Another Day of Decay

 54th day sober.  Up at 2:30, and these days getting to sleep is easy again. If (when) I wake up too soon, it's easy to get back to sleep and get another hour or two or three in. 

On the radio (the only dependable media) they were saying only 10% of Olympic athletes have been vaccinated at all - so much for any perception that they'd be 100% vaccinated, making the Olympics a good showcase for vaccination. Athletes are being given a little bottle of hand sanitizer and told no autographs, and "behave yourself". If my own experience is any guide, not all of them will behave themselves, not at all. 

The modern Olympics only kept going and became "a thing" because it was a showcase for which was a better system: Capitalism or Communism. It was already well-proven that Communism is better for 99% of the population when the oligarchs killed off the USSR for being too good and too successful, and now the Olympics has limped along, trying to justify itself as sheer advertising, which is better, Pepsi or Coke? 

Now it's going to be the first multi-nationally held super-spreader event. And there are anti-Olympic demonstrations all over the world. 

So that's another thing that's dying. Reddit is dying, and YouTube is becoming almost unwatchable - there are tons of ads and some weird algorithm that wants to auto-play all kinds of stupid shit. 

I got going for downtown at almost 4. It was actually pretty nice out, sunny and not too hot. I remembered I had to take the 4 packages I had stashed in the bike bags to the post office and stopped there and dropped those off, then went to the bank. I was only off by $3 in my calculation of what my deposit would bring my account to, which is an error of only about 1%. 

Next I went over to the hardware store and got a Victor snap trap because I think there might be a rat in here. Then went to the drug store for some aspirin, $8 for a bottle of 300 when they used to be a lot cheaper. 

I went over to the book store since I have over $20 in trade credit and picked out a book that's a combination of "Pidgin To The Max" and "Pidgin To The Max Hana Hou" for $2, and a Kurt Vonnegut book but the Vonnegut book turned out to be new so I had to put it back. So even though I wanted to spend more, I only spent $2 there. 

I decided I didn't have much more to do downtown so I rode back to Nijiya and did a big shopping trip. I got all kinds of things, even some barley tea and a roll of chashu. And a nice big bento of course - that was under $10 though. It all came to a bit over $60. 

I got back and ate the bento and relaxed, Reddit was back up again - for now - and then sifted and sorted stuff and put stuff out for the bums to pick up.