Hardly anyone remembers the pier

 Above is a 1961 photo showing Portlock Road, Koko Head, and to the right the epic Portlock Pier. I guess you had to grow up in the area to know how great that pier was, but so much of my best childhood memories were spent on or around it. 

We tried fishing off of it and of course plop! There went Dad's fiberglass fishing pole which we said we'd be careful with. Surfers would walk out on the pier then do this neat dive off of it with their boards underneath them and go surf. The reef around the pier was fantastic and had tons of shells and things to find, including the intimidating bristle worm, a creature I learned not to touch. 

I remember the fantastic day my older sister took us out to "the cave" that we got to by going up to the end of Portlock to the Kaiser Estate, through a hole between a fence and a hedge, down to the beach and out along amazing lava flats with wondereful tide pools and different colors of algae and hermit crabs galore. Did we ever get in trouble when we came back home, too, because Mom didn't know where we'd all gone off to and the place was so fascinating we were there for hours, where I believe my older sis had told Mom we'd be gone an hour. 

I played along that whole stretch of beach from "the cave" down to where Kuapa Pond drains out into Moanalua Bay. Even as a teen I sailed Sunfish on Kuapa Pond itself, when my father had a place on the little island in the pond and it was me, older sis, and one of my younger sisters. I was trying to get into scientific things, and I'd lay out on the lawn at night and look at the Milky Way and imagine I'm stuck to the side of a planet that's sailing through Space, and looking out at the stellar neighborhood. 

But back to the pier, because I think it's a crime it's not remembered. It was made of some kind of pressure-treated wood that got wonderfully furry and silver on the outside, and was fine and fresh below its surface. I'm going to guess it had something to do with Henry J. Kaiser because about everything in Hawaii Kai does. When you live in Hawaii Kai, go to Kaiser High School and shop at the Koko Kai shopping center, and even had a Kaiser-Frazer car in your driveway, and one of your fave beaches is at the Kaiser Estate, it's a pretty Kaiser life. 

Henry J. probably just wanted a way to get out past the reef where he probably had a boat or two, to go do some marlin fishing. Like Mr. Durant did - he caught a huge marlin and after the requisite pictures were taken, it was divided up and everyone had marlin that night. I've not been able to find that much about the Durants but they had a company called Durant-Irvine Co. or DICO. They gave us a cat, a really pretty tabby, which we named Dico. So he was a cat named after a corporation. 

Eventually more and more boards fell off of the pier and eventually it was a real challenge to get out to the end. Lots of rusty nails too. Parents hated the thing because they couldn't keep us kids away from it. So it was demolished which killed off the life on the reef and broke my damn heart. "Ecology" was talked about on TV and boxes of Cheerios came with those green "Ecology" flags you could stick on your bike, and I felt like I was seeing damage to the ecology up close and personal. You'd not think a 10-year-old could be worried about the environment but I sure was. 

The boards from the pier were piled up on the beach, and Dad took four of them and cut grooves so they stacked like Lincoln Logs and got a big piece of plate glass from a hotel that was being demolished, and made the neatest big coffee table. We kept that thing around for years. It's how I know the pier wood was fresh as new under the surface, because I saw the cut ends before Dad painted them black, and plus we kids got into the habit of picking at the wood when we were bored. Plus eventually the glass got an awful lot of scratches. When we left our Punaluu place we left the table behind. 

Why do I natter on about all this stuff though? Because since coming to the mainland I've felt like a stateless person. I thought I'd feel rooted to the mainland because of course I was actually born here. But it just doesn't seem to work that way. Hawaiians feel very rooted to the land in a way that I'm not sure mainlanders can understand. 

When a Hawaiian was born, their umbilical cord was buried under the hale/house and they were bound to that land. They find the Western idea of buying and selling land and moving around rather appalling. For some reason, I feel more like a Hawaiian would than like a mainlander. I'm not sure how culture is transmitted but I seem to have internalized a lot of what they call "AAPI" or Asian-American Pacific Islander values. How, I dunno, but I'm stuck with 'em. And I've lived various places on the mainland but none of them have been home. 

A friend of mine, now departed, Sam Anderson, who'd been a fighter pilot and test pilot and a bunch of neat things, including retrieving the first object brought back from Space, had this special feeling about the Prescott Arizona area. I lived out there with him for a couple periods of my life and at one point, I asked him, Why here? Why here of all places? It's nothing special. 

And he told me, when he was a kid in WWII, and his father was a high ranking officer, who was a doctor so he was in tight with all the other officers who really liked him, so they liked little Sam, the doctor's kid. And they kept coming back to Prescott, AZ. It was this place where there were always comfort and good times. And Sam didn't have any easier relationship with his dad than I did with mine. 

My own dad loved Kahana Bay. We'd go to the Foodland in Kaneohe and get those flat raisin cookies and to go Kahana Bay and sit and eat 'em, and Dad walked with me up to the end of the beach most people don't go to, where there's hau forest down to the shore and there are all these little white clam shells. Kahana Bay was my dad's comfort place. 

I have my suspicions that my parents visited Hawaii well before we kids came along. I think my grand-aunt had at least passed through from the 30's on, as she traveled all over the Pacific in the process of becoming Commanding Officer Of All The Military Libraries In The Indo-Pacific. Or whatever the title was. I seem to remember photos of her as a young person showing off her "gams" in good 1930s style, and some picture of my parents at one of the big Waikiki hotels in the 50s. They're standing in front of a banyan tree and some tiger lilies.

So the thing is, I may not have come to Hawaii myself until I was 6, but I've got a lot of history there. And I'll never "get" the mainland. All this place is about is work, work, work, sheer survival and no talking on the line; don't socialize. I really want to be out of here, if I can find some way to do it. I don't want to be homeless there and a burden to my sisters or an embarrassment to them. 

I'm not even sure where I'm going with the shakuhachi. It's healthy as hell, and I'm glad I've taken it on. My whole musical "career" has been an exercise in stubbornness. I was no natural on the trumpet but over years, I actually started sounding pretty decent. Also got OK on flute, PVC flute, a bit of drums, a bit of musical saw which no one gave a damn about, and can usually pick my way around on piano. 

This is all great, but how am I making the best use of my abilities? I have developed pretty decent busking powers and now that I think about it ... what was my hang-up about art? Originally I did art because it was fun. I drew my seashells and I did all sorts of things. There was no money involved. I did some really cool shit. I remember going through a chest of childhood stuff Dad had somehow hung onto and finding stuff I did when I was around 8, Xmas ornaments and drawings and things .... one of the funnest things  I did was, I guess the Peanuts characters were big during the 1972 Olympics and there were these sticky stamps with Snoopy doing all kinds of events. And I liked bicycles. So I did this drawing of a 10-speed and then cut out all these little Snoopys and had them all over the bicycle, doing their events. 

I also went to a school where playing cards were forbidden so naturally I made a full set of playing cards in miniature size. They were like 1/5th the size of regular ones. It was so they could be hidden. I figured I'd be the cool kid who could play surreptitious games of War when the nuns weren't looking. 

I think what screwed me up was the need to make money. We lost our Portlock house and went to Pupukea but like the Biden presidency it was only a temporary respite, as computer programming kept being a dumber and dumber idea for my dad to make a living, and we got poorer and poorer. 

Pretty soon we had hippies. I think the idea was they'd pay rent, but somehow that never happened. The North Shore had lots of hippies then, so we ended up with these lazy freeloaders who had a way of eating up the food. There were smart hippies but they were starting businesses in Hale'iwa and so on. 

Eventually we lost the Pupukea place and Mom found a cheap place out in Punalu'u. The hippies were gone then because we got our electricity turned off in Pupukea, food got very scarce, and even hippies don't like to cook over a fire on the lawn, using an old tire as a fire ring. 

Mom had kept one of the hippies - the laziest one - as a boyfriend. This is when doing art became about making some money (external goal) instead of for enjoyment (internal goal). I worked on art a fair bit, but was always kicking myself for not practicing it enough. 

I had paintings of mine in the local gallery, and there's a good chance an oil painting I did is still hanging up in the office of Kahuku High School so when a kid's in trouble they can see it and wonder why I'd used so damn much blue. 

The thing is, there was a great pressure to make money, to survive. And I was constantly told by my mom's useless boyfriend that "Artists don't make money until after they're dead" and "If you're gonna be an artist, you need to practice at it 8 hours a  day". Well, I did try the working-long-hours thing when I did the airbrush T-shirts and we couldn't give them away. And there were only so many paintings I could sell to my high school teacher and his friends. It was all very discouraging. 

I even had a bit of a mentor, an Australian seascape and landscape painter who'd retired from the Australian Navy and was now going to be a  painter. And he was really good. He gave me some of his old brushes and paints and let me borrow some of his art books, and was very encouraging but even he was having a really hard time and eventually returned to Australia in disgust. 

This is why I didn't stay with it. But I think having it linked to the must-make-money mindset is what really hurt my enthusiasm. But since I'm close to retirement, money's not going to be a huge problem soon. So I am thinking, maybe I should approach art like busking. I should be willing to give artwork away just like when you busk, you're giving music away.

Gotta catch up

 Feel like shit. Got about 15 things that are overdue like library books on Ebay. 

I took some things that I could carry w/o the trailer and dropped 'em off at the post office and FedEx. I felt surprisingly strong on the bike considering how lousy I feel. 

I stopped at H Mart for sake and a fish cake and found some bubble wrap on the way back. I got back here and lay on the floor for a while then started in on packing the things that are overdue. About halfway through Ken came by, and I talked to him while packing packages. 

And I actually got them all done; the overdue ones (except for a pair circuit boards going to Germany) and the ones about to be overdue. Ken will take the packages to the post office and FedEx tomorrow. 

Ken gave me my pay check and I reminded him about the 1099 form again. As long as I have a figure and it's the same figure he's giving the IRS I'm happy. 

Ken and I talked about all sorts of things. We talked about how, classically, in the military the way we were taught to interrogate people was to be nice to them. Ken said that goes back to WWII. I told him that's what I was taught and I was in an MI company. Some of my best friends were interrogators. I never heard anything different and I'd have picked it up if there was any different doctrine. All this waterboarding bullshit came in with the Bushes, it seems. We talked about ex-Nazi's we'd known and old war vets and for some stupid reason I got all teary about my old friend Dr. Sprague, who'd served on subs in the war. I suppose he's gone, along with Mr. Von Kessel, Robert Rauer, Roy McInness, Jack Wheat, a whole lot of those old guys I looked up to.

The older generation was just plain what idiots now would call "liberal". I told Ken how my mom taught us to never cross a picket line and if they're boycotting grapes you boycott grapes, and you never say bad things about black people and so on, and Ken said his father who served on a destroyer in the war, was the same way. 

Since we were really letting our hair down I told him about the nigger club. I was 8 or so, and a bunch of us were sitting around, cross-legged as a kids in Hawaii do, and there was some sort of discussion as to who was a nigger. It sounded really cool. It had to do with how dark you are. I asked if I could be a nigger and was told that well ... I wasn't very dark but they supposed they could sneak me in. "I'm a nig-ger, I'm a nig-ger" I sang as I trotted to the bus at the end of the day. But when I got home I thought I'd better check with my mom about it, and asked her what a nigger is. She immediately stormed up and said it's a very bad word for a black person and she never wanted to hear me say it again. 

That's what a good mother does. There was just a basic decency and reasonableness that was expected. Of course a bunch of 'em voted for Nixon and Ken can't believe  I voted for Reagan (young and very, very stupid). I also took Revolutionary Communist Party newspapers to Army Reserve duty and hung out at the communist book store by the university and bought my share of Novosti publications. 

So my commie ratbastard creds actually go back fairly far and back when the Olympics had any political relevancy I even got to compete with Eastern Bloc athletes. They were good; damn good. But once in a great while they'd have an especially bad day and I'd have an uncharacteristically good one... 

I actually ate a bit around midnight or 1AM. Half the fish cake, Japanese pickles, Korean bean sprouts (cooked). I can smell the domoic acid making its way out of my system and forget about practice, I haven't even been practicing what I call Full Range Breathing these last couple of days. 

Once I've got some kind of a figure from Ken, how much he paid me in 2020 and is the same one he'll tell the IRS, I'm going to get my 2020 taxes done which should leave about a grand in my bank account. Then it's a small splurge or a big one. Mejiro in Japan has a deal where you buy a Shakuhachi Yuu and a book, and even with DHL airmail it's under $200. Or, I might drop $500-$700 a  Monty Levinson flute. I'm also on the list for a Jon Kypros "Bell" which is a tad over $200 but I've seen a side to side comparison with the Yuu and the Yuu is actually louder. Kypros is a jinashi purist and .... nah man that ain't my game. I want that jiari pure tone. Of course the real aficionado could just fork over the money for an AirReed X, at a mere 6 thou, a far, far better investment than my old Yamaha SRX-6.

Demoic acid?

 Feel like shit. Slept all day. It's not just alcohol, there's something else going on. I theorize I got a good dose of demoic acid from that lobster I ate. 

Seems the stuff is concentrated in the guts. And of course I wasn't going to let anything go to waste. So a lobster might be GRAS (generally recognized as safe) as long as you just eat the parts distal to the guts like the claws, and not so if you're using the "butter". 

I sent Ken 3 emails and also printed out a note in case I'm completely flaked out, and in the emails expressed the concern that it'd be nice if he checked in on me. 

And he called me back to check in which is nice.

Mirrorland

 Back when I was a kid, at 348 Portlock Road, we used terms like looking-glass and writing-paper and "one" does this or that or thinks this or that. And we had the sort of handheld mirrors that debutantes would primp themselves by, and of course I had one, in case the one in my bedroom surrounded by seashells wasn't enough. 

So one day I went to Mirrorland. This is easy when you only see kind of well out of one eye and your relationship with binocular vision is theoretical at best. 

I took a handheld mirror and I placed it beside my head and I navigated by looking into it only. Everything was flipped. Our Portlock place was big, with front, back, and side yards, and now I had an additional space just as big. 

It was very disorienting. Even more so than spinning on the swing in an area of the very large back yard we called "Makalani Palaced" after one of our dogs, a female Basset hound we'd named Makalani. 

Well, I felt like this today. Pissed my unders so I was Donald Duckin' it until I'd trimmed all nails all around, treated sleeping bag and futon with Frebreze, changed clothes, yadda yadda ya teacha' ya maddah. 

Plus I'm all dinged up. Big ol' scuff under my bad eye, signs of Thai elbow boxing on both elbows, scratches and dent all over, and most annoyingly, I must have sat down on something hard because I've got a massive bruise on my right ass cheek. 

So I feel like I've been to Mirrorland, with extra tune-ups and beefs. Cracks and nacs nacs. 

I finally got my lazy ass, feeling like lead, going around maybe 8:30 to go up to H mart for that essential, sake, and some of those wonderful ark shells and cooked chilled mung bean sprouts and even a bottle of Asahi "Dry" beer. 

I'm blaming the lobster. The last time I had lobster it was tails only and I'm pretty sure it was the good old Pacific Spiny variety, the kind I used to find the moults of on the beach on good old Portlock Road back when the Portlock Pier was a thing that terrified parents and delighted us kids. But it was an East Coast type lobster I bought and a bit over  a bound, yielding 9 oz. of meat and "butter". 

I had a lobster salad and lobster miso soup the next day and both were umami, but I have a theory: Said lobster was farmed, in China, and was fed any damn thing. Human crap? Why not, it's nutritious and both we back in Hawaii up in the valleys and the Plains Indians had dogs around to clean up that opala. 

Why not heavy metals? Why not any damn thing? I read recently on Reddit about a guy catching crabs in the Ala Wai and selling 'em to restaurants.

Whole lot of nothing

 I made up a nice lobster miso soup last night and watched tons of YouTube and did a whole lot of nothing, then slept in until the afternoon, then slept in some more. 

"This isn't doing me any good" I thought, and "This is an reductio ad absurdum". Ken's not gonna come by and spoon food into my mouth and wipe my ass, and it's not making me feel any better so I might as well work.

Lobstah

 I made a delicious lobster salad last night with a dumpstered white onion and some chives, and of course a good amount of Kewpie mayonnaise, a little S&B "seasoned pepper" (equal parts salt, pepper, and MSG it seems) and a bit of additional black pepper. 

I also got in a full practice session last night. Then I declared it Night Off and went to bed. 

I woke up around 3, had a little wake-up sake and read the 2nd Buddha book because I want to read at least one each week. Then I started in on Japanese For Dummies. The Dummies books are meant to be skipped around in, and that's what I did. I'm not sure it's the best book because for instance they talk about hankos but they call it some other word I've not seen and there's only the shortest explanation of the word "do" which needs at least half a page if not more. Plus why spend so much paper on a rude form of the word for "you"? Just leave it out, and when the student sees it used by some yakuza or bosozuku on a TV show they'll catch on. 

Still it's a start. So I stayed in bed and read until about 8 in the evening.  The promised rain came through and it got pretty good and wet out there.

We don't want your kind here

 Up around 3. Awake earlier, of course, and listened to the radio for a while. It's going to rain tomorrow. 

I noticed when I was out riding around yesterday that they're putting ramps on a lot of the corners here so some theoretical person using a wheelchair can travel around. I then reflected that other then a few oldsters on motorized scooters, I never see disabled people around here. The area's unfriendly enough to those who don't get around by car, and I've noticed it's positively hostile to anyone who's not physically 100%. 

Hell some areas don't have sidewalks so you walk on the bike lane or on the side of the road, and I remember when I lived in Sunnyvale there were regularly mothers with young children or babies in strollers walking along the side of Maude street with cars whizzing by, going to/from a homeless camp that was set up in a field back there. 

It actually looked like a pretty nice camp. My understanding is that around that area, the homeless group up in "tribes" and these tribes have various levels of rules like no drug use etc. so there can be some fairly nice camps. This was before the 08 crash, and things being so much worse now, I suppose there are a lot of ex-middle-class people out there setting up some fairly rule-abiding hobo camps. 

But apparently, if you're disabled, we don't want your kind around here. You have to either be a rich techbro or working-class that's useful to the rich or you can just go off and die. And don't do it here. retreat to some shitty flyover state where the weather or the drug-addled locals will off you. 

Jim Crow's coming back to the South too. What a time to be alive. And I'm not fooled, this last election has only bought us some time. I did my part and voted for JoBiden (it's always JoBiden never Joe, or Biden, just like Al Gore became "Algor") but so far he's no FDR. And FDR was no V.I. Lenin who was the kind of leader we really need. 

So the new Jim Crow is all about banning non-whites from voting. But what about the opposite, let everyone vote? Let felons vote and let illegal immigrants vote and green card holders vote and visiting Albanians vote. People have this bugaboo about jailbirds voting but if a country has enough jailbirds to sway the vote, the problem is overgrown gulags not open voting. Being banned from voting should be a very restricted thing, not based on race or creed or class but only on very select histories, like being a traitor or insurrectionist. 

Tomorrow being a rain day, I had to go out today. I went up to H Mart and since I was starvin', I went to the California Fish Grill and got a shrimp appetizer, which is a little cup of breaded shrimp on top of some shredded cabbage. I ate the shrimp there, then walked back over to the bike and got a plastic cutlery set with napkin I had in the bike bag, and set up on the bench a lot of H Mart workers take a break on, and put tartar sauce and "cocktail" sauce on the shredded cabbage and thus has a nice big of cole slaw. 

Ken's wife Suzy can't take cabbage. She's got diverticulitis and it messes her up. I told her how, for some reason, cabbage in any of its forms is absolutely soothing to my system. Cooked, pickled, raw, doesn't matter. And it might be due to my being of European and Central Asian descent, where cabbage was a thing for 1000s of years, while she, being Mexican, doesn't have a genetic heritage of eating cabbage. In any case, all the more for me! I never even had cabbage until I was 10 or so, and my first thought was, "Where has this stuff been all my life?"

I went into H Mart and literally just got a cooked lobster of a bit more than a pound and sake. It was fairly busy because I think people know it's going to rain tomorrow. On my way back I cooked up a plan: I'll take a quick look at the place with all the boxes to make sure all's well, then come back with the bike trailer and take the Uline boxes that are exposed enough that the rain's going to mess them up anyway. So I came by and Lo and Behold they'd gotten all their stuff under tarps, and good for them I say. I picked out a couple of smallish boxes from hair-care products and that was that. 

Once back, I processed the lobster. It was a bit over a lb and I got 9 oz. of meat and "butter". My goodness did that thing have a lot of "butter" in it, all over its body. It was a messy production and I think I'm going to appreciate nice clean prepared lobster tails more. Or their diminutive cousins, shrimp! In fact I'd almost consider getting a fryer just to make "salt and pepper shrimp" which you eat shells and all. I could run an extension cord out front and cook that outdoors. 

So I got the lobster meat out and into the fridge, and my hands smell like Ke'ehi Lagoon which I love. It reminds me of Miss Takata's Marine Science class in high school where we had all kinds of different seaweeds that for some reason we had to take out of the little dishes and handle, with the result that for the rest of the day I'm pretty sure the other students thought we'd been playing hooky out on Kokohead Point and only just shown up for class. It's fragrant stuff after all, especially after it's been sitting a while. 

Going on more about local/native foods, I think if I'm going to be a fisher and a forager, I might need to, like "Outdoor Chef Life" on YouTube, get into cooking up my tucker "afield" too. Because it comes down to strong smells. I know I got a talking-to from Ken for cooking green onions with my eggs in the morning and it didn't help that they were from Dai Thanh where the veggies are so fresh they might slap you if you look at 'em wrong. 

I'm really hoping I can find a place to rent to hole up with some Asian people, anywhere from Kaimuki to Chinatown.  I still think I'll clean my fish down at the beach because it just makes a ton more sense.

Still conking out though

 It seems in the evening, around midnight, I just start conking out. This is fine, assuming I get right to bed and get up early enough. I was awake around 2 today, though. 

I got some practice in last night and I can tell I'm improving. It's just going to take time, discipline, and ardency. It can't be forced, just practiced. The last brush pen I bought is really neat though, so I need to start learning to transcribe common songs into the kinko notation. 

I had vitamins and almonds, forgot I'd gotten more natto yesterday - I've finally zeroed in on one type I like that has big beans. Since I can't read Japanese for shit I call it "Sweatin' in the garden" brand because the package has a picture of a guy and his wife out, well, sweatin' in the garden. 

I got out of here at 6:30 with 13 packages. Ebay has given us a bit of a spanking because I had a couple of packages go "overdue" by half an hour at most. So now we're "below average" so I want to stay really on top of shipping. I think they're tracking not just whether we're within limits but how far ahead and also delivery times. Geez I remember "6 to 10 weeks shipping" and watching movies a year after people on the mainland did. 

On the way back I decided I might go to the falafel place for a gyro because I thought I had $8 on me which would be enough. But they were closed. I know they're pretty serious Muslims, and if they're following the Sabbath the way Jews do, it's pau hana from sundown Friday night so that would make sense. 

So I decided to try a place called Sizzling Lunch, and ordered the chicken wings. Those were about $7.50, took a while, came with a sugary sauce I wasn't crazy about, were small, one undercooked, and literally left a bad taste in my mouth. Meh. 

I visited the storage unit and pulled some stuff out to list, and just generally to see how things are going.  I still can't figure out the lighting system there. But flashlights were invented for a reason. 

I checked the electrical lighting place and nope, no small boxes. They've really tapered down from when I used to gather tons of "Topaz" boxes that were really nice. But I've got my new box place ... 

At Sanmina I found a ton of firm foam pieces and stacked those on, then took off for home. I stopped by Grill'Em because I kind of wanted more to eat and to get that funny taste out of my mouth. The guys outside said they were open and I should go in and I said that's surprising for after 8 in the evening in San Jose. I went in and was told they're closed - after all, it's after 8PM in San Jose, the functional equivalent of after midnight anywhere else. 

Feel more energetic

 After Ken left last night I cooked up some dinner, then watched some YouTube and decided to call it a night. I practiced some, most of page 23, and it's hard to say if I'm practicing "harder" but getting through 80% of page 23 as opposed to lamely puffing through the whole thing like I was weeks ago. 

I actually woke up before noon, and lay in bed until about 2. Did a lot of breathing exercises. 

I had a bank appointment at 4, and left here at about 3:40. I steamed right on over to the bank and was right on time by which I mean just a few minutes into the 15-minute window the appointment provides. The reason to be a few minute in is to not have to wait outside, where there are so often crazies and bums. There was a bum passed out on the bus bench and a bum passed out in the next doorway over. And as I left, a crazy came through but didn't bother me. This is life in a world center of technology. 

I went over to the Amazon place next and picked up a book I'd ordered, "Japanese For Dummies", and some bubble mailers. Then I went over to Nijiya and noticed the bentos were really wiped out. But they had one "School Lunch Bento" (my name not theirs) left so I grabbed that and a beer. I walked over to the Issei building and ate there, happy it's warm enough again but not *that* warm actually. The school lunch bento has, going left to right, pickled daikon, tomago, a sausage, two onigiri one with pickled seaweed and one with cooked salmon, some broccoli, and two pieces of chicken karaage. I imagine it being what you'd get at a Japanese high school for lunch. 

As I walked over I noticed Ukulele Source is open again. That's nice to see. I also stopped at The Arsenal and looked around ... they have sumi-e stuff of course and, well, just all kinds of unexpected things. I didn't get anything though. 

I went over to Kogura's and got two more pairs of chop sticks, telling the gal there I'd gotten away from using disposable ones but I think I'd gotten absent-minded and thrown one of my pairs away. I also picked up a brush marker to try a different kind, Kuratake brand. (Testing it out later, it's neat! I think the UNI is my favorite small one and the Kuratake is my favorite larger one.)

Then it was back to Nijiya for serious shopping, and I got a bunch of stuff. Blondie checked me out and I completely forgot to ask him how the kava had worked out for him. Darnit! Because I'm happy to give him the rest as, I think whatever kava does, it does in parallel with alcohol not as a replacement for it. It cost me $40 but what's money these days? 

I got back here and was on time to pick up packages I'd packed and take them to FedEx and the post office, which I did. Then I shopped at H Mart, one interesting thing I got being a package of sauries which I'd been meaning to check out. They're a seasonal fish and this is about the last time to get them. 

On the way back, I went by the old shop because Ken said Tom Price was there last night. Tom was there and we hung out, talking, for a while. It was cold as hell in the wind but it was fun for a while. He's living there all the time, it seems, because he's been "teleworking" for the past year. I told him I can coach him to be a busking trumpeter (he played trumpet in school) and I'll even go out with him and get him started. There's a retirement career there, playing outside various Whole Foods stores and such places, and I won't be doing it here because I'll be playing shakuhachi in Hawaii or even if I got back to trumpet it will be in Hawaii. 

He seems to be at loose ends and depressed because of it. I don't know why I care so much about the guy except he's a neighbor, and now that we're not in conflict about the building he's a pretty nice guy. I get the sense that if I lost my situation here he'd at least let me camp out there. If I could scare up $500 a month he'd probably rent me the back half of the building and then I don't know what I'd do, probably start a business because that seems to happen when I get bored. 

I told him about "publishing on demand" as Amazon does it now, where I've been ordering books and I'll look in the back and the book will have been printed and bound a few days before I got it. Publish-on-demand has been around for a few decades now but I think the way Amazon does it, it's really come into its own. And the reason I'm interested is, shakuhachi scores for nice easy beginner stuff are really hard to find, so I figure I'll have to learn to transcribe stuff, and it would be useful to publish a book of non-copyrighted, easy music for shakuhachi. 

I'm really serious about getting him going on trumpet, though. I put all these years and work into trumpet, I told him, so I might as well pass it on. Anything I can do, I can teach. I can't teach a person to play like Wynton but I can get 'em going.

Waking up tired

 Up at 4 in the afternoon.  My gut's still a bit unsettled and arm a bit sore, and I woke up tired. At least I know the shot I got sure wasn't just some saline. I thought I was going to get Moderna but apparently it was a Pfizer day because my little CDC card says I got "P'zer" which is fine with me. 

And no, there's no way they're putting a microchip in. That needle's like a 28 which is far too small for any microchip to go through. And for that matter, if I find I'm getting senile, I think getting chipped is a great idea. There ought to be a standard place like the back of the neck where a senile, lost, person can be checked just like they check a lost dog or cat. 

Anyway I woke up tired. I just want to stay in bed for a week.  At least I practiced last night and worked the full set of exercises on page 23 of the Koga book. These days, what I do is take each column of 3, 4-not figures and play each one 6-7 times then right on the next, not stopping until I've done the column. 

And it's so hard to get a handle on just the right technique. Just like that sport I did, there was no way doing X number more curls or being able to run a 5-minute mile was going to make me suddenly improve. It will just take time and dedication. 

I got the packages I'd set up finished and loaded 'em up at took off at about 6:20 and got to the post office in time. The chute didn't even jam. 

On the way back I looked through the strip mall there and decided to check out a place called KingWuu, and got duck wings. That was about $10.50 with tip, and I ate 'em behind FedEx as I wanted to be out of the cold wind. They were good! They kind of had a "tea egg" taste. My gripe is, they include all 3 wing parts, the drum, the flat, and the tip. I suppose a real Chinese person would eat up those tips but they don't do much for me. 

I took my one FedEx package into FedEx then went back around the back. There was a homeless guy with a bike trailer who'd ridden by while I was eating, and gone rummaging in the dumpsters, then left, then had come back. He'll be gone now, I figured. I pulled a couple good boxes out of the FedEx dumpster, and the guy was still there, pulling packages of fruit out of one of the H Mart dumpsters. Oddly, the guy seems to be fairly sane and we had a nice conversation. He kept offering me strawberries and I said I'm trying to limit sugars in my diet. I said I figure he must live along the river and probably has lots of people to give them to, and he said he did. I told him a bit about what I do, and about the decent deals at Fry's now that they're closing, how I got a decent flashlight for $2 and all those bubble mailers. 

I felt like getting something else to eat and went to the falafel place and got a gyro. I had a nice talk with the gal there about the insurrection and the importance of voting etc. These folks appear to be pretty observant Muslims and naturally, anti-chuds. I was going to eat the gyro over by City Gym but when I opened the package I saw this is going to take using a spoon or something so I wrapped it up again and put it in the bike top bag. 

I stopped a couple of places on the way back for packing materials and found a bunch of office break room type medicines, which I can donate in the little free libraries. 

I got back here and got started on the gyro, and wow it's a lot of food for my $8 or so. I'll have to stop by there more often because they have this great yogurt drink too. I put half of the fillings away for later and put the pita out for the birds. 

I packed things that had to be packed before midnight and Ken came by at the usual time while I still had two to go but he didn't have anything to drop off or much to do so I made him iced tea (hot tea and a big bowl of ice) and I took a couple of asides from our BS session to go get the things, and packed them right while we talked. I showed him the Fry's bubble mailers I'd snagged and he wrote me a 2nd check for the $90 those cost, which I figured he probably would. I also told him small boxes are not going to be an issue from now on because I'd stopped by that place and got a few and a stack of Uline small boxes they had just sitting out there. 

We talked about a number of things and I told him how I'd watched a tutorial online about Schlieren imaging and now I actually understand how it works, and it's pretty cool. We got talked out fairly early this time and Ken left at just a bit after 11. 

I cooked up the leftover gyro fillings with some broccoli and stuff, and it was pretty good. Now to get back to my addictive watching of "Bush Tucker Man" on YouTube, which makes me very nostalgic for my childhood.

Kinda feel crappy

 Up around 4 in the afternoon. Maybe it was too much sake last night or the unfamiliar fish'n'chips, but I had the shits. At least I got some practice in last night. And doing breathing exercises whenever I think about them. 

My left shoulder is pretty sore from the shot too. They always choose the left because most people are right-handed. But I'm left-handed so it means the arm I use more hurts. 

They've convicted Officer Chauvin, a literal chauvinist, for as Pres. Biden says "A murder that took almost 10 minutes, in broad daylight" and I hope many know that Chauvin killed another guy the same way about a year earlier. So people are celebrating and even I feel better about taking part in some of the protests but I hope people are not celebrating too soon. There's still the sentencing and the sentence may well be an all-expenses-paid vacation at Mar-A-Lago and 3 new Klan outfits. 

There needs to be national-level licensing and certification for cops just like there is for EMTs and nurses and so on. 

I got going a bit after 6, taking the bike with trailer over to Fry's, where I bought their last 3 sealed boxes of "small" bubble mailers. They'd marked all sizes down to $15 a box now and I think the guy gave me a refund because he charged me a bit less than $40 and that's including a flashlight that was $2. I talked a bit with the guys, how Fry's used to be really good and I bought everything from DVDs to lunch there but over time, it ended up being very overpriced compared to other places. An example being my kettle, which I use every day but I'd spent $40 on it from Fry's and it turns out you can get the same one for $20 everywhere else. 

I said I assume they must be Fry's old-timers to be overseeing the store now, but they said they're in another company that was hired to sell everything off. That explains my being able to use my card there, it never worked on the Fry's system (they're using Square) and in fact that saved me some money over the years like the time I wanted to buy a certain Fluke multimeter that was about $170 and my card didn't work and when I checked online they were about $120. 

After dropping the boxes off here, I took off again for H Mart along the same route I followed to go to Berger Auditorium. I wanted to check up on some blackberry plants I'd seen growing, and I think they're first-season or something as they seem to be in growing mode and I didn't see any flowers. 

I rode past Berger and it looked like they're keeping up giving out vaccines. It's good to see. I checked out a bunch of the small businesses along Oakland Road - how does Fastenal stay in business? They're idiots. And there's a little homeless "town" along the river next to the golf course. So I'd taken a "scenic" route to H Mart.

I got eggs, sake, these Chinese "Spicy Peanuts" I like, a $2 package of cooked, chilled, marinated mung bean sprouts, and saw some little clams, cockles I think, that were also cooked, chilled and marinated and since this all goes well with beer I got a beer. 

On the way back I checked behind a place I'd wanted to for ages but never did. It turns out there's a cosmetics dealer in there and behind there is a mother lode of well-made small boxes. So now I have a source for those. The electric lighting place hadn't been throwing as many away and the drone place has been keeping their trash locked right up. So I'm really happy about this new place. 

I got back and set out a nice meal with bean sprouts, the cockles (or they might be part of the ark shell family) peanuts and beer, and the cockles were indeed really good. I've eaten clams, scallops, mussels, and oysters but I've never eaten a member of the cockle, lucine, tellin, or ark shell family. And when I was a kid there were tons of cockle and tellin shells on the beach there in Hawaii Kai along with tons of quohog clam shells of all things. I could have really eaten well when I was a little kid if I'd just known. 

I eventually got some fishing and foraging skills but I'm learning now how much there is that I didn't know. That's why I like watching Bush Tucker Guy on YouTube and Outdoor Chef Life and all those fishing/foraging people especially those in Hawaii because that's where I'll be in a few years. 

I need to clarify in my mind how I'm going to live there. Am I going to be a busker or a begger or a "freegan"? My main "nut" each month is going to be rent wherever I'm living, but then I should have a ton of free time to fish, forage, busk, play shakuhachi for hours a day, maybe learn to make the things, etc. 

I've sure been through some experiences here on the mainland. I'd not have been able to put it into words at the time but I think I left because I honestly thought there was a white culture here on the mainland that was analogous to the Asian cultures, especially the Japanese, culture I saw around me in Hawaii. And I'd been welcomed to participate in, in Aikido classes, invited to Obon, etc. I had no idea. I was thinking one of the most highly evolved cultures ever, would have a white counterpart. There might be pale parallels in such cultures at the Amish or the Hasidic Jews, but there's really no comparison. 

And that besides finding out that I'm part Asian myself. I'm sure my mom put "white" on every census form, but she was 2X as brown as me and I'm brown. It's been hard for me to accept. One of the first cracks in the "I am white" armor that was inculcated in me was Tubgirl. I'm sure everyone's seen that picture by now. What amazed me when I first saw it was that she's really all white, all over. Forget what she's doing, look at that amazing (lack of) coloration. I've got parts that have never seen the sun and they're my darkest. 

And I realize now that in Hawaii, "white" is defined if anything by how you act and carry yourself as what color you are. I can see now that a lot of the hassles I got for being "haole" was the way I carried myself, the way I looked at people, and so on. The time some kids threw rocks at me, I didn't have to throw rocks back (to near them, not to hit them but they probably didn't know that) I could have made a game of it, catching the rocks, after all, they were just small and medium sized kids. They couldn't throw that hard. But no, I had to throw rocks back, to miss them narrowly but they probably thought I was aiming for them and just an average thrower, and they ran off and got their parents who came around in a van looking to whup my ass - I hid out in the Ching Tong Leong Store for a while then went back to the bus stop I'd been waiting at and took the bus home. 

It's like the situation with the "micros". One time I was waiting, under the kamani trees, at the bus stop by Pat's In Punalu'u, and there was an old white guy waiting there too. I made some complaint about "the Samoans" and he told me that "the Samoans" all grew up watching American movies with people like John Wayne, and in those movies, there are always tons of fist fights. So they think that's the way it is here. And in truth, in Samoa, under Fa'a Samoa, their customary way of life, it's peaceful. I'd been taught that if someone throws rocks at you you throw 'em back, but that's the Western, barbaric, way.  So these poor "micros" are allowed to come to the US due to our bombing and drowning their islands, and they land in Hawaii because it's closest and most familiar, and life's so different they lash out. So everyone hates 'em now.

First shot today

 I had to be at the Berger Auditorium for my 3:45 appointment and left here at 3:30. There was a long line everyone started with, and about halfway along we were given papers to fill out and pens, and I had everything all in order on a clipboard so they were impressed with me. We shuffled along, and the line moved pretty well actually, and soon were inside the building where we went through all kinds of twisty passages and finally to a large room where we were sent to this or that desk to get vaccinated. That all went well and the shot didn't hurt much at all. I also got an appointment card for my 2nd shot on May 10th I think. 

There was an area for people to sit, officially for 15 minutes, in case they were going to have a reaction but I probably only sat around for 5 and figured I was fine, and left. 

I came right back here and gathered up the packages I'd packed including some that should have gone out on Friday, and dropped those off at the post office. On the way I'd stopped at Fry's to see how they were doing and found out they had a lot of bubble mailers for sale, the "small" ones being $15 for 100 of them and of a size I'd call medium or even large. I told the guy I'd be back. 

After the post office I stopped by a place called California Fish Grill I'd been riding by for months and got fish and chips. It was pretty good and only $11. There was so much there that I couldn't finish it, not even all the fish. So I bagged what I couldn't finish for the birds. 

I went into H Mart and got my sake and odds and ends, including some sashimi for later, and rode back here with that stuff, put it away, hooked up the bike trailer, grabbed some cash in case their credit card system is acting like it generally does, and rode over to Fry's. I picked out 4 sealed boxes of "small" bubble mailers which I figured would be $60 and tax, but the guy only charged me a bit under $50. So I guess you get a discount when you buy 400 of something from Fry's... 

I loaded them onto the bike in a tall stack and bungee'd it down and took off, and the whole bike trailer fell over! I dunno if a wheel caught on something or I took off too fast or if a weird wind gust got me, but the trailer on its load were on their side and a black guy in the parking lot yelled out, "Good Job!" which was pretty funny. I got it all set up again and rode very cautiously now, and he called out again asking what I'm buying and I said bubble mailers, you know, mailing envelopes. 

I rode at least as carefully as when I was carrying loads of lab glass. I got back here OK, then gathered up some trash and took it on the trailer to the FedEx dumpster and pulled out a nice HP monitor box, then stopped here in the complex at the HVAC place and got a nice huge Mitsubishi air conditioner box. That will be to put on the floor under my futon; I use a large cardboard box for this purpose and when it gets "tired" I replace it. 

In global warming news, I saw bindweed flowering at the Berger Auditorium and thought, WTF, it's April! I thought, maybe it's a localized condition, but nope, saw it flowering by the post office too. It was a late-summer going into autumn marker when I lived in Gilroy, 35 miles south of here. I'm late to the game for picking brassica buds but geez, flowering bindweed, now? Oh and CalTrans has trimmed back the blackberries up the road here although I spotted some other happy looking blackberry plants nearby and the post office seems to have completely eliminated the purslane they had growing on their bank by the sidewalk, it almost makes me want to buy some purslane seeds and plant them around. 

At least Hawaii is lazy and neglectful, and the same broken traffic light control box that I personally saw destroyed from a few feet away in the mid-80s was still destroyed, with some temporary thing sitting on top, in 2003 when I was last back home. And there are all sorts of plants growing everywhere and the possibilities for guerrilla gardening are rife there. 

I didn't practice last night other than a few breathing exercises and I watched a bunch of "Bush Tucker Guy" on YouTube, he's an Australian who was into finding wild foods.... it made me homesick for things I did as a kid like how to get jelly out of a banana flower, and taught me new things like chewing a green casaurina cone which never occurred to me to stave off thirst, we just took a few drinks out of valley streams. 

Around midnight, I finally got around to putting my newly purchased boxes of bubble mailers upstairs in the loft, and decided to take my old under-futon cardboard box and put it over where I'd gotten the new one, on the stack there, and also get rid of a box that was from sports equipment or something, large and long and not a size I need and only single-wall so nothing special. I was walking back from the first operation when a bum rode up next to where the long box was sitting and as I got my pepper spray out and walked right up alongside the building so the bum would have to make more effort to get at me, he blargled something angry at me in Bum, a language I am not at all conversant in, and took off with the long box - saved me some work! 

Really, going out after dark around here, even just in the parking lot right outside, and expecting no bums to come traveling through is sort of like setting up to have a picnic in the park and expecting no ants. They're out there, due to meth they don't sleep for days, and sometimes they treasure (to me) utterly worthless boxes. Maybe he's gonna burn it for fuel. 

In the Army we had a gal named Wilda something, she was Black and I think came from some little speck-on-the-map town as the way she spoke English was ... hard to understand. It was kind of the old joke about the ACcent on the wrong sylABLE. We used to joke around and me and a guy had a routine where we'd pick up a filter for one of the generators and call it a "voice filter" and speak clearly through it then move it away and then talk like her. But I could understand her if I listened a bit. But the bums around here; I can't understand 'em at all. I suppose it's like a speaker of Received Pronunciation or "BBC English" trying to understand Cockney slang with a bit of Gypsy cant thrown in. 

In any case, unlike picnic ants, bums will stab a person for $2 so it's best to avoid. I should have gone out earlier and taken more than one weapon with me.

Getting stronger

 I listed some things on Ebay last night and got some practice in. If I compare how I play now to when I started it's a night-and-day difference and I'm only what, a month or two in? And this is an instrument that takes years to get decent on. I should give it those years. Besides playing, I've been doing breathing exercises any old time and especially when first awake, lying in bed. I just breathe in as much as I can, like trying for a high number on the Voldyne, but breathing in a bit faster than I did on that. Because I had to breathe in faster when playing the shakuhachi. 

I watched too much YouTube today but with the things I watched, I realized that a big reason for me leaving Hawaii for the mainland was, I really thought white society would be like Japanese society, except, you know, with white people instead. I could be in a community and have a sort of a tribe, like an extended family. And the closest thing I've seen to this is among the Asian communities around here and I've sure gravitated to them by preference. Whites don't give a shit about each other, not even within families. 

I even got into Conservatism for a while as I rightly perceived them as more tribal, but they really don't give a shit about anyone and whites live in this dog-eat-dog culture. 

Back in Hawaii I'll never be a full member of the local Japanese community but like here, I can make friends and participate in things and become known as a "good egg".

The more I learn....

 The more I learn about Osamu Tezuka the more I adore the guy. He was publishing books when he was 15! I watched a documentary about him I had watched years ago and saw new things in it, like he drew using a dip pen. Those lines weren't gotten with a brush, they were with a particularly good dip pen nib. 

Tezuka had everything I didn't; a stable, upper-middle-class family and a mother who actually did little flip-book anime's for him, and you don't publish at the age of 15 without some family connections. But it's not like I didn't get art materials whenever I asked for them, no matter how poor we were, and tons of encouragement that I saw as pushing but what hope did my family have? I now know that art's a much more solid field than tech, and maybe my parents knew this already. 

Before we were poor, kids in the neighborhood called our house "the library" because going in from the door we almost always used, in from the carport, the whole long hallway was occupied with book shelves. There may have been a thousand books there. Lots on literature, art, tons of cartoons (my father was loyal to Walt Kelley to the end) and a bit on technical things. Since I cut school a lot, I read a lot, at home. Naturally I was attracted to technical things like The Big Book Of Transportation and You Will Go To The Moon but I guess that's natural for any kid. That was a probably the beginning of what I'll call the "tech delusion" where I decided I was going to go into tech instead of something reliable like art. 

One one level, tech things *look* cool. The colorful components, wires and color-codes and all that. And the equipment, like oscilloscopes, where you see pretty pictures. I guess it's not that I wasn't a good fit for electronics, it's just that the jobs all up and left, and the very few that remain pay minimum wage. 

The thing is, I'm feeling very un-motivated. Enough so that I've gotten behind on delivering packages to the post office and have customers complaining. I took 4-5 of the "latest" ones and went up to the post office and actually was able to get 'em into the chute. I went to H Mart on the way back, for sake, a beer, and some really nubbly fried fish with pepper sauce on top ... real "drunchy" (drunk with the munchies) food. I might make another run with about 10-12 more packages. People are tracking them and they expect them at a certain time. 

I finally took a look in this box that's always by the door of H Mart. The (Hispanic) security guards and yes they are armed, are always hovering around so I'd avoided doing so, but I peeked in today and I saw a can of soda and I think some bananas and a few top-top cans of spaghetti. It's got to be either random things people forget on their carts or I'm thinking more likely, it's things to pacify any bums/crazies who come around. The security guards do a really good job of keeping order around there and the whole front of the market would be a homeless camp, in other words it'd be like a Safeway, if not for them. 

I need to find a way to get re-motivated because this kind of behavior is gonna tank Ken's business. I might only have 3 more years to work at this but I need to make them good years. I need to find and train a replacement near the end of the 3 years too. I wonder if this isn't fairly common, people feeling burned out or disillusioned a few years before retirement because in a relatively short time they won't have to work any more. 

Thinking about poor dear old Osamu Tezuka, he was not only a genius artist but a doctor who actually worked in a hospital for a while (and where, according to Wikipeda,  he got punched in the face by an angry American) and was a decent piano and accordion player. So he had other interests, he just had art as his largest interest. He drew bugs the way I used to draw my seashells, although he took it a lot further, publishing about 5 books on bugs as some of his first work.  

Bugs were, I think, a pretty good way to start. Just like my seashells. It's a fairly narrow interest that at least some people will always be interested in, and an easy first step. I should just pick any old thing. 

I was berated with how "You'll never make any money as an artist" and we kept moving all the time and then I was making money as an artist but it had to be used to buy food and I was just convinced that the only way to live how I wanted, a stable life, was to get a regular old job like at the Chevron station or the Baskin-Robbins, a couple of my first jobs. The 70s were a hard, hungry time and the early 80s if anything were a bit worse. Studs Terkel has documented how the Depression in the 1930s just kind of broke some people, and maybe to some degree this is what happened to me. 

Well, pretty soon I won't have to worry so much about working or how much money this or that activity will bring in. I can live on brown rice, greens I pick by the side of the road or guerrilla-garden, and fish I catch. But really there's so much food around these days I don't think I'll ever see the kind of hunger that was routine in the 1970s. Maybe I'm a bit like Art Spiegelman's father in "Maus" where the father is going on and on about saving the bit of cereal in a cereal box because in Hitler times... and Art snaps at him, "Maybe you'd better save it in case Hitler comes back!". 

This shut-down, locked-in life is really peeling back some layers. I can't go out and busk, and the last time I did no one gave a shit anyway. This virus may not be over with for years. I'm beginning to think busking may not be a solid retirement plan. But if I'm going to do art after all, I need to be prepared to just about give it away. And if I look at what I'm spending my time on, it's some animated series I'm addicted to like Atashin'chi and a bunch of other weird Japanese stuff, and I keep being interested in learning Japanese just so I can appreciate the stuff I watch and read better. I feel like the layers are going away, and I'm reverting back to where I was at about 8 years old, loving cartoons, loving drawing, loving seashells and Nature in general. 

I really did some great art. At least I think so. And then we'd have to move or some calamity would happen and I'd have to start from scratch. But I did some really great stuff, at least within the very limited society we lived in on the Windward Side, where I was "The Artist" kid for miles and miles of shoreline. It was another blow when we moved to Hawaii Kai again and I went to Kaiser, one of the better high schools, and there were kids there who'd had more exposure to, and training in, art and of course their stuff was better than mine. It felt like a giant punch to the solar plexus to see one gal's painting, of a kid climbing in a cave, and all she'd done was copy it from a picture in a magazine. 

All I'd have had to do is "paint what is there", a thing I did when I did a really nice painting of a ti plant in one of those tinfoil covered pots, said would be impossible to paint. But it was such a gut-punch at the time. I've read that this happens with Japanese students often; they're big stuff at their small provincial school and get into a major school and now they're small potatoes. It's a crushing defeat for some. Here I'd gone from Kahuku to Kaiser and I was just average. 

That's how it felt to me. All those years of being "the artist" and far outdone, and I knew I needed to make a living somehow. It seemed like my work and my aspirations (I'd told a career counselor at Kahuku that I wanted to be a commercial artist) were all a joke I'd played on myself. What a waste. Better stick with what I knew I was good at, and that was hard physical work. Hence the kind of jobs I took and the Army. 

But pretty soon I'll have to try to *not* make money. To keep my life outside of the money economy as much as possible.

Finally in summer mode I guess

 I wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt yesterday and I will do so today. Normally I change to summer clothes around April 1, like they do in Japan. But I had to dress warm again as it was getting cold overnight. Pretty soon it'll be time to get out the undershorts and Crocs to wear inside the shop here. 

I ordered "Japanese For Dummies" last night, for a bit under $20 and will see how I do with that. The "For Dummies" series of books are actually pretty good for getting up to speed on something. It seems a bit less serious than the Genki series, more for someone who's gonna go to Japan and be able to survive, navigate train stations and restaurants and not commit too many serious social gaffes. 

I practiced last night and that's good, but I'm only practicing when I've got other things all done so it's kind of last priority. I'm not sure if that's the best way to get good at something. 

I did a little looking around and this makes a lot more sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rabbit I was never able to see a face on the moon but a rabbit with a mortar making moon cakes or maybe, just maybe, the kibi dango Momotaro set out with to vanquish the evil oni, that I can get with. The story of the self-sacrificing rabbit is in the first Osamu Tezuka "Buddha" book so I wanted to study more on it. 

I'm having such a hard time getting motivated that I just packed the things that are in boxes, and will try to put the things in bubble mailers into various mail boxes over the weekend or something. 

I found some packing stuff, and got some pork and shrimp on noodles from Pho Bel Air. They had the TV on Fox news and wow, it's just a constant barrage of fearmongering. Something about "Make USA A Christian Nation" hell the founders didn't even want that and I think one of them swore on a Koran when he became president. Seeing that crap is kind of like not reading the NRA's "American Rifleman" magazine say, in the 1970s when it was really about target shooting and a lot of cool scientific stuff, and opening a copy now, where it's close to a Nazi propaganda rag. And there are people who watch the Fox station for hours a day voluntarily. 

 

Maybe a new routine

 Up at 3. I practiced last night, as I hadn't the night before. At least in the face of all the despair I'm feeling I did a good job of "personality prostitution" with Ken last night. Talk about techie things, exercise my "science muscles" a bit, yadda yadda. Ken won't throw me into the street as long as I'm his buddy. 

And I need to get into position to, if something changes, I can literally be set to jet back home. I may need to consider leaving before October, when I'll be under an effective no-fly list due to not having a "Real ID". 

I snagged a 4:00 appointment for my bank and left here at about 3:45. I got there about 5 after so it was perfect. Then I rode toward Mistuwa Marketplace. I got a bit distracted by riding up Bascom Avenue because the area was so amazingly bleak and decrepit. Nothing but the skeeziest stores and 90% of them closed and abandoned. It was like a dystopic movie set. 

That brought me up to Stevens Creek Avenue and of course that's awful with that horrible shopping center no one goes to and the freeway interchange so I took a random North-South street to get  back down to Moorpark and ended up using this really weird pedestrian overpass that end on the Moorpark side in this little bitty entrance next to someone's yard - you'd have a hard time finding it if you didn't live right there. 

It's a solid hour's ride even without the detours so I went right in and picked out a nice charashi bowl and a little bottle of sake, and went to my spot to eat, and enjoyed it very much. The variety seems to have gone down from where it was but their chirashi bowls are pretty tasty. 

Then, having eaten, drank, and picked up a few pieces of trash to throw out along with my stuff, I went into Kinokuniya. I looked at the Genki books, and was thinking maybe I'd start out with Japanese For Dummies and if I get through that one, then think about the Genki series. I looked around at some other random books, hoping maybe I'd find something cool like Yokohama Shopping Trip. What they did have, though, was the full 8-book "Buddha" series by Osamu Tezuka. I really, really love Osamu Tezuka. He's been called the Walt Disney of Japan but that really doesn't do him service. He put a lot more of his heart into his work. 

So I grabbed a basket, put all 8 books in it, and rang 'em up. They cost me about $130 but apparently they run $150 online so .... I bubbled to the cashier there about how I can read 'em 2-3 times then donate them to my temple. He seemed to like that idea and I told him how I'd once had the chance to buy the complete 2nd series of Astroboy and regretted it ever since that I didn't buy that series. 

I put the books, in a bag, in the bike bag and they didn't fit all the way in but people generally don't steal books so I didn't worry. I went back in and did my general shopping. Sake, chives, a bag of those pickles (who sells pickles in a bag? The Japanese, apparently.) 

I went out and divided everything up on the bike, and did the relatively easy ride home. Going there it's uphill and upwind. Going back it's downhill but still upwind for some reason but at least easier. I headed right for downtown and checked out The Fountainhead. thinking maybe my friend was working there and I'd get a snack from one of the places there and have a beer and talk a bit. But he wasn't in and every place in there was closing up - it was after all close to 7, pretty late for The Town That Goes To Bed Early. 

At least I was able to stop at the Amazon place and pick up a ton of bubble mailers. And, for some reason although I already had picked it up, Amazon insisted I had a shakuhachi CD I had to pick up, so when the guys couldn't find it, I said that I actually already had it and could they clear it off the system. Not trying to get a 2nd one for free? paid for? but Amazon does this at times and if I got a 2nd one it would clear it off of their system and I'd have one to give away or something. 

I rode for home, avoiding as always the usual quota of zombies and screamers, and stopped at TAK Market for a large Slim Jim, a beer, and some peanuts. I got back here and put stuff away and settled in with peanuts, beer, etc and read the first Buddha book. It's really good. As impulse purchases go, I'd rate it higher already than the scanner radio I've not even listened to yet, or the Glock-replica air pistol I haven't even taken out of its package. A higher rated impulse-purchase could only be the shakuhachi I have right now, which is at the very least a decent beginner instrument and is also beautiful which means I'd happily take it out busking once my skill even begins to match its beauty. 

It's really funny that I got this set of books because while out riding today I thought, if the realm of the animals, and of the hungry ghosts, and of the devas, the bodhisattvas and even the Buddhas all are happening "right here, right now" as Rinban Sakamoto says, what must it be like to experience the world as a deva? Would a human be able to stand it? Would it be like in a Superman movie I saw, where another Kryptonian comes to Earth and finds it overwhelming, because his red-sun senses, under a yellow sun are super-senses? Superman tells him it takes a lot of work to learn to tune it all down... 

It comes down to a thing I realized a couple years ago. How do you punish Hitler? There's no amount of floggings that would do it. No, you don't punish Hitler. You simply make him, after he dies, perfectly aware. Poor Hitler, if all this is true, he's probably cycling around and will be, for many lifetimes before he works things out. Osamu Tezuka was a devout Buddhist and loved all living things, all animals and even bugs. In fact he changed the way he signed his name to use a character for "insect". He trained as a doctor, originally, and I suppose had a front-row seat to how life was in Japan in WWII. There's an excellent documentary on him, showing him working, only a couple of years before he died, of overwork it seems. He saw something, the path we're all on, the Buddhist path. 

I finished reading the 1st book (8 to go) and went on Reddit and found a link only a few minutes old and ... signed up for a vaccination. Right nearby at Berger Auditorium. It's great; I've got the QR code printed out and everything on a clipboard so the New World Order can inject me with Bill Gates' RFID chip and they can know I'm itching to sign up to be an Antifa supersoldier. Or, you know, a jab and maybe a cookie.

Bi Sheng Day

 Wikipedia is calling it Gutenberg day but it's actually Bi Sheng Day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi_Sheng

Interestingly, I found there are stamp sets for hiragana and katakana I can buy in a local store. They're interesting, but at about $60 a set I haven't gotten one so far. "People like that printed look" I was told, and I'm on the fence whether to experiment with a stamp set or to get good at hand-lettering. 

They're talking about the Sackler family on NPR and ... they seem butthurt that the company the Sacklers owns can declarebankruptcy while the Sackler family themselves are doing OK. They don't seem to be aware that that's how corporations work. It goes back to the days of whaling and exploring voyages, where a company is set up to finance the mission, where the ship might be out at sea for years, and it makes money or not and if the ship is lost with all hands or something, the people who invested don't lose their houses and everything. 

Personally, I find what I know about the Sacklers to be pretty hilarious. They made tons of money off of hillbillies and white trash, to spend it on things like art for museums. Said hillbillies and white trash would gladly burn art museums down for "showin' pichurs of nekkid people". They did their bit for art and culture, and as for the hillbillies and white trash, nothing of value was lost.  

I was out the door with a load of packages at a quarter after 6, did my drop-offs and picked up some packing stuff, and went to the curry place and their ever-changing cast of employees for some goat curry. I think the place is some sort of a venture where it'll go along fine until the start-up money is burned up then it will close. Or maybe the owners are talented in money-laundering and it's a tasty money-laundering front. I got my goat curry with shrimp in there too, for about $2 less than it was supposed to be. 

For some reason writing about the curry I ate reminded me of when I was watching the Mardi Gras parade online last year. At that time I was still thinking I'd move to New Orleans to retire. There was talk of this new virus at that time, and some discussion of the wisdom, or not, in holding Mardi Gras with all those crowds as always. Needless to say after that long, long year, I have lost any interest in moving anywhere in the South. Or much of anywhere in the continental US. But this memory fixes in my mind how recently l was not actually planning to move back to Hawaii. 

In fact, I'd say I was not planning to move back to Hawaii as long as I was playing trumpet earnestly. I remember playing Taps for the Bugles Across America thing and that was in May of 2020. And I went out playing and busking past that, like at the demonstrations which were in the warm months of June and July. I was starting to think about moving back to Hawaii but I think I figured I'd do it as a trumpet player. Lots of military there so some need for people who can play Taps for instance. (In all fairness, I can keep a bugle handy and be available to play Taps, with the advantage that with no valves, it's easy to keep a bugle clean and no one will expect me to play non bugle calls.)

But being happy in Hawaii means getting with the program and that means turning one's back on a lot of "traditional American values" like being a braggart, being conniving, being loud and self-promoting, etc. This is why my parents weren't happy there. My father wanted to get rich for some reason, and had a very high opinion of himself, which he was happy to share. My mom wasn't far behind, after all, she married the guy. 

Hawaii values are more like, be productive, be reliable, be a part of a network of people who all look out for each other. Don't brag, don't be a hot-head, be calm and kind, be a friend who can be relied on. If you're an extra good worker or really good at something, word will spread so there's no need to brag about yourself. 

If my parents had been more like Hawaii people we'd have moved to a less-expensive house and stayed there at least until we were all grown. We'd have all gone from Kokohead Elementary to Niu Valley Intermediate then to either Kaiser or Punahou depending on budget and we'd have grown up knowing the same kids growing up alongside us. A lot of mainland people do still live this way, but capitalism demands atomization and hyper-individuality and my parents, always in pursuit of some fictional better thing, kept us moving every year or two. 

And I still know more people back in Hawaii than I do here on the mainland. People are *really* atomized here.

Ken came by at the usual time and dropped off stuff to list and packing boxes and stuff. He wrote out my pay check, another $400 one, "I'm prorating it based on our sales and we're doing well". And we are. About 12 grand a month, which Ken says is due to a few large sales, but I pointed out that even without those we'd be at 8 or 9 grand and that's pretty good. 

We had the usual BS session about various science-y things. It's kind of fun and kind of part of my job.

Not being very useful.

 I slept the day away. At least I practiced last night. I was going to list some things but then got involved watching an "American Masters" PBS thing about Ernest Hemingway and then tried watching a movie that had been done about his WWI experiences but it was only in Italian so it was hard to follow it much. 

Lying in bed thinking, I thought about the vaccinations. As with everything else, being able to obtain one is tightly linked to one's wealth. People seem to think once they're vaccinated they can go back to living like it's 2019. But even if vaccinated, people can get the virus and pass it on. I think the idea is to have those of means all vaccinated, and the virus a weapon against "the poors" pretty much how other diseases are. Except, perhaps, for those "poors" who are useful to the rich. 

As an example, growing up poor, I never was vaccinated against chickenpox. I got it when I was in my 30s and got very sick. But at the time, while not wealthy at all, I was arguably useful to the rich because I was an Olympic hopeful. So I was able to go to the doctor and get Acyclovir, which may have helped. The lady I rented a room from cooked up chicken soup and for a while there a full day was making it up the stairs, having a bowl of soup, and going back to bed. As I got better, I entertained myself by reading her pre-WWII medical textbooks. Grim stuff - a lot of involved various concoctions that were easy to swallow and in which whiskey figured largely, and keeping the patient comfortable while they died, or didn't. 

I've learned on Reddit that there's a come-one-come-all vaccination on Tuesdays at Diridon Station so I missed it today, but I can show up early next Tuesday and that's a chance. And I can try bugging them at Berger Auditorium near the end of their day and maybe get a leftover shot. Setting an appointment online is impossible and I think the authorities realize this; it's just a tool to prioritize the wealthy getting vaccinations. A wealthy person can simply pay a bribe or set one of their hired help to sit on a computer all day, finding an appointment. 

If Trump had gotten a 2nd term I think they'd be very mask-off about poors not getting vaccinated. But now we've got a guy who's fairly normal, and a good Catholic, in charge and a lot of us remember vaccination programs when we were growing up and the idea being to vaccinate all, rich and poor, all colors, all creeds. 

Of course if Trump were still in control all those old memories and ideals of equal access would be called Anti-Trump Thought(tm) or something and probably land one in a camp. Trumpism/Nazism is an ideology that had regular old Germans, florists and shopkeepers and trolley drivers, clicking their heels and making that silly salute, all with a straight face so once the madness reaches a certain level, rationality is swept aside. But we've managed to dodge that, for now. 

I'd mind it a bit less if the virus were affecting lower-class whites, a group we need less of, more. But it's affecting non-whites, people we need more of, more. The Sackler family were doing great work toward improving this country until they got called out on it. Maybe we need a domestic poppy-growing movement because in the US we've certainly got good land for growing poppies, and lower-class whites love their opiates. Maybe some Chinese company will buy high-altitude arid-ish land some places in Flyover, USA and start it up. 

Back when I worked shoulder to shoulder with Vietnamese and Cambodian guys in the 80s, one of the guys said they didn't understand why young people in the USA smoked pot. It's for old people, he said, who are done working and are in the stage of their life where they relax, and have "pains". It seemed weird to him that young people were acting childish, taking old people's medicine. 

On Reddit they're talking about preparing for the fire season. I guess I need to start thinking about that, get one of those filter sets that people who build surfboards wear, and rig up one of those home-made air filters out of a fan and some filters. Last year I just breathed that red air but I'm not sure that's very good for me. 

Ran Prieur notes that Gallup notes that less then 50% of Americans are tied to a church these days. I guess I'm bucking the trend as I'm sending in my $30 each month to the temple, and really like the people there. I really like Rinban Sakamoto and I feel there are many, many layers to the guy. It's enough that he grew up in Mo'ili'ili and we share a culture in common, but I wonder what brings a guy to put in the years of dedication, traveling all over the US and serving in various capacities, to become Rinban of this particular temple? But all of the people are a really nice bunch, and the food and the get-togethers were so great. It will be nice to get together again a year or two from now, and time to start arranging some kind of social links to make my moving back to Hawaii easier. I'm fully prepared to be street homeless back home but it's probably better if I can avoid that. 

Someone at the temple fucked up and put all the members' email addresses in a CC and you know I jumped on that. I printed them all out so now I can email anyone if I want. Even good old Ben Yep but what is there to talk about until this virus is over with? He can play some uke and I can sing, and am coming along on shakuhachi, if nothing else the best breath-trainer ever. While the virus is raging, now's not the time to introduce him to the genius Hawaii comedians I grew up with. 

Maybe I should come up with a comedy routine that involves kulolo from Palolo valley that goes well with Malolo.... you gotta be lolo to not like 'um.

The great pickup

 I was up wayyy too late into the night and early morning, watching idiotic stuff on YouTube and on some level thinking I'd avoid doing some work, but in the end I listed about 15 gauges and things on Ebay, and found room in the optics cabinet for some new optical stuff by taking the tray of microscope stuff and putting it with the other microscope parts that sit in boxes on top of the "Science" cabinet. 

And I practiced, of course. I think there's a lot I'm just not "getting" about the shakuhachi. I guess there's a reason it normally takes 10 years for someone to get adequate on the thing, and it reminds me of the sport I did where it wasn't cut-and-dried; it wasn't down to being able to curl X lbs for Y repetitions, it was just a matter of performing the sport a lot. So I eventually built up to doing it for hours a day and got fairly good. 

I finally went to bed at something like 7AM, and woke up at 2 in the afternoon because the guy was here with the truck to pick up the annealing furnace. And it went really smoothly. I opened up the roll-up door, and he got his pallet jack and picked it up, and I was ready to jump in to help him push it onto the lift gate of the truck but it went on fine. And he wasn't even a big guy; he was an Asian guy about Ken's size. I told him right off it's top-heavy and he said he picks up lots of lab equipment and it's all top-heavy. 

And I'm proud of myself, because with these pickup guys generally waking me up, I'd been interacting with them (at least with some distance) without a mask because I'd just jumped out of bed and it was all I could do to pull some shoes on. So this time I put a mask on top of the the papers I'd put on a clipboard so it was easy to put the mask on then pick up the clipboard.

After he was done, I closed up the door etc. and went back to bed for a few hours. Whew! I'd been thinking up all kinds of scenarios where the thing fell over etc. I think I worry too much. 

Dinner last night had been the pork gyoza I'd bought at H Mart, cooked with oil and chives and I made a nice dipping sauce. Late-night (early-morning?) snack had been to sprinkle "seasoned pepper" on cold gyoza wrappers, roll 'em up, and eat. It's weird but they tasted good. Breakfast today was scrambled eggs with shrimp and chives. I'm amazed how far even a small package of chives lasts. 

Busy Sunday

 I got my practice in but with all the futzing around and then practice, I didn't go to bed until 7AM. This is going in the wrong direction entirely. 

I woke up around 2 and for some reason the temple doesn't have their service on YouTube. Maybe they'll put it on later. It's really nice when I'm up early enough to lie in bed and listen to it live. 

I'm really glad I got that shelf cleared and the plug-ins cabinet re-organized. I always feel good when I get something like that accomplished. 

I took a look at Reddit and someone mentioned the Berger auditorium as a vaccination site. I looked it up and it's really close to here. I planned an itinerary... 

First, I rode over to the Berger auditorium where some workers in front told me they're vaccinating 8AM to 4:30PM. They said I need to make an appointment but I said I hadn't been having any luck with the programs and might come around at the end of the day and see if there are leftover shots. 

Then I rode on Oakland Road to the golf course and on a whim went in. I rode up to the end where the pro shop and snack bar were, but I looked over the very limited menu and decided I wasn't quite up to paying $10 for a hot dog. Two guys were at a nearby table with a dog. "Hold the leash" one guy said, and walked away from the table, and the dog followed. "Good job of holding the leash...." he said to his friend. Friend said he didn't hear him. I piped up and said he had indeed said "Hold the leash" but he had said it very casually so it may have been hard to hear. We all had a laugh and the guys play-bickered as friends often do. Something about the one guy fitting in everywhere and with everyone. "Like a puzzle piece" the other guy said. 

I rode to H Mart for sake, a package of egg rolls, and got a tall can of Stella Artois and stashed things away in the bike bag. I rode over to Fry's and locked the bike up and went in. I had to sign in/out and didn't see many names on the sheet. I looked around and it was pretty comical. They had the pots and pans and stuff from their little cafe, that had been used for years. All kinds of used stuff. The prices were not great and in some cases barely lower than the new price. The place was really picked-over too. 

Then I went over to the storage because Ken wanted me to look at and list some amplifiers he's put in there. But when I opened it, there was not room to go in at all. I ended up picking up a bunch of gauges and valves, putting them in bags hanging off the bike handlebars, and locked it up and got out of there. 

I went over to the old building and knocked on the door. Tom Price was there and I offered him half a Stella Artois (I hadn't thought to get two of them) and he was up for it, producing a small Tupperware type container as he didn't have a cup or mug, and we drank beer and talked about stuff.

He'd gone over to Fry's and bought some things and a couple small tool boxes, "one with some tools in it" and spent about $40. He told me they have a couple of those little Red Bull coolers and wanted about $700 for each one. We laughed about the ridiculous high prices on some of the stuff - typical Fry's. 

We talked about his kid, who's 24 now and doesn't work, is dropping his college classes, and is living in Tom's apartment and not helping with the rent. We talked about how ridiculous that is. I mentioned that by age 18 I and my four siblings were all on our own, working etc. I told him about working at the Blue Cross Animal Hospital and how much I hated that job but I knew I had to work. I told Tom maybe he should just move the kid in with him, or evict Joel, the guy who's renting the back half of building and paying $500 a month rent, and move the kid in there and charge him $500 a month rent. He could go to San Jose State or to a trade school. Tom just gave me a look showing how likely he thinks it is that his kid will straighten up and fly right. All he's good at is video games. 

Tom's depressed about the thought of retirement too. It's about 5 years out for him, and a little more than 3 for me. "You must be counting the days...." and I said since I resolved myself to move back to Hawaii it's been weighing on my mind a lot. I told him about when I planned to convert to Judaism and retire to Israel. I named the many advantages of Israel, and thought it might be a match. But we then talked about "You have to kill the Arabs!" "And hate the black immigrants!" and so on. I told him that I'd realized it would not be another Waikiki. It gets hot there, like 115 degrees, a real Phoenix-by-the-sea. And I'd be living in a poorer area so I'd be right in amongst the black immigrants and that's not a good scene. And the whole having to believe in God and the whole mythology thing, and that it's a "hustling" culture even more than the US. "And who wants to live on a postage stamp in the middle of countries that want to kill you?" he concluded. So that, I'd decided, was right out. 

And I even, for a short while, considered retiring in New Orleans. I could play trumpet there and it's cheaper to live and all that. But, it's the South, it gets hot as hell, and New Orleans is one of the top few most dangerous cities in the US, year in and year out. And well, it's not home. 

And thus, I'd concluded I'd move home to Hawaii where I grew up fishing and foraging and doing all kinds of local stuff. Where I can point out my elementary school and high schools and where I worked and where I lived, where I first surfed (Waimea Bay) and so on. I told him we were kind of like the kids in the book "The Mosquito Coast" where the dad really tried to be "local" to the area but had this weird first-world obsession with bringing ice to the people living inland, and in the end, not only fails but dies. His kids, though, still growing up as they are, become as home with the jungle and living in nature and can get by OK. They'd become "local". My parents, for all the years they lived in Hawaii, were still mainland people.

I guess Tom's just going to live in his building there. I don't think his property tax is more than 5 grand a year so it's practically free to live there. He told me he recently had a break-in attempt. Someone had cut the chain to the side yard with bolt cutters and then tried kicking in the side door in the side yard and, Tom thinks, hurt his foot and went away. I told him I've got a big thick piece of chain just like my bike chain that I paid a guy $10 for, so I'll sell it to him for $10 and will bring it by when I find it again.

He gave me his number so if I see any sign of a break-in or anything I can tell him. It's good to have some kind of a mutual aid system set up. In fact if I find that chain during the week I might just go over and install it, as I know the combination for the lock. He'll have a nice surprise when he comes in on Saturday.

What a Saturday

I got my practice in last night, went to bed I dunno when, woke up at maybe 11 then went back to bed until 2. My wall clock was ticking but the hands were not moving. How could it be ticking but the hands not moving? When I got up I noticed the second hand ticking but not moving forward. I put in a fresh battery and set the clock. 

I packed one more thing, a high voltage power supply that's essentially just some modules in a box, and sad to say, to get it into the box I had, I took the front panel off and the handles off, and hopefully the guy getting it knows how to put it back together. 

I took the 3 packages up to FedEx and said, "See you tomorrow!" and picked up too-little packing stuff on the way back. Mainly some foamcore and I got 3 wheels boxes from the tire place. I've got it figured out now: Any wheel box for wheels 18" or larger will work great for shipping 19-inch rackmount stuff. And I need to keep more wheel boxes handy. 

I also messed around with a goose. There was this Canada goose trying to figure out how to get under or over or around, the fencing around Fry's. It was there when I was going to FedEx and it was there when I was coming back so I figured, well, let's see how mellow this goose is, maybe I can pick it up and boost it over the fence. I've never boosted a goose before but there's always a first time and hopefully it doesn't bite the shit out of me. But the goose didn't let me get near, and finally flew off over the buildings on the North side of Brokaw. So at least it was well enough to fly. 

I got back here, put things away, and headed back out to go to H Mart. I rode up Rogers Avenue AKA Bumville, and saw some messed-up bums, big surprise. I smelled something burning and sure enough passed a bum standing on top of a folded up box, out from under of which was issuing some foul-smelling smoke. He's obviously burned something and wanted to put it out. It was pretty cool actually. I kind of wanted to stop and ask him what he'd burned and then talk about, I dunno, burning stuff  I guess, but nothing good comes of interacting with the bums in Bumville. 

I wanted to take a look at Fry's in its final apocalyptic form. So I rode in there, through the one opening in the fence, followed a sign saying FIXTURE SALE and rode up to the front and just parked my bike there. I went in, and they had all kinds of things for sale. They had lots of display/dummy drones for sale cheap, and shelves, Fry's shopping bags, their POS machines, you-name-it. There was a friendly guy there and I asked if they have any laser all-in-one printers but he said they were out. There's not a lot at Fry's I'm itching to buy, but it was interesting.

I left and thought I ought to tell Tom Price about the Fry's sale as, knowing him, he probably had no idea it was going on, just a street over from him. And, if I hung out with Tom for an hour or so, that would get me to H Mart a bit later, when it's less busy. 

So I rode over and knocked on Tom's door. I think he had to scramble to find and put on the (dirty) pair of pants he had on when he came to the door, shirtless. The guy's got a lot bigger gut than I thought he had, and he rummaged around and found a shirt that just barely covered it. I told him about the Fry's sale, and he was surprised to hear that they were going out of business and having a sale. 

We hung out and each had 1.5 beers as he had 3 cans of the lousy stuff left, and talked about all sorts of things. He said he uses Jackson Hewett software to do his taxes, and I told him how I'd done the 1040 or at times, the 1040-EZ, as long as I'd been paying taxes except when I had my tax guy. I told him that I'd sent off about $2700 and the IRS had had no problem cashing my check. He said, "Sometimes the IRS sends me a grand and sometimes I send them a grand". And also, "It's white knuckles before every payday" by which he meant he lives paycheck-to-paycheck. 

Since he's so broke, he's been furnishing the building with free stuff from Craig's List. And he reminded me I'd told him about all the furniture that's just left out in neighborhoods with a lot of houses and that I'd found all sorts of stuff even in this industrial area. He's still gonna check out Fry's though.

I also told him to check out Yamaguchi Goro on shakuhachi on YouTube, and Tom told me he's actually studied Japanese in college. His degree, he said, is in "Oriental Studies - Japanese". That's actually really cool. He says he's lost his Japanese but I'm sure he could get it back in no time - I told him some of the things I've picked up from watching Atashin'chi and he knew those things. I had no idea he'd studied something so cool - I guess I just thought he'd studied chemistry or something. He also told me the combo to the lock to the side yard in case I want to use the porta-potty there. There's about zero chance of that, but it's still nice to know. 

Tom's also involved in some weird "Operating System 1.0" philosophical thing by a guy named Ken Wilber. I guess the guy's semi-legit but I looked up stuff on this online and it's just ... it makes sense but you can just think a bit and it's all fairly obvious. We compared Buddhisms. He'd followed Nichiren Buddhism and I told him about the Jodo Shinshu Buddhism I follow and all the wholesome hijinx we get up to.

When we were about talked out and the (lousy) beer gone, we wished each other luck and I went up to H Mart where I got sake, some sashimi, fried fish, and a beer. Then came back and ate and drank. The sashimi was really good as it was tuna slices but about 2/3 of each slice was the cut called o-toro. 

After spending too much time on YouTube I got busy with a plan I had for today. I took a bunch of stuff off of one shelf, then got into the cabinet where we keep all our plug-ins and took the more "drab" ones that hardly ever sell, and put those on the shelf. The freed up room in the cabinet so I have room for the Tektronix plug-ins we have over in the storage unit. It felt good getting that done. Ken wants me to list some amplifiers or something he has in the storage unit so ideally I pack some FedEx things tomorrow, take them to FedEx, then visit the storage unit.

Glad I dragged myself to the bank

I'm always glad when I've gone to the bank on Thursday, because I had a slow start today.  At least I got in a decent practice last night. 

I packed some more things, left at 6 to do my drop-offs, and stopped at that one Vietnamese place for pork and shrimp on noodles. It was a big meal and I ate most of it, having just had some natto for breakfast. 

I had to pack some more things by midnight or they'd become "overdue" and one thing was like a main unit and a control head and I couldn't find the control head. I called Ken and asked if he could swing by after work and help me look, and he sounded a bit grumpy about it at first then perked right up. So he came over and we looked around, and wouldn't you know it, I found it. I thanked him and he took off for home. 

He'd told me that the truck might come by on Monday to pick up the annealing furnace so I need to be prepared for that. I have two things to take to FedEx tomorrow and will pack one more to make it 3, then will pack more stuff for FedEx to take on Sunday because I have 4-5 large things I have to get out to keep up with things.