Mud

 31st day sober. After getting back from dealing with Tom, which was tiring and not worth it, I put some things away including clearing off another shelf to put some of the newly listed things on, ate some late dinner, and then looked for something to watch while practicing. I found a movie called "Mud" which sad to say for practicing, was so good I just watched it.

The movie reminded me of how great life was as a kid, owning nearly nothing, and just going around doing kid stuff. In the movie the kids do some pretty grown-up stuff but still their lives were very simple. Just like when I was a teen, and had my surfboard, some fishing stuff, and that was about it. And for that matter a lot of the fun things to do didn't take any extra things at all. Shell collecting and finding Japanese glass floats required none. Likewise hiking up to Sacred Falls, that didn't even require shoes. Maybe a bag to bring back some mountain apples in. 

I've long noticed that really wise people try to lead very simple lives. If you look at Society's example of really un-wise people, you get the homeless living in their cluttered dumps. They collect all kinds of crap and pile it around themselves. One of the shining examples was, in fact, a guy back in Hawaii. I'd always see him along King Street from the University area to almost downtown. He had two shopping carts heaped with highly compacted trash and junk. He'd drag one some distance, go back and get the other, then drag the first one some more distance, etc. 

I guess I was kind of minimalist from early on. I remember my siblings getting all hung up about "their" toys and worried about their getting taken, so I decided I was only going to care about a few toys. Since then, I've learned to not really even care about a few toys, because everything comes and goes. Trumpet playing drove that point home for me too, because you can have the fanciest trumpet there is and if you can't play well because you've not built yourself up with practice, you're still going to sound like hell. And a good player with a student horn will run circles around you.