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.
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