77th day sober. I slept in until a little past 4. I needed the sleep, I think! I had vivid dreams, while also sleeping very deeply. One was where Fry's Electronics had all kinds of junky computer parts tossed out out back, but also stacks of unsent mail and addressed envelopes, and one pallet had tons of those with stacks of money inside - typically stacks of $20s with a $100 on top, so I was trying to snag some $100s and tuck them away in my jacket while not tipping off the other scroungers there as to what I'd found. And also wondering if the money was counterfeit, it being Fry's after all.
I practiced last night, working a lot on tone, and how to "come back" even if I was tired. And watched more War And Remembrance of course.
I got going for downtown at about 4:45 and visited the little free libraries, dropping off bags of various individually wrapped medicines that I have a big box of, and picked up a book called "Our Man In Havana" that looks interesting. I went to Lee's for something to eat, and seeing a down-and-outer sitting out front and rice plates being two for one, I got two waters, two rice plates one of them being easy to chew fried rice with scrambled eggs on top, and by the time I was back out front the down-and-outer was gone, so I rode down Santa Clara street and soon enough found a little old "ex" Marine with a sign, and gave him the food for which he was quite grateful. "Semper Fi" I said as I rode off.
I locked up the bike at Whole Foods and used their bathroom and sat down at an outdoor table with the rice plate I'd gotten for myself, with chicken wings, and ate, and realizing it was only about 7, I went upstairs and got an alcohol-free beer and watched MMA. One fight was really good in that they were very evenly matched, and it went pretty long too. The winner eventually did his victory dance and almost passed out, falling on his ass and getting up with difficulty. That's how good a fight it was. The 2nd fight might have been good in a way, in that both guys were beasts and one guy better, getting more punches in and getting out of a few grapples, but then the less-good guy won with a choke hold. A Hemingway story of a fight.
I found myself yawning so I went downstairs and got a cold coffee which I drank about half of, and pretty soon realized it was 8. So I chewed gum and went downstairs and got started, after using the bathroom (again) too.
By this time it was 8:27, and I started in. It went fairly well, and lots of people appreciated my playing, but I had an idea I'd started too late, as I was now "committed" to playing until at least 9:30. It was cold enough that I put on my sweat shirt and jacket which felt a little too warm at first but ended up being just right.
A certain older, very short, lady came out to load up her bike and since she had these weird things on her handgrips I mentioned them and we got talking. Somehow it ended up politics, and I said I'd voted for Hillary in '16 "Just like you", nodding toward the T-shirt she was wearing that said HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT etc. It turned out to say HILLARY FOR PRISON. Oops. She accused me of being a Communist which I proudly owned up to, and it went pretty badly. She called out over her shoulder, "It isn't too late for trumpet lessons!" and I called to her, "You gonna pay for them?"
I thought about this on the way home, and have a plan to drag up my old conservative chops from when I was young and stupid and *did* subscribe to the National Review and all that. Tell her I was bored as I often get, standing out there with my horn, and since I'd done some debate in college (debatable) I was messing around seeing if I could convince her I held opposite political views than the ones I, of course, certainly do. And, I'd say apologetically, I'd not done a very good job of it. What Communist would be out here working so hard, after working their day job?
And this was all a lesson to me: Never-ever engage with street scum. This person isn't street scum per se, as I don't think she's actually homeless. She's probably living off of of a deceased husband's pension or some such thing, and is existing just a half-rung above those living under bridges and along creeks. A very definite member of the underclass.
And why do the underclass have such horrible politics? It's because the underclass are scared. They have every reason to be scared. Solidarity is the one way out of the scary, dangerous, lives they lead and it's the one thing they've been brainwashed not to do. Even if you'll never have more than a bicycle, some rented cubby hole to sleep in, and a can of beans for dinner, if you have solidarity you're not alone. Your suffering has a purpose. And it's exactly why anything but hyper-individualism has been ingrained so strongly in the underclass.
And this is why, if I have any interaction with the underclass, I must assume whatever droplet of it I am conversing with, is a die-hard Trumper who will happily throttle a baby if its leaders tell it said baby is that of "Lib'ruls".
And it's best to not interact at all. I might, like the character Syme in 1984, not hide my intellect, but even though Syme was indeed loyal to Big Brother, the fact that his loyalty was on an intellectual, rather than the gut, level made him dangerous and he was disappeared. Among Trump-troglodytes, loyalty is at the lizard-brain level. One must be prepared to grunt and scratch and sputter, "Hillary Baaaaad!".
And why is a member of the underclass, scared and not least financially so, shopping at Whole Foods? I noticed her putting kooky things like soy milk into her bags, because a lot of the brainwashed far-right are really into kooky diets. The underclass can actually cough up a surprising amount of money when it comes to cigarettes, booze, tattoos, kooky foodstuffs and frauds like homeopathic medicine, and so on.
They could remove a lot of the fear in their lives if they simply learned to not get sucked into fads and fraud, work out an inexpensive diet, and save up a financial buffer. But the same as class solidarity, they are taught the opposite of that.
So enough about the lumpenproletariat. I continued playing, got many thanks and more donations, and all was well. I played until about 9:40 and I made $26.52. So my total for the weekend was just over $110.
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