gibbering of Bikini Girl. 

Anyway I fucked off out of there, ducking behind the fence and through Loomis Security's parking lot and out the other end and back here. I tossed the bag etc into the trash enclosure. I'll throw it away some other time. 

I had some scrambled eggs with poblano chili and caught up with Ebay stuff and just generally futzed around, when Ken showed up. He'd tested the tube tester and brought it back because he didn't want anything that valuable sitting in his truck (and besides, it's big) so I'm to list that and he'll add in photos he's taken of the unit operating. 

I've also ordered a safety vest on Amazon that might be pretty decent. At least Prime allows free returns if it's junk, and it's not like buying something that will go next to my skin. The thing is, I was thinking while out riding today, that in the Before Times, the traffic was often so congested that it made is really safe because no one was moving fast at all. It's more dangerous now because there are lots of cars going fast. I should be able to pick it up late Sunday so I'll have it on my next package run.

Like in a gym shower

 Up at 2:15. I didn't have coffee this time, but just ice water and some almonds and a slice of cheese, and didn't have that shaky feeling. Hm! I wonder if I should switch to tea.  

Last night, among other things, I did one of the voice "warm-ups" off of the YouTube channel I've subscribed to, that teaches voice lessons. It's 20-odd minutes long and that's plenty long for a beginner. The key is to practice every day and gradually increase the amount of time spent. 

In the TV show King Of The Hill, the character "Lucky" has his voice done by Tom Petty. I always wondered, why does Lucky's voice always sound like it's recorded in a gym shower? And now I remember, there was a guy who worked at Weird Stuff Warehouse who'd come out here from South Carolina or something, and his voice resonated like that. So I'm thinking, Tom Petty sure sang a lot, and this guy from S. Carolina may well have grown up singing in church or something. The S. Carolina guy eventually went back home. I  think he missed surfing in warm water. 

So, think super-resonant voice. I also listened, last night, to a BBC radio program on NPR about Paul Robeson which got me reading the Wikipedia on him also. He was very influential in the middle part of the 20th century and it was his amazing voice that gave him so much clout. The guy was also a college and pro football player, and a lawyer. I only learned about him from an NPR program that came on the radio back when I was a college student in Hawaii. 

I got out of here at 3 and stopped at Dahl's to see about getting a safety vest because I thought I'd seen some in there but they don't now. They directed me to the place on Commercial and 5th where I bought some red curb paint (which was pretty lousy paint) years ago. "They have all that stuff" I was told. 

I got to the bank in plenty of time and put my check in, and everything was dead-on to the penny. I guess the $11 for the pepper spray wasn't put in, but then I'd told Kate "Don't worry about it, whatever you want to do" and frankly, that $11 might be a lot more important to her than to me. But Kate wasn't there today; it was a different gal. 

I went over to Whole Foods and got stuff that's prosciutto but cooked, and a can of some kind of hops brewed tea with chamomile? - to see if it's a decent near-beer. I racked my brain trying to think of what it was I thought of that the stationary store near Target would have and that I should get, but came up blank. I thought I'd sit at the corner on the way to Target then walk over and get whatever that thing was and some things from Target also. But I could just not think of it, plus I didn't have my Swiss army knife to deal with the prosciutto package so I just hopped on the bike, went over to the Amazon hub for bubble mailers and my new Swiss army knife which I put right in my pocket and rode for Japantown. 

I stopped at Nijiya thinking, Screw it, I'll get a bento and a beer. When I got there the bentos were completely wiped out, so I got a few grocery things and a nice piece of smoked salmon and an Asahi "Dry" beer which is the wateriest they have. 

When I got back here it wasn't even 6. So I was really out and back in a short amount of time. I cut up the smoked salmon and the prosciutto and discovered the prosciutto had this plastic between the slices - I wanted to make a bowl of cut-up delicious stuff I could eat with chopsticks. And it was good, and so was the beer although what would be nice is if there was a beer that tasted decent that was very low alcohol like 1-2%, something like the Russians have with their drink, "Kvass" which is made from bread. 

Then I spent a couple of hours taken apart a piece of equipment Ken had brought over, just the usual, lots of circuit boards and some other parts like capacitors, transformers, etc.

October 21

 Up at 3. I did a little voice exercise last night and sang with some Doors songs. 

I had coffee etc and finished the packages I'd staged, and took some kava, but I noticed something - the shakiness comes on after I've had the coffee. For me, coffee was a part of my breakfast as a food because I was taking plenty of heavy cream in it. Keeping cream on hand has become difficult and I'd always wanted to learn to like black coffee so I cut that out months ago. So it's coffee, ice water, and nuts, generally walnuts but I've been having almonds lately. 

Because I got shaky-feeling I had 20ml of vodka but I wonder if the real problem's the coffee. I also had a couple slices of cheddar cheese before taking off. 

I was out of here at 6, and it was another nice uneventful post office and FedEx run. I even  found a video game controller that's good for $20 or so on Ebay. 

I got back here and had some nuts and cheese and started a load of laundry. Last night's had been all dry so I had clean clothes to change into, and the rest folded up and put away to make room for tonight's wash. 

Ken came by and wrote out my pay check with an extra $50 on, "We did a little better this week" and then he brought in a lot of newly-bought stuff to put onto Ebay. That took a while then we sat down and talked for a while about all kinds of things as we usually do. By the time he left it was past midnight, and I was quite hungry. 

Dinner was veggies with beef on top, a favorite.

No eye-opener

 One symptom of alcohol dependence is needing an "eye opener" or sometimes called "hair of the dog" etc. it's taking at least a small drink when one gets up. Alcohol has a fairly short half-life in the human body so you can go to sleep OK on, say, 125ml like I did last night and 8 hours later, having woken up, feel shaky. But I was OK. I'd taken kava last night too and had a nice sleep with no weird dreams. 

So today no need to take a nip until about 7PM and then a very small one; 20ml. Been taking kava too. The key to getting off alcohol is Delay, Dilute, and put up with about 72 hours of Discomfort. 

I did more voice exercises last night which is a good thing. And listed 20 items on Ebay, a lot of them taking some effort to count out etc., and that's a good thing also. 

I didn't go out at all today because I'm behind on laundry again so after taking a good bath and vacuuming the office here, I started a load of laundry.

Kava

 Up at 2. I'd been up until 3 or 4 in the morning "staging" about 30 packages. I wanted to get them all cleared out. I figured I'd get up in time to have a couple of hours to finish packing them. 

I also am going to try not drinking any alcohol but took a couple of the kava pills I got yesterday and see if taking kava keeps me from getting too twitchy. $25 for 60 pills is cheap compared to the alcohol they should replace. 

I finished off the packages in an hour and a half which kind of surprised me. This is a good method because the hard part's in finding the item and choosing what to pack it in and whether it needs bubble wrap etc., and once that's done go on to the next. So I was out of here at 6 on the dot, and the drop-offs were uneventful. The chute at the post office even worked fine. 

The kava's not completely filling in for alcohol so I'm taking a very small amount of alcohol. I'd been getting to where I was drinking 400ml of vodka a day and I'm going to try for 200ml total today/tonight. 

While out today I realized I didn't have my Swiss army knife in my pocket. I did a lot of thinking about where I'd seen it last, and up came a memory of having it out for some reason when I was sitting and eating on the steps of the Issei Center in Japantown, then having my trash all picked up and the knife lying there and myself thinking I'll be sure to pick it up and put it back on my pocket and I guess I didn't do that. So when I got back here I ordered another one on Amazon.

Guerrilla gardening

 Up at 3. I'd done voice exercises last night and some singing, drank a bottle of wine, etc. I've got a sort of conversation going on with my aunt, still alive at about age 80, and mentioned my plans to plant acorns and artichokes and such on this little strip of CalTrans land where the blackberries are. She told me this is going on all over, with people gardening on little bits of land. 

I finally got my dead ass out of here at almost 7. I rode by Japantown to dump a bag of trash, then went to Whole Foods and locked up the bike. The old guy who collects signatures was there with his table, well onto Whole Foods property but he's not really annoying. 

I walked to CVS and got my vodka, then came back to Whole Foods and got cheese and butter and some broccoli and spent $25 in a bottle of kava-kava pills so I can take those at bedtime and see if I can get off of alcohol again. I also got a beer and asked for 1/3-lb of roast beer but the kid weighed out more like 1/3 lb and I said that was OK. 

I went by the Amazon hub for some bubble mailers, then rode for home. 8PM downtown is more equivalent to midnight. I used to happily play my trumpet by the Old Spaghetti Factory until midnight but now the only people out are some pretty far-gone zombies. 

I stopped in Japantown, and having noted that the steps of the Issei Center are very well-lit at night, I stopped there and had my roast beef and beer. It was very nice and quiet. It reminds me of small towns in Hawaii. Because it's hot in the middle of the day, people traditionally get up early in the morning like 6 or even earlier, do stuff, then stay inside for the hot part of the day then maybe do more things after it cools down. But because they were up at 6, bedtime is generally 10. 

I seem to have a pretty good conversations going with my aunt. I want to become a person to her and not just a name.

A very mariachi night

 Up around 2.  I got my copy of "Unfamiliar Fishes" out and read it, partly in bed until around 5 or 6 then at my desk. It's a pretty good book. Then I realized I was almost out of vodka but didn't want to go all the way downtown so after procrastinating a fair amount I decided I'd just ride up to the gas station on 1st by the Denny's which has a lot of wines and get some wine. 

So I rode up there and there was a sketchy looking bum who came up and had a look in the trash can, and I asked him if he wanted something from inside, and he said, "Something to eat..." so I went in and scouted around. All the wine was done, replaced by more types of chips and small snacks like that. So I went back out, and gave the bum a $1 bill  I had, "My last dollar" and we complained a bit about prices, "$10 for a happy meal" he said, and I observed that it's long been cheaper to eat at the Denny's than at the McDonald's across the street. He asked which was downtown was, and I told him and that the light rail will take him right there, and that I've never seen fare cops on there at night so he should be able to ride for free, but if he sees them, he should run for it because none of them can run very well. 

I rode down 1st and over to Taylor and to TAK Market where I got two bottles of "Manage a' Trois Midnight" red blend and a package of hot dogs. I just didn't feel like cooking. That ran me $31 which just illustrates how expensive it can be running low on vodka, or needing/wanting vodka in the first place. 

I rode back here and heard the sound of a trumpet as I came in. The Mr. Softee employees have a party going on and even had a live mariachi band play some numbers. It was great - violins, trumpet, singing. Now the band's gone and they just have recorded music and dancing. I got settled in back here and had a few cold hot dogs with "Dusseldorf" mustard that comes in a little mug, and of course some wine. 

My attempt to move back to Hawaii in 2003 had been a real disaster. Firstly, the only way to get out of the debt I'd built up would have been to drop off of the grid and I was not prepared to do so at the time. I didn't have the skills. Ironically, the panhandling technique that came in handy after the 2008 crash, what I call "walking panhandling" but is actually called "crack spanging" by those expert in such things, is a skill I learned in Waikiki. I was walking along and happened to be going the same way, at the same speed, as this guy who was, well, crack spanging. And he was making serious money. 

I'd rented an apartment for $600 a month which is a lot of money. I thought I needed all that room because I was going to do jewelry like my older sister did, not exactly the same way but scrimshaw and shells and stuff, and thought I needed a dedicated work bench and so on. It turned out what I was able to do could be done out of a shopping bag while sitting under a tree in the park. So I had a $600 a month rent to pay plus some utilities, had decided I needed a car also so I had to maintain that thing and pay for parking, and my main way to make money was Ebay which was exactly what I wanted to get away from. And if I didn't keep up with my huge debt payments I could say Goodbye to Ebay. It was a huge catch-22 all around. And I was not prepared to "swim like a fish in the sea of the people" as Mao put it. 

I'm older now and if not wiser can I hope to say at least less foolish? I'm scared to death to move anywhere until I'm 62 so I'd have the lifeline of Social Security. And I've learned tons about hustling, making little handicrafts for donations or of course, I've learned a little bit more about busking. In 2003 I was scared to death of what people would think if I played music on the sidewalk in Waikiki. It took me forever to get up the guts to get out there, and now it's very natural. I still need years of practice, four of them to be precise, to practice but now I have no compunctions about playing music on the sidewalk in Waikiki. Just get out there and "geev 'um". 

In '03 things did not go well. I lasted 4 months and in the 07/08 crash I talked with my older sister about going back, and it didn't go well. Bad things were said, although thinking back those bad things were pretty mild. I believe  I said something like, "Fuck you and your Punahou" and that's pretty trivial, except that having gone to Punahou is about all she's got. And dammit, I'm glad she went to Punahou. She's the oldest so that kind of makes sense although if my father had the money he'd have sent us all there. And Punahou may have saved her life - she has bad migraines and could not hack it in the working-class world like the rest of us could, so she needed that Punahou network more than the rest of us. I really hope that if I get back we can hook up again and I can apologize. 

But a Seriously Good Plan(tm) would be to have enough cash on hand to pay for a place to live for 6 months or a year in advance when I make the move. 4 months is not enough. Maybe a year is not enough, but it's better than 4 months. I just need to have the rent paid, I can always feed myself. That's what busking taught me. I can always pay for my food and a bus pass. I've also looked into things like WWOOF'ing which is where you work on an organic farm about 20 hours a week and you get room and board and often some pocket money. I saw a quite tempting one involving taking care of chickens in Punalu'u. Since some of my formative years were spent in Punalu'u and I've kept some pretty scientific chickens, it could be a good fit. But am I to take care of chickens, or make music? Just about anyone can learn to take care of chickens. 

Well, back to progress if there is any. I did voice exercises last night and sang some songs. I was thinking while riding back here tonight that if I've practiced every day consistently for a month, so up to mid-November, I'll go buy a uke. Because we'll be getting into the season for Christmas songs. I'm thinking, I might find places where I can keep distanced from people, maybe sitting up high on something or out on a balcony or something like that, so I'm maintaining "social distancing" but I'm getting experience being out in public playing.

"Have a nice night and stay safe"

 Last night I did more voice exercises and sang a few songs. I "staged" more packages making a total of 21, two of them quite large. I figured I'd wake up early enough to pack them the rest of the way before heading to the post office. 

And I was right. I woke up around 3, had coffee etc., and packed them all in an hour and a half. Today's the last day inspectors might have shown up and I guess they were impressed enough the last time that they didn't bother with this unit this time. People are naturally lazy, and I'd really made a good impression. I'm still really glad I got the smoke detectors and the fire extinguisher set up, and I want to find a place to put the first aid kit where it's really easy to find, and once I find it again I'll install the EXIT glowing sign we have around here. 

So I left here at 6, got up to the post office, and almost left a small FedEx package with them too. Of course the chute was jammed so there were lots of packages stacked on the counters and one of the ladies there had me go over to the blue door which she opened and I put the big box in there and some small stuff too. 

FedEx likewise went fine, and I found a box of yoghurt in H-Mart's trash. But, like almost all yoghurt in the US, it was full of sugar. We're talking 30g of carbohydrates per serving and the standard serving is quite small. You might as well eat pudding or have a couple of candy bars for breakfast. I took it with me, though, and left it on the corner by the McDonald's where there are always down-and-out people passing by. 

I got the shrimp appetizer at "Ono Hawaiian Barbecue" and set up over by the Chipotle to eat it. It's not a bad place to eat because I'm not where anyone would walk, there's light, I can pull my bike and trailer in there, and it's a nice combination of tucked away yet safe. 

On the way back I didn't find much. Just a couple of tomato boxes which are perfect for microscope parts and a big sheet of yellow sign vinyl. I'm not sure what I'd want to do with yellow sign vinyl, but I decided to take it with me in case I think of something. 

Coming in here from Queen's Lane, as I passed the dumpster out there, a guy's voice said, "Have a nice night and stay safe". A bum, evidently, and I showed no sign of having heard. Sure enough, there was a shopping cart piled high with junk sitting in the parking lot in an ideal spot to get hit by a car coming in because that's just the kind of thing bums do. He'd probably left it there while he checked the dumpster there which is again kind of dumb because it's just wood scraps and maybe some junk from the lunch truck like a few bottles/cans and maybe some bread crusts but that dumpster's also tall and hard to even look into. You have to lean a pallet against it as a ladder to peek in.

For no reason at all, here's Aric Leavitt and his latest banjer. He sings folk music and learned originally from one of the Grateful Dead who taught guitar and banjo. I don't particularly care for his style of music but apparently it's the real thing. And he can keep up singing and playing for hours on end. That kind of endurance is an inspiration to me.

Brr-Brr-Brr-Brr-Brr!

 I listed 20 things on Ebay last night but more importantly, I did more voice exercises. Some of them are kind of silly, but I'm sure they're all good. I'm subscribed to "Jacobs Vocal Academy" on YouTube and they just have tons of "warmups" and "workouts" and they seem to be really pushing this sort of straw gadget you hum through that provides varying degrees of backpressure. Hah! Been there, done that, with the trumpet. 

I actually was up around 3, and was able to get right over to the bank for my 4:30 appointment, leaving here just a few minutes before 4, and getting there 10 minutes early. I had the pepper spray for Kate, and she was really happy since she's not been able to get any. She was really surprised that I'd not just said I'd get it and then flaked, but actually gone and gotten it. So that was nice. 

I went over to Whole Foods and got a couple types of cheese and other odds and ends, and a beer in the colorful can that's hard to tell from iced tea. 

Then I went over to the Amazon hub and got my little package of pencil leads and a bunch of bubble mailers, and had plenty of time to get over to Nijiya where I got a bunch more things and a bento to go along with my beer. I got this big "Tastes of Autumn" one which was a real treat but really larger than I needed. I had my bento and beer on the steps of the Issei building which is a nice place to eat. I'm back away from the sidewalk, and no one seems to go in or out of the building when I'm there. It's nice and peaceful. 

The singers were at it again, across the street so when I was done eating I went over there to see. It's an older couple, he's quite good, she, not so much. They were singing some Japanese  thing where they took turns. It was all pretty cool; they could have been singers in vaudeville or something long ago. He sounded operatic, actually. They wanted me to sing something and I tried Sweeping The Clouds Away but between the beer, having just eaten, and getting a bit emotional for some reason, it sounded rather awful. 

That bugged me quite a bit, but it just means I need to practice every day and work hard. I'm only very early into this. I got back here and did a couple of things like de-scale my kettle and de-ice my freezer. I did that last the quick way by setting up my fan on a ladder to blow air in there which melted the ice really fast as opposed to just letting it sit, unplugged, with the door open. There was a lot of ice in there.

When I was downtown I was surprised how un-busy it was. Maybe it's because I was out fairly early (it still was before 7 when I got back here) but Whole Foods wasn't very busy, there were no charity booths out front, only one of the Gypsy women with a drugged out kid and a sign "TWO LOST KIDS" wait a minute, did she drug two to death? What gives here? Not many zombies around although it's downtown so there are always zombies. By and large, it was pleasant to be out and around today. 

When this shutdown started I'd done things like take my trumpet and go play in the park where I'm far away from people but the sound does carry. And I went to play at some of the protests. And I went around playing "We'll Meet Again" when there was a big to-do about that tune. And I'd played Taps on the steps of the 1930s post office right at the time there were supposed to be trumpeters playing it all across the country. But since it's a trumpet, it's always been a big to-do. It's kind of hard to sit back and coast with a trumpet. 

But if I can get my voice into shape and then get a uke and learn some basic chords so I can play simple things like "You Are My Sunshine" and Waltzing Mathilda" and so on, I can see it being really rather fun to spend an afternoon just playing where I'm not too close to people but I'm out in the air and the trees etc. And that gets right back to when I was a little kid. I used to take my ukulele to the beach, and it's a fairly common thing for people to have a few ukes around when they're getting together in the park or whatever. It's pretty much where all those local musicians and comedians got started. 

And that's pretty much what I have in mind for my retirement in Hawaii. To go around to various places and just play and sing, and if someone tosses some dollars that's OK and if they don't that's OK too. I've learned so much about living cheaply that I could pretty much allocate $0 out of my Social Security for food and eat well. That might mean being paid $20 to play and sing at a certain fruit stand in Chinatown and get to take home a bag of fruit, or busking in Waikiki, or it might mean picking Ni'ihau shells. 

When I tried moving back in 2003 it did not go well. First, I needed to go through a financial crash to get out from under huge debts I had. I needed to fall off of the grid almost completely, and I was not prepared to do that. 2008 did that for me. I considered going back to Hawaii then, but told my older sister I'd probably be homeless, and she said, "Well, if you choose to be homeless"... and I tried to convey to her that it's quite often not a choice. I sold her a stunningly beautiful Kamaka ukulele I'd gotten (funny story) but stayed here on the mainland. In 2008 retirement age seemed very far off. 

(OK the funny story: I'd gone to Gryphon Strings in Palo Alto to buy a plain Kamaka, and had one lined up; I think I'd put a down payment on it or something. When I went to pick it up I wanted to see if they had any others of that size, Concert, with a better "action" and the guy, a different guy than the guy I'd dealt with initially, went in back and pulled out this beauty, and charged me the same as for the plain one.)

I've maintained since then that Hawaii can be a hard place to live when you're working age, but as a place to retire it can be pretty good. There are lower-priced places to live, various programs, even Section 8. In fact, the apartment right below the one I had in 2003 was Section 8, being rented to a young haole lady with a white Persian cat, and I think she was going to pay something like $250 a month. She was on disability for some reason. 

Such wandering thoughts ... I just did another unsuccessful search for a song my father wanted me to learn, it went "What's a nice girl like you, doing in a place like this?" and I guess it's about some low-class place where "the potato chips are soggy and they're watering the beer". 5-year-old me wondered at the idea of potato chips so soggy that their merely being close to the beer, on the table I guess, would make the beer get watery. I'm sure it's a song Dad sang with friends at Dartmouth college and I'd have to find some old Dartmouth'ians and see if they recognize the tune. But I guess he really got a kick out of my singing because we sure sang a lot. 

And I found it. So, Sammy Davis Jr. sang this in 1966, Dad would have been teaching it to me in 1968 or so... it's the tune all right, and there's even the line about the potato chips and the beer. Maybe Mr. Davis jazzed up a college drinking song? Or maybe Dad had even wider listening tastes than I thought.

Sweeping The Clouds Away

 Awake at 3, up at 4. I find that lying in bed and doing deep breathing makes me feel better, and then I started to go to sleep again so I got up. 

I did some voice exercises last night, packed that stupid heavy pump I need to ship, and sang some songs also. I actually have the sheet music for the song "Sweeping The Clouds Away" that I'd ordered; the one with the pink cover from the 1930s that shows up on videos of that song on YouTube. 

I wanted to list stuff but decided to just get some sleep, but before that I did a thorough scrub-down while watching some YouTube stuff like Shinichi's World. He left Hawaii at around the same age I did, but he left for Japan and had his father there; it was still rough at first though. 

I also watched a documentary about "Braddah Iz", Hawaii's answer to Luciano Pavarotti. Just an amazing, amazing, singer. While Hawaii gave the world slide guitar and a lot of tin-pan alley stuff from the 1920s became "Hawaiian" music, and a handful of ukulele virtuosos have come from there, this guy really put Hawaii on the map musically. It's too bad he was so overweight. That had to be the cause of 90% of his health problems. If I can develop my voice maybe I can sing some of his stuff and pull it off OK. A while back, Ben Yep, I guy I got to now from the temple choir who plays uke, and I got together and he could play the uke part and I did the singing part of "Over The Rainbow" the way Iz sings it and it went pretty well although of course I didn't have the words down pat. 

In a couple/few years when the virus is done burning its way through the population like the 1918 flu did, it will be good (assuming we both make it through) to go to the adult Buddhism class again and listen to Rinban Sakamoto's long lectures, and meet up at Roy's Station with Ben Yep and kanikapila which means to get together and play music. 

I've talked about how my earliest memories were those of having art materials shoved into my hands and doing art; kind of steered into art and from an early age being used to people watching over my shoulder etc while I paint or draw (a major bugaboo for most) because I guess that's what I was supposed to do. 

But at the same time, my earliest memories also go back to my father playing tons of music from classical "world" music, stuff like the Kingston Trio, records of spy movie themes, you-name-it. The guy had an incredibly wide taste in music and he's the one who turned me on to electronic music like Isao Tomita. And, when I was very little he seemed to get a kick out of teaching me all those little-kid songs like "This Old Man" and having me sing them to him. So although it wasn't Officially Sanctioned By Mom(tm) I was formed as a singer as much as a drawer or a painter. That's the idea behind my 1-year plan to try to train my voice; let's just give it a year of consistent practice and see what happens. 

So I left here at a quarter after 7 and took the big heavy pump, now all packed in a box, to FedEx and bought some more paper. On the way back I got a ton of small boxes from the electrical place and a few tomatoes. I got back here and had some canned mackerel and then "pre-staged" 15 things that had to get packed tonight. Pre-staged means not completely packed but I know the sizes and weights and printed the labels. I had this all done before Ken came by. 

Ken wrote out my pay check and we talked about all kinds of things. At one point I said, "If I could figure out how to live in a cardboard box in Hawaii, I'd be out of here in two weeks!". But the reality is that I'm scared to death to try until I've got something in the bag - either Social Security or good enough at something that I know I could trade that skill for basic room and board at the least. 

An interesting thing though. There is very little socializing around here even without the virus, and with the virus naturally there's even less. I've noticed that even in talking with Ken for half an hour or an hour, my voice would get tired out. But it got less tired out this time and it was one of our longer BS sessions.

The Ukulele Guy

 I woke up around 5 which is awful. There really wasn't a chance to pack this really heavy pump I have to ship and get it to FedEx in time,  so I decided I'd go downtown instead.

I got out of here at ten after 7, of course it was dark and that means more zombies. I went to Japantown first and put a bag of trash in one of the cans and put a book into the little free library on 6th. Someone had knocked it off its stand or maybe it just fell off, but it's been put back together. I took out a book, "Going Home To The Pure Land" which is by a Taiwanese Mahayana Buddhist group so, not the exact one I've been associated with but close. 

Next I got over to Whole Foods and locked the bike and walked up to CVS. There were some nasty zombies hanging out in front of the Arena Hotel, one female one was sort of dancing? with a very large teddy bear and I had to dodge her, then the other three nasties just sat there commenting on me? someone else they knew? the whole teddy bear scene? I went into CVS and got a package of TP, a bottle of vodka and some mouthwash that's supposed to help if one has a dry mouth. 

Coming back I went to the opposite side of the street to avoid the zombies and went into Whole Foods and got a couple avocados, a beer, and a package of what I thought was chicken wings. I then rode over to the Amazon hub and picked up my drawing pencil, the book "Unfamiliar Fishes", and a few bubble mailers. The zombies were certainly out, fighting and yelling at their reflections in windows and so on. But no close calls this time.

I rode to Japantown and set up "shop" on this sort of long bench thing in front of The Arsenal, an art supply store. The "chicken wings" turned out to be "nuggets" and kind of dry but the beer was nice and wet. For such a quiet street and at such a late hour (8PM being the equivalent of midnight these days) it was pretty entertaining. People walking around, and the tree near me full of some kind of large bugs, and a white van with satellite dishes on the roof wandering around lost. I figured I'd eat half the nuggets and I noticed what appeared to be a small old lady walking around looking for things, maybe bottles and cans. 

So I packed up the 2nd half of the nuggets and the barbecue sauce in the nice fashionable Whole Foods bag and got on the bike to find her. Maybe she's hungry. I'd seen her wander towards the temple so I looked around here and even asked a neatly dressed guy if he'd seen her but nope. Maybe she'd gone up Jackson and I'd not seen, I thought. 

So I doubled around and rode up the sidewalk on Jackson and there was a drone right over my head. I love drones so I stopped and got talking with the guys piloting it. It was a young guy, easy to talk to, and an older guy whose drone it actually was, who was of few words. We (the younger guy and I) talked about drones, and Hawaii, and so on, and it gradually came out through the older fellow's few words that he was from Hawaii - Waipahu to be exact - and I said "Waipahooooooo..." in the old joke from the 80s alluding to the large number of Filipinos there. That got a smile out of Mr. Taciturn. 

I ended up talking about all the places I'd lived and knew, even surprising myself with how much places and things like stores and museums, and people, there in Hawaii are intertwined all through my life. The older guy went into the ukulele studio there to get more beer and since I was empty-handed I offered to buy a beer from him and he was out but he had these vodka/seltzer/pineapple things and handed me one, ice cold. 

I need to mention that the ukulele studio guy has a reputation for being a bit of a grump, and he's also a red-hot ukulele player. He could give any of the stars, yes even Jake or Ohta-San/Ohta Jr. a run for their money. I mentioned my plan of setting up for the next 4 years to return to Hawaii, and for the next year seeing if I can strengthen my voice the way I strengthened my trumpet playing, and then if I'm getting somewhere, I'll get a ukulele "to give my hands something to do". 

They hadn't seen the old lady that night but "she circles around the block" and they thought it was a very nice thing for me to do, to try to find her to give her food. Then it was my turn to be kind of "aw shucks". 

It came out that the ukulele guy's name is Rodney and I asked if he was "Uncle Rod" of the "Uncle Rod's Ukulele Boot Camp" which is a very simple handout that's free online and he'd not heard of it. "It's really super simple" I said, to mean it's really below him anyway. 

So we all hung out and local'd it up a bit, and the guy wouldn't take the $5 I'd laid down on the drone case for the drink, "What's this? That's not the local way" and I looked a bit sheepish as I should and took it back. I still had to finish my pineapple drink when we all called it quits, so I took it with me and finished it while riding home. 

It's quite an honor to have been given a drink by the ukulele virtuoso. I'm not sure if the guy's really a grump or just very "old school". Those old school guys didn't believe in a lot of words. When I took Aikido class at the Kahuku temple and the old sensei came around and manipulated my hands and wrists to make sure I was doing the stretches right, I don't remember him emitting more than a grunt or two. I think he just barely keeps his little school going and I'm pretty sure he lives in there (hint: if you don't want people to know, don't keep two rice cookers in the window....) Since I don't plan to ever get to the level that I'd need lessons from him, so maybe there are some other ways I can do him a good turn. 

I got back here, took my veggie scraps to the blackberry patch, and that's it for being outside for the night.

Murdering Bastard Day

 AKA Columbus Day. I slept in and stayed in. I got up around 4. At least last night I did one of the "vocal warmups" and wanted to do one of the 30-minute "workouts" but felt a bit daunted so I just drank and sang along with a bunch of songs you YouTube. The main thing is to establish the habit of regular vocal practice. 

I think the reasoning I explained to Ken last night was sound: I took the DNA test to verify what I was sure was true, that I'm Jewish because Mom was and on back to old Lithuania. The idea was that Trump would get two terms, and eventually they'd get around to finding out who's Jewish. If I went ahead and took the test, and thus had something I could take to Chabad or the Israeli embassy or whatever, and start taking steps to get outta here. 

When you're a Jew by being born one, it's a pretty easy decision. Israel will take you in. You might be barely living off of the street but you're a Jew living in Israel and that's what matters. Converting however makes no sense. It's a lot of work, to profess to believe in things I don't believe in, to move to a small country that's in a perpetual state of war. And right now, in whatever records the Fascists are keeping, they might be able to say as so many have, "You're 'something'" but they won't say I'm a Jew and round me up. At least not on the first pass...

 Instead I'm that ever-popular thing in Hawaii, a "mix". About 24% of the population there is mixed race, the next-highest state being Alaska at about 7%. It's got to be a large part of why my parents moved to Hawaii. My older sister told me an anecdote about Mom wanting to volunteer for the March Of Dimes and was told she's too dark for them to want her to go door to door. And now that I think about it, while Mom could stay in, we kids were outside playing all the time so this WASPy white guy (Dad) in the nice white town of Costa Mesa, having a bunch of little brown kids running around may have gotten a few side-eyes. 

But now I can say that like many in Hawaii, I'm a white/Asian mix, even if the Asian is more West Asian; I think Tatars are considered Turkic/Mongol. But fair enough, it makes me tan. I've even met people here on the mainland who look white but are part Hawaiian, like a guy I used to know who worked in a motorcycle shop in Garden Grove who told me he's part of the Parker family that owns Parker Ranch in Hawaii. So we "Schrodinger's haoles" are out there. 

So, besides these thoughts, it's a depressing day. The weather's finally turning cooler and it's getting dark earlier and that's depressing. Making my post office run at 3-4 isn't saving me any traffic craziness so unless I start doing my runs a lot earlier, like maybe 1-2 in the afternoon, they'll be depressing "night time raids". 

Although in all fairness I kind of like riding around when it's dark. With my blinky lights on it's easy for drivers to see me, and with their lights on it's easier for me to keep track of them. And businesses are done for the day so it's great for dumpster diving. And making my run at 6PM means it isn't late enough that the zombies are out and active. I've worked out the best routes for avoiding 'em anyway, and I'm friends with a few security guards around here too.

I managed to find and download the .pdf of this old "Frank Sinatra Guide To Popular Singing" which may or may not be useful but at least the price was right. And I did some reading on another hero of mine, Tony Bennett. What a great guy. Grew up poor like me, absent father like me, studied art (was going to become a commercial artist) but also liked music, like me. Got out there singing for tips by age 13 which was not a thing I could do, then served in WWII and what he saw there made him a lifelong "lefty" while the only war I served in was the class war and it's convinced me to be the same. 

He studied the "bel canto" type of singing which I'm pretty sure is what the singing teachers teach now. If you want to stress and strain and sound like you're about to shit your pants like rock singers do, well, any training would be counterproductive. And even though I grew up with rock, I never liked that style and it was so prevalent that I thought if I sang, I'd have to sing that way, and that's probably why I got so hung up on playing an instrument instead. I like my rock and roll music, but that "taking a shit" vocal style is most emphatically not for me.

Dear old Tony went through a real dry spell while the rock and roll boom was going on, but he came roaring back because good singing is good singing. I think I'd pay money to go to one of his concerts if this virus thing has died down and he comes through here. 

I also looked at the Hawaii Craigslist and rents have really come down since the last time I looked. In four years, part of my plan is to save up enough money that I can pay for a place for 6 months or a year up front and not have to do much of anything for a year. Besides things like get my state ID/drivers license and get established in various ways, I want to be able to just do things like visit the Art Academy and the aquarium, go to the beaches, etc.

Out for a quick bento

 Up at a bit after 2. I did some voice exercises last night from this YouTube channel that has them. They have various "workouts" (they don't call them that but I forget what they call them) and sang some songs too. 

It appears to be pretty much like trumpet. It's all out there, and generally for free (for instance the famous Arban's manual is free online). It's not hard to find the basic, beneficial, exercises. The hard part is getting in regular practice. 

I got up and had my coffee etc. and diddled around online and was getting ready to get out of here to go downtown and visit the usual places like Whole Foods, CVS, and the Amazon hub where there are a couple of things waiting for me. Then I heard Ken's truck drive up. 

I said I have to get errands done, and Ken said he only has a couple of hours. I said I'll go as quick as I can and get right back. So I took off, and my first stop was Nijiya where I stood in line for a healthy amount of time and had time to think. I realized I can push the downtown stuff off a day or two, and I'd just get a bento and a beer and a few things like eggs there at Nijiya, go eat on the steps of the Issei center, and get back to the shop. 

So that's what I did. It *is* nice and peaceful there on the steps, out of the wind. There's the most amazing pine tree there too that's got huge branches in it and could accommodate a few treehouses. I wonder if it's a special Japanese kind? 

The wind was really strong coming back, and when I got back here I said to Ken, "You know how in a move when it's the Apocalypse and there's always this wind? It's really that way!". 

Ken had gotten the JET mill/drill head onto his truck and done whatever else he needed to get done, and we just hung out and talked about stuff for a bit. Ken likes to talk with smart people and I guess I'm one of those. It's like when you're in high school and most of the kids aren't really that good for deep or scientific conversations but a few are so you go to them when you want to talk about "brainy" stuff. 

I've pretty much let the cat out of the bag that I'm really considering leaving for Hawaii once I'm 62 and can at least get the minimum Social Security. I also told him that along with wondering why my (very pale) father moved to Hawaii to program computers of all things, why'd my mother ever leave? She was brown enough to blend in and would have done fine. As for my father, if he was going to live in Hawaii, he should have joined the carpenter's union. He liked carpentry, and they'd have taken him in; they even wanted to take me in and I should have dropped the college nonsense and done that. Of course then I'd be a semi-retired carpenter with a house in Manoa and a good pension and health plan, griping to my friends that I should have gone to college. 

My 2mm sketching pencil is waiting for me at the Amazon hub and a book, "Unfamiliar Fishes" about Hawaii that the Hawaii subreddit recommends. That's the book I'll read the coming Saturday. I'd told Ken about my new routine of reading a physical book every Saturday and as little internet as possible, "to head off burnout". 

So I'll have the sketch book right here at my desk and can do some drawing any time, and my drawings will all be in there and not get scattered around like index cards. 

And voice training is right there on YouTube on the channel I've subscribed to.  I remember making up my mind that this year I was going to master playing up to high C on the trumpet, and I did it. So, I'm thinking maybe I should do voice exercises and practice singing every day for the next year, Columbus Day to Columbus Day, and see where that puts me after a year. The YouTube channel suggests recording myself and listening to hear what I sound like to give myself feedback. Louis Armstrong actually recorded himself a lot for this reason (recorded practice sessions) and if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me!

Rainbow Showers

 Up at around 1, because I'd gone to bed so early (for me) at maybe 11PM last night, then woke up around 8 or 9, and went back to bed until 1-1:30. 

I've just stayed in. I read The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings, which is a pretty good book about the complicated lives of Hawaii's elite. I wondered if she was related to the surfer Fred Hemmings and researched it and she's his daughter. Old man Hemmings did OK for himself too, so Kaui was writing about the world she knows. In that world, if I were very lucky, I'd end up one of the ukulele-playing guys in the bar, "who smoke cigarettes and eat boiled peanuts on their breaks".  

My oldest sister is on the very periphery of that world, as about the only thing my father really accomplished was just barely getting her through Punahou School. It's about $30,000 a year now and was comparably expensive then. As is standard in white culture, the oldest kid gets all the support and those who came afterward are on their own. The result was one hot-house flower and 4 who are scrappy enough but have had to try to get somewhere from the very bottom.

All of this would not matter except that I am seriously considering just going back to Hawaii in a few years.

At least once back in Hawaii I'd be able to sell stuff on Ebay again if I wanted to, since I'd be out from under the non-compete thing I'm under now with Ken. It's not officially a non-compete, it's just that if I set up my own account and sold stuff, Ebay would flip the fuck out and throw us both off for life. I know this because it almost happened to me and another friend of mine years ago simply because we bought and sold between each other. And he was several miles away. So I'd need to put more like 3000 miles between myself and Ken before I thought about setting up an Ebay account of my own and selling seashells and odds and ends I find.

Ugh an all-nighter

 My understanding from the emails Ken had forwarded to me is that the inspectors were going to be around the 8th or 9th... and since they'd not been around on the 8th, for sure they'd be here today. And they wanted "accessibility" from 8AM-3PM which roughly matches the first shift (7AM-3:30PM) at most industrial places. 

Since I'd been going to bed around 7AM lately, I decided to just stay up. With lots of coffee etc., and I put lots of personal stuff upstairs and made the place look as much as possible like a place someone doesn't live in, and put on my outside, "normal working stiff" clothes on before 8. I also did some Ebay listings, packed things, and as it got to be closer to 3 in the afternoon packed a few more things, and once it was actually a bit after 3, I walked out to the lunch truck and spent $9 on a half-burrito that was full of eggs and I think sausage trimmings with no potatoes (yay!) and two little "boats" of chicken wings. 

I walked back here and ate the half-burrito and one serving of chicken wings, and put the other serving in the fridge. I took off for the post office and dealt with the aggressive traffic OK; my bright white "getter stick" is sure handy for visibility among its other uses. I didn't pick up anything, just dropped off the post office stuff (of course the chute jammed on the first few boxes I put in, so I just grabbed a USPS tub and put the rest of the stuff in it and put that on the counter. 

Meanwhile I was going back and forth on the phone with Ken about one package, one of those tricky ones I can't seem to mail because everything's in grams and centimeters which is OK except then the system decides it weights 700 oz. or so and I can't cancel the order because it requires signing on with Ebay Italy which I just won't do.... Ken had actually called me to tell me he'd come up with the same idea I'd just thought of while riding, to have him do it "manually" and just print the label. 

So I got back here, put the trailer away, got my bucket 'O' organic stuff and blessed the blackberries with it, really got back here for the day, and packed the thing and called Ken who didn't answer, of course so sent the information by email. Then I ate the 2nd batch of chicken wings, drank some, and went to bed. 

I got about 4 hours' sleep and got up at 10:20 or so, and since it was a good time to call Ken I did, and told him he could swing by and pick the package up but he was just pulling into his driveway, and I told him to call me back when he's ready to take down the information but ... 30 minutes later he hadn't so I called him. Finally we got his figured out and he'd marked it on Ebay as "shipped" so they won't ding us. This is the kind of annoying stuff I have to deal with all the time. It's just amazing that Ken and I just plain get along. Things can get frustrating but we just work it out. We're like two guys who knew each other since we were kids, working on bikes and stuff. 

I just got out my new sketch pad here and it "takes" pencil rather well. I'd been eyeing a pencil lead holder that uses 2mm leads at Michael's but was not sure; didn't I have a couple nice Pentel mechanical pencils already with leads that thick? So I didn't buy it. But when I got back I checked and my beloved Pentels (they're really nice) are 0.9mm so I went ahead and ordered the 2mm one and some leads on Amazon. 

The Pentels are "Twist-Erase 0.9" and are actually really nice for doodling especially if you're used to those fine pens people draw manga with. The 2mm stuff I have coming is probably just about right for sketching in this 5.5X8.5 sketch pad I picked out because I'm thinking it might be a standard size for me in that it's big enough for a fairly large sketch but small enough to be easy to carry around with me on the bike.

 

More Reddish Air

 Air quality's been around 100 (not great, not terrible...) for a while. And I get to go out in it today. I was up at 2, and sad to say after Ken being over and after all the processing of the stuff he brought by and listing 10 things on Ebay, I was just plain tired and didn't do any drawing. 

A couple days ago I watched the most excellent documentary on Vincent van Gogh, that has stuff in it about him I've not seen anywhere else.

And here it is. I want to keep track of it because there's a book mentioned in there that Van Gogh studied out of, and I'll have to watch it again with the closed captions on to try to catch the name of the author. It was a mid-1800s book of tons of "classical" drawings that the student was supposed to draw, gradually getting better through sheer hard work. Vincent not only was a real workhorse, but he copied shamelessly. His drawing, "Sorrow", is right out of that book!

That's another way I was screwed over as a kid - I was taught to never, ever "copy". But that's how artists learn! The Louvre used to be crowded with students and their easels, copying the Masters. 

I surprised myself by being up in time for coffee etc and to get downtown to the bank and deposit my check. I got talking with the nice gal there, and she mentioned she wanted to get some pepper spray because she had an incident in the parking garage, been followed etc. It actually happened three weeks ago. I told her to try Big-5 and auto parts stores, and we agreed to both look for it, and if I find some I'll buy it for her and she'll just pay me back. 

So yeah, there I was, in a bank, with a bandit mask on, showing two the two pepper spray weapons I have to the teller, one of which being gun-shaped. Pure 2020. 

I went over to Whole Foods and locked the bike, and joked with the kids with their "anti-bullying" Cause-Of-The-Week(tm) booth out front, and went in and got 1/4-lb of roast beef and that beer in a can that's in the same colors as Arizona iced tea, hee hee. I walked over to the corner and set up and ate and drank, and a very persistent yellowjacket kept bugging me and I put little bits of meat out for it but this was a liberated yellowjacket who don't need no human to dish up their food, and I let it land on the roast beef and it chewed out a piece just as big as it could carry and flew off. Hilarious. 

I left half the beer there for some lucky bum to find (it's cheaper to buy a tall can of that kind than buy 12-oz. bottle of something else) and walked over to Michael's Art Supplies and picked out a sketch pad because all these individual index cards are hard to keep track of, and looked at their pencils but decided what I have is just fine for now. So I just got the sketch pad. 

I looked around at the restaurants a bit and then just walked back. There's an office supply store in that complex that might be worth looking in also, since I know they have "marker paper" that doesn't bleed when you use markers and I think some sketch pads. 

I walked back and put my sketch pad in the bike bag and walked up to O'Reilly's Auto Parts and they had pepper spray, but the guy said, "But they're pink". I said that's OK; I'm buying it for a friend. So $11 got me a small pink pepper spray of the type that used to be $5 all day. Then I hit CVS for my vodka and a yard-long receipt promising all kinds of deals on stuff I never buy. 

Finally I went to Whole Foods and instead of just buzzing around and using the restroom twice, I actually shopped, spending $60-odd on mostly vitamins. 

I stopped by the Amazon hub for a few bubble mailers, and stopped in Japantown thinking I'd treat myself to some tempura at Minato, but even though I walked right in and was there in person, "All orders have to go by phone; you just dial that number over there, and it's good because it rings and rings...." I said I have to go out and lock my bike, and went out and got on the bike and left. For a treat, I should have picked up that duck pate' I was eyeing. At least I picked up some long skinny string beans from the dumpster on 10th. 

How many heads

 Up at 4 and want to get out of here at 5. I'm still rattled about that SUV-driving asshole honking at me when I went under the bridge, and have looked at a map to see if there's a better route and there really isn't. One solution may be to ride up on the sidewalk there.

I got a bunch of packing done last night including one big thing that I was going nuts looking for, how could something that big get lost? I put away tons of things I'd listed because sometimes that helps me find things, and at the very end of that, it did. The thing, a big piece of metal hose, was simply placed up high on top of other stuff on the top of a shelf. D'oh! I packed that right away. 

I then made a really excellent bowl of miso soup with salmon. After frying the salmon, I had an idea and scrambled an egg and fried that in the oil left by the salmon. It was good! Even then, before bed I was hungry again and toasted some walnuts with garlic and had that and a couple slices of cheese. 

I didn't draw any, which isn't good for establishing a habit. I'm not about to break into that illustration board I found last night; the larger size of index cards are fine for now. But I thought last night: If I drew 3 heads a day, isn't that over 1000 a year? Or three drawings or sketches of just about anything. The idea would be to become so "prolific" as such an artist is described, that it's no big deal to just give art away. 

In other words, now that I can make $0 playing trumpet, why not make $0 doing art? 

In other thoughts, living on the island of Oahu is 1/2 the cost of living here. Israel/Tel Aviv is 1/3 but a huge language barrier and the need to convert which means I'd have to profess to believe in a lot of stuff I don't necessarily believe in. 

In fact, after some reading on Buddhism yesterday, it seems to me the contract between the Jews and "God" would be seen as worshiping one of the devas and so not the actual truth. It's exactly what deva-worship would look like. I don't think that's going to really work for me. Judaism looked attractive to me because of the high regard for learning and the influence of so many Jewish people in my life, like Carl Sagan and Feynman and so on, but really, these are people who largely broke away from Judaism and were pretty largely not observant. This same high regard for learning is found in many cultures and is certainly present in Asian ones. 

So getting back to living back in Hawaii being 1/2 the cost of living here, it means the $800-odd I'd get if I got Social Security ASAP there, would be like getting $1600 here and I could certainly get by on $1600 here. Besides wherever I go, I want to have enough saved up that I can do absolutely nothing for a year if I feel like it. 

So today after coffee etc., I got out of here about 5:40, did the run to the post office which was uneventful as I happened to cross under the bridge when there were no cars, did my drop-offs (of course the chute at the post office jammed so I had to put the 2nd half of my packages in a tub and take it to the middle counter) and rode for FedEx. 

But what do I see but a lunch truck called "Fire And Rice" and that got me interested. I parked and got a Spam and egg musubi which was $6 with a $1 tip, and since I had to use the bathroom I tucked it away in the top bag on the bike and went over to FedEx and dropped off the big box. 

I got some nice cabbage leaves behind H Mart, then rode over to the place that puts together emergency kits and such things for business because they often throw out neat stuff. This time I got a little bottle of rubbing alcohol to carry on the bike, and 3 boxes of Alka-Seltzer. 

By now I really had to "go" so I went straight back to the shop and took care of that. Then I tried the musubi, which was pretty good. They left the egg runny but even that was OK.  I followed it up with a couple slices of cheese, to tide me over until my usual past-midnight dinner time. 

Then I took a washed my hair and shaved and bathed, and having an hour until Ken came by, hunted down the Ebay things that had sold, to make my packing easier tomorrow. 

Ken came by on the dot, gave me a lot of packing materials and some stuff to sell, showed off a neat thing he'd bought to keep - some ancient medical device - and I showed him my smoke detector and fire extinguisher installation. "It's the same size of extinguisher I saw in Ono Hawaiian Barbecue", I said. I also gave him the receipt for the $97-odd so he can write it off on his taxes, and he said "I'll pass it on to you" and wrote me a check for $400 instead of $300 for this week. 

Then we talked about all kinds of technical stuff, and he left at .... midnight.

A demotivated motivated thing

 I was so de-motivated yesterday I considered just staying in. But no, my plan had been, in my packing a load of things on Sunday night, to keep those packages here and my trip "out" would be to Lowe's where I'd buy the smoke detectors and fire extinguisher, which I'd then install. If I didn't do things according to plan, those packages would sit until Wednesday and that would just not do. Plan your work and work your plan...

Still, it took me forever to get the things installed, between fixing food and eating, trying to take just enough alcohol to not be too shaky on the ladder but not too much, and so on. But I got everything installed, and got some Ebay things listed also. And so while being very demotivated, I did a thing I hadn't had to motivation to do - and should have - when first moving in. 

I drew a few more heads and doodles, too. It's actually really easy to fit a few in; with trumpet practice I have to block out an hour or two of time, get my mouth all clean including chewing sugarless gum, then find something on YouTube that's about an hour or an hour and a half long like a movie to watch (often with closed captions on) while I practice, etc. It can't be at 4AM because that results in a shitty practice and who needs to practice not being able to go above high C. You want to practice doing well. And it can't be when people are holding a party next door because who wants to mess up their music? And so on. 

From the movie "Trumpets Republic" I learned that it's entirely to become your area's champion trumpet player by practicing while watching trashy TV, and watching a show to "pace" my practice (not only make it more enjoyable but also to make sure I put in the hour; hour-and-a-half). The main thing that got me into is regular practice. 

Unfortunately I was raised with this weird mid-20th-century idea that kids should be "natural" and anything that smacked of grind, or drudgery, was unnatural and bad. And if a kid was "smart" then they were really let off the hook with regard to any sort of discipline so it was only very, very occasionally that I determined myself to draw or paint something every day. It usually lasted less than a week. I drew or painted depending on whether I *felt* like it, which is how people thought artists did their work, and in reality is only how the many hacks around Hawaii at the time who called themselves artists, didn't do their work. 

After doing all the stuff  I did last night, I actually dressed up and walked out to the front of the complex where the lunch truck should be, around 7AM. And it wasn't. Maybe it's just not profitable any more. So I went back in and got back into my "inside" clothes and had a can of sardines that were on sale at Nijiya and not bad, and a little Parmesan cheese and drank a bit and went to bed. 

So I was up around 4 today, had my coffee etc., and somehow managed to just barely get out of here at 6. The deliveries went OK, except that when going under the bridge where 101 crosses Brokaw, some idiot in an SUV got all pissed at me and leaned on his horn. I hurled a fine trail of blasphemy at him. The problem with going East there is that the bike lane and the lane going onto the freeway cross each other. 

Deliveries all done, I went over to "Ono Hawaiian Barbecue" and got the shrimp appetizer. I'd realized I still had the ratty $10 bill I'd put in my pocket for the lunch truck, in my pocket. So that's where $9 (with tip) of that went, and I even got a 1960 penny in my change. I went to the opposite shopping center, the one with the gym in it, and found a place to sit and eat at one of the planters because it was too dark to go to the egg-shaped robot place. 

On the way back here I found three perfectly good onions in this one dumpster that occasionally gets good stuff (like the Vita-Mix I'd pulled out of there not long ago that went for $100 on eBay) and over at the Sanmina circuit board place I found 10, 18X24 sheets of what I'd swear is that elusive treasure called "illustration board". It sure looks/feels like it, and even had a smooth (hot-press) and rough (cold-press) side. Since Sanmina deals with some high-dollar stuff, maybe they're buying actual illustration board to used between circuit boards. Right now I'm drawing on the larger size of index cards, and have been considering ordering some card stock but this stuff is a real find, and free. 

I got back here and put things away, and made up a load to junk to take to a dumpster, and my organic trash to bestow on the blackberry patch. The dumpster I wanted to use, the one right out front, was locked (maybe they didn't appreciate my putting a huge scientific equipment "body part" in there...) so I used a couple others, dividing the stuff up. Then fertilized the blackberries and back here. 

A few small faces

 Up at 4. I didn't practice last night of course, although in the area of "doing something" I did draw a few small faces and doodles. 

I also packed things, not to take them to the post office today, but to have them officially packed, then the plan was to go to Lowe's today and get a couple of smoke detectors and a fire extinguisher. I had a lot of trouble getting motivated, and finally took off at almost 7. 

Although it was rapidly getting dark I didn't have any zombie problems so I got lucky there. The extinguisher and detectors cost me $97 but are well worth it I think.  Lowe's was all out of Windex except for one small bottle that got bought as I looked, and completely out of paper towels. They did have big packages of white shop rags, for people who want to go to using cloth rags I guess. 

I had a chat with Arnold the security guard at Telemundo on the way back, and picked up a red bell pepper. Then once back here cooked up some "Spanish eggs" which is just scrambled eggs with diced poblano chile, hot sauce, and sour cream on top. 

I just feel very un-motivated and it's for the reason that I think I have a problem that precludes my getting any further in trumpet and in fact, means I should probably quit and call it a good run. It's the same sort of situation Marvin Naylor's in, with his deafness/tinnitus and arthritis, I think. My rate of improvement has been glacial, anyway, but I'm also up against the curve of old age, and then there's this problem. Marvin Naylor continues to play and teach because he can get by 1:1 with a student or as a busker, and he really doesn't have a fallback. 

Well, I do. From before I can remember it was the rule that I would be an artist. Everyone being so sure is kind of neat, in that art materials rained from the sky whenever I wanted them, but it also introduces a thing called pressure. This is a very well-known thing in sports, where a kid can become very good at a sport, but really not like it because it becomes a job. Enjoying the sport, an internal goal, gets covered up by the need to do well, which is an external goal. 

So I was put under pressure especially when we were very poor and my paintings and drawings were a lifeline at times. But I think it disgusted me as I think the whole family would have lived off of me if they could. And I was discovering new stuff, electronics and science-y stuff like books by Carl Sagan. And poverty had me afraid to go into anything but the things thought most likely to provide a good living. In my case and my era, electronics. Yeah take a big bite of that mock apple pie, them's apples not dry crackers, you bet. 

It turns out that you can go into just about anything whether you like it and assume it pays little, or hate it and assume it pays much, and you're going to get about the same crappy pay no matter what you do. I've even told Ken I'd have done far better in life if I'd gone to college for art instead of electronics - I'd have gotten a job in an art supply store, and had side commissions, and possibly gotten credentialed as an art teacher, and have made 10X the money electronics ever got me. 

But back to those internal and external goals. I've told myself I "should" learn caricature drawing because it (supposedly) makes so much money, and put that way, it sounds like a damn job. But in reality I really *would* like to be able to draw all different kinds of noses and eyes and so on. And as my caricature drawing buddies (Fat, and Skinny, of Christmas In The Park fame) "you just have to draw a lot of bad ones before the good ones start coming out". 

All I ever wanted was something I could be good at that I could use to make my way in the world. Hawaii was awash in artists, and all of them seemed to be poor. So I thought electronics would do it, and got in just as the electronics technician jobs were all going away. Then a minor sport, which was OK but *very* political with backstabbing and skullduggery at an almost Kremlin level. Plus the USSR fell so the modern Olympics mostly lost its reason for being. 

Then Ebay started up and I got in early. That's been "very OK". It's probably on a par with being a skilled line cook or warehouseman or tire installer. You'll survive and that's about it. Losing my own Ebay business in mid-07 was a relief. I never wanted to make a living where I had to have that much stuff again. (At least here it's all Ken's stuff.) 

My criteria are that whatever I do, can't take a lot of "stuff" to do, and if I were dumped in a strange town with the clothes on my back and not much more, I could make my way. Say I get quite good at portraits, I can always beg some paper or cardboard or something and a pencil or crayon and draw a few people, and then I've shown myself to be someone with a special ability who's worth something. 

That's how it was when I was a kid/teen. There was little food and I didn't have shoes (not as big a deal in Hawaii) but I was taken a bit more seriously because I was an "artist". Not that good of one, but head and shoulders above any other kid I knew of on the then sparsely-populated windward side of Oahu. 

Imagine my come-down when, after running away to join my father in Hawaii Kai, I met kids who'd had some actual art training and were better than me. When you've got a skill that's about all you've got, and you think you've got a solid living on it, then get crushed by the people who are *really* good at it... it's no wonder I fled to electronics. I was given the decades-old impression that in electronics, they needed legions of techs. 

This happens in Japanese schools a lot. Some kid is the hotshot in his little area, then because he *is* smart and hard-working, he tests into one of the elite high schools and finds out that there, he's 3rd rate. That's what happened to me, and it was only a painting of some kid climbing on some rocks, and copied out of a magazine illustration at that. I felt like not even mentioning to the girl who painted it that I did art at all, tho' I was not immune to the occasional doodle. This last meant that in the last year at good old Henry J. Kaiser High, when kids got their yearbooks like I could not afford, to graduate which I could also not afford, I was suddenly very popular - they wanted my signature but more importantly, they were hoping for a doodle. 

I'm not sure if it was my cartoon about Mr. Bill and Mr. Hand that somehow involved solar energy, my drawing of "Captain Larval" in English class, the stuff I did in actual art class (where popularity actually hinged on knowing Rapper's Delight) or my profusely-illustrated notebook for Marine Science, which someone stole, but I had a reputation. And those kids weren't just drinking "Moonrise, The Coffee That's Mellowed With Plutonium", a product I came up with in some weird class, call it Economics, it was more about living day-to-day. 

If it weren't for art, I think I might have had a good run for Most Unpopular Kid, because I was so miserable, and so underfed, and so worried about how I was going to survive, would I become homeless, etc. I almost never had anything good to say, because I really didn't know how. Conversation, as I'd been taught, meant finding something to gripe about. Observations about someone else meant snarking at them. I was equal parts MAD Magazine and my mom's mental illness, I think. So I was most unpleasant. But they came around to have me sign their yearbooks... 

So there's a lot of sugar and a lot of shit, and the task is to separate the sugar from the shit. That's what the lotus does; growing out of the mud. The significance of the lotus in Buddhism can only be compared to Mother Mary in Catholicism probably, only more so. Something in the midst of mud and filth, that grows pure and beautiful. The sugar should not be thrown away. My parents were both frustrated artists and on that basic level really wanted me to be an artist. That they were both rather awful people who'd have taken advantage of any success I had is also certain, but I've outlasted them now. 

I can separate the sugar from the shit. I'm 4 years out from not having to work any more, as long as I can live on about $800 a month, Medicare, and "working the system". 

So I can spend the 4 years learning Hebrew (it hasn't been going well) and converting, then moving to Israel which may or may not be possible and may or may not go well. 

Or I can spend the 4 years working on art when I'm not working on stupid Ebay stuff, and at the very least be able to sketch, joke, and entertain well enough to get me the happy hour special in restaurants in Waikiki. 

The advantage of retiring back in Hawaii is I already know the local dialect, and if I can learn to draw or paint "atmosphere" it won't matter where I do it. I'll still be in the US if a remote corner of it, so if I want to publish books it won't be any harder than in any other US state. I know where everything is. I just have to make myself someone  who adds to the place.