Kava Konnection

 I woke up around 11, not having had enough alcohol on hand to really sleep, and kind of went to half-sleep until around 2. Did my deep breathing stuff and tried to come up with a reason to get out of bed. I thought about Kumar's Island Market, reputed to, according to one reviewer, have "strong" kava. That was a reason. 

I got up and tried my best to ignore being twitchy and took off at about 3, my first checkpoint aside from dumping a bag of trash, being Nijiya. I bought my sake and a bento and a beer, and went over to eat on the steps of the Issei building. The food and especially the beer fixed me up. 

Next checkpoint was Kumar's and that was fun to go to - Santa Clara street has a lot of cool Hispanic stuff on the east end. Also cool Vietnamese stuff. Kumar's was easy to find and there was even a bike rack in front and no bums around - it was really nice. 

I went in and the store capacity according to the sign was 2, which seemed to mean 6-8 large Polynesian persons. I knew the place was legit when I overheard that one lady had spent a couple hundred dollars on food, including turkey tails. They had kava, at $42 or so a pound and I had to buy a full pound as the bags are sealed. "Looks like I'm buying a pound of kava, then!" I said, cheerfully. I'd taken out $40 cash at Nijiya but used my card. 

On the way back, I saw a guy selling T-shirts and hats and so on, in a park area just off of the sidewalk. I doubled back and asked about bandanas - he had 'em in rainbow and I said that's fine and they were a buck - but I didn't have a single dollar and he didn't have change, so he just gave me his "example" one. We talked a bit about surviving scroungy times, and busking, and all sorts of things. I need to find a reason to go down to that end of Santa Clara St. to get him his dollar, and explore some of the cool stuff around there. 

I stopped at the Amazon place to pick up a few bubble mailers and pick up a CD that goes with my latest shakuhachi book but it's not in yet. 

Next was Nijiya again, to buy another beer and some fried smelt that are a seasonal thing. I crowed to Blondie (I really need to get the name of that kid!) about obtaining kava and how I got so much, a whole pound. "You could sell it..." he said and I said Nah but I'd give some to people who are interested. He said he's up for it and I said I'll see if it's good stuff first then certainly I can bring some by. But waiting in line, sweat was getting into my eyes so badly it was hard to keep them open, so along with a beer and the fish I got an unsweetened green tea. 

Right outside by my bike I washed my face with some tea. What a relief! Then I boogied over to the Issei building and opened my beer - it foamed all over! So now I had a beer spill on the steps of the Issei building which I washed down with more tea, and "swept" the puddle into a crack using a leaf. 

Fortunately the Ito-En tea bottles are really nice and sturdy, and the bottle will serve me well as a water bottle to carry with me in the warm months for drinking, washing up, etc. 

So I sat on the the other side of the steps and had beer and some of the fish. I thought about all kinds of things and then relaxed and looked at the pine tree there and the rocks and the benches, and how beautiful the natural things are, and I thought, Maybe a motivation in art is nostalgia. Not "the" motivation but one of the various streams, along with political message, aspirations, and the simple conveyance of technical information. But nostalgia... it sure carried Marc Chagall through a career and his work makes me nostalgic for schtetls I never knew. 

I am not sure I'd want to be a political artist because I think I would be too angry. A teacher I had in high school wanted to encourage me that way, back when the daily political cartoon in the newspaper was an important thing. 

And aspirations! My only aspiration is for the rest of Life to somehow survive Humanity. So I could never do rockets-to-Mars type art. 

But nostalgia, there's an elephant in the room. I learned nostalgia early on. It's why I like the shakuhachi, it being, to me, the most "nostalgic" of instruments. 

I rode back here, messed around on Reddit for an hour or so, and then rode up to H Mart. I got some sake, some coconut cream in little boxes, a bottle of Asahi beer, and a package of gyoza, among other things. 

I thought about nostalgia on my way back. Of course I could make paintings of the old Portlock Pier and such things that will arouse a great sense of nostalgia in those who have known them, but then, who are those who'd remember the Portlock Pier and old buildings around Honolulu and the island of Oahu in general? Those old guys who burned their trash piles on the beach when I was a kid and seemed to have so much fun probably were real bastards in WWII who collected "Jap ears". The Portlock Pier, when it was taken down, damn near killed the reef. It must have damn near killed the reef when it was put up. How many locals were displaced when Hawaii Kai was planned and laid out by Henry J. Kaiser anyway? 

Representative, depicted nostalgia might be a dead end. Maybe that's why Marc Chagall's paintings are so abstract. They are of a dreamland, of a rabbi or a yeshiva student floating over a schtetl dreamland, the buildings all tipply-topply. It could be anywhere. They're wonderful paintings and people of a certain background and of a certain generation will get all misty over them, perhaps not remembering that some of those schtetl Jews were so poor they had to eat mud pancakes like they do in other, extremely poor, areas. 

This is where music gets around this. Gustav Holst was certainly writing about the vast, mysterious, interplanetary spaces when he wrote the last parts of The Planets, yet I found it perfectly fitting to have it booming in my head when I was walking on the wild reef off Kokohead Point. The same piece of music creates a wonderful, and different, mental world for everyone who listens to it and loves it. 

That is the true universality of music. Probably the closest thing art can come to this is the paintings of things in nature that were done so brilliantly in China and Japan from 1000s of years ago to the present. That's one of the fun things I did today, to look up at the pine tree in front of the Issei building and a particular dead branch on it, which had a beautiful form no human could invent. And a single, small, 2-spined pine needle, that was so perfectly formed and curved. I looked at it and almost cried. We humans are going to burn this all up? 

I would seriously consider taking up sumi-e to paint things like that pine needle. It could be a nice thing to do, along with the shakuhachi. I would certainly like to take a Shodo (calligraphy) class when things are back to normal, and while I don't see anything for sumi-e scheduled now, I'm sure something will come along. There are classes in beginner and intermediate Japanese too but of course I'm not able to do "Zoom" because I don't have the internet speed. I *do* need to pay my dues to the Yu-Ai-Kai Center though because even if I'm not using their services much this year, I think it's the right thing to do and who knows, they might have some inside line on getting covid vaccinations. I'll be glad to fork over the $60 yearly dues for that. 

But getting back to music, it's got to be in the same realm as prime numbers. Most people don't even know what a prime number is, but even Nature knows what they are, and used them long before humans came along. With humans gone, they'd still be there. They survive kalpas (universes) as the Buddha does.

Rinban Sakamoto would probably think I'm crazy if I told him this, but this is why I believe in the Pure Land of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism. You can't hold a prime number in your hand, but they exist, as surely as any other thing. And the realm of the Hungry Ghosts, well, as he says, this is happening all around, all levels are all happening all around us. You just have to go to the part of San Jose I call "Hamsterdam" to see a few Hungry Ghosts staggering around and screaming at each other. At the same time the realms of the Devas and Buddhas are here, and if we are lucky we might get a glimpse of them. "This is all happening, right now" - Sakamoto san. 

This is why I look forward so much to going back to Hawaii. The weather there will not kill me so I don't need to fear becoming street homeless like I do here. I can fish and forage and if the experiences of "Panther Hawaii" are any indication, there's tons of free food anyway if you know where to look. Plus I plan to play a lot of shakuhachi. I can go to the practice sessions at the Buddhist center 2X a week, and as John Coltrane aspired to do in his final years, purify myself.