140th day sober. I got Ebay stuff listed last night and about 6AM the paving guys came and re-paved the messed up asphalt from the new cement drainage channel having been put in. They brought in a lots of heavy machinery and made a hell of a racket. After getting the listings done I just went to bed, hoping I could sleep through all the noise and I could, as I was pretty tired.
I woke up at 4, which was fine, and had coffee etc. and was out of here at 5. I got some things at Nijiya, went over to Lee's and got some spring rolls and gyozas for $5, and ate over at the college. The squirrels are in fine form, big bushy tails and lots of attitude. I'm going to have fun explaining squirrels to people back in Hawaii.
I started playing at 6:40 and it was cool and windy enough that I'd worn my orange jacket with a light sweatshirt underneath and was glad I had. But wow was it slow. I ended up making $27.40 which is a record low. I think I need to start getting out there earlier so that the bulk of my playing is when it's light outside. This can be arranged, even when it's getting dark at 4 in the afternoon. I just need to get up earlier and get out there a lot earlier. If I'm playing on whatever day I go to the bank, whether it's Thursday or Friday, and then Saturday and Sunday, I can get out there at noon if that's what it takes.
What's funny is, as I started playing, I noticed a guy sitting against the Whole Foods building in the sort of corner between it and the rack that holds the shopping carts. I guess there are narrow planters there so he had this narrow planter to sit on. He was holding some kind of a sign, I didn't read it because I didn't even notice the guy was there until I'd set up, and then I wasn't going to walk over and check. I acted like I didn't know he was there. He was actually placed where he could be fairly visible to some of the people coming from the parking lot, while being less visible to employees and security guards.
It's kind of a stupid ploy, because many a bum has set up right where I do, with their sign, begging away, and as long as they're on the sidewalk they're on city property and Whole Foods can't do much, and if they're not obnoxious they're tolerated.
Well, anyway, this guy got a tip from a lady, cool for him, then when I got a tip, and then another, he seemed to be irritated and picked up his stuff and left. He seemed to have a guitar bag or it really looked like a banjo bag, along with the other crap he was carrying. So why didn't he play the damned thing? Although bums are known to carry instrument bags with no instrument in them, or maybe half his strings were broken, or maybe the thing was stolen and he didn't want anyone to recognize it. By the time he left it was fully dark.
It just seems the mood changes once it gets dark. It's not that I don't get tips, but it seems to be less of them. I think people are being more careful after sundown in the same way that, other than on busking days, I've been making sure I was back here before it got dark.
Even though the pandemic seems to have thinned the zombies out by quite a bit, there are still zombies and they are still dangerous. In fact, on my way home tonight, going up that street that's always full of zombie cars and zombie RV's and little zombie "outdoor living rooms" set up under the trees, there were tons of cops and ambulances and some kind of heavy duty vehicle moving equipment, and as I rode by on the sidewalk I saw a cop putting some kind of foam on a spillage, maybe some zombie blood. Where there are zombies, there's always trouble.
As I rode home I thought about the zombies in the movies. Somehow they're always really dumb but an unerringly tell if someone else is another zombie and leave them completely alone, or a non-zombie to be attacked right away. In reality, a rabid dog will attack anyone or any animal, even if that person or animal is rabid also. And a mentally ill zombie or druggie zombie doesn't care whether you're mentally ill or a druggie or not, if you're close by, you're a target.
Also, in the movies, zombies are always attracted to sounds. So all the people would have to do is set up something like a rat trap, where a zombie is attracted to a noise source over a big pit with a trap door that resets to catch the next zombie. In the real world, movie-zombies would be really easy to deal with.
So in the real world zombies are a thing, but you don't typically get great masses of them and they're easy to spot (staggering around, pushing a shopping cart loaded with useless shit, yelling at the air, etc.) and you learn to spot them from a good distance and avoid them. Like last night, where I was going to ride by the old Safeway location on 2nd, and heard some zombie going off, yelling angrily about some stupid shit, so I cut across a parking lot and went up 3rd instead of 2nd.
Rather than how it is in the movies, real-world zombies are more likely to attack fellow zombies, because normal people avoid them but another zombie might not notice that a guy has his pants down below his knees, is wearing one pink fuzzy slipper, and is yelling about Communists from Neptune. Even if they notice, they're not human enough to react thinking, "That's not normal" and move away.
Maybe movie zombies are so different from real-world zombies because it's not fun for people to watch a movie and think, "Hey, wait, that's how I move around my neighborhood to avoid 'pants down guy' and 'swing a machete guy' and 'screams at clouds girl'" People go to movies to see something different from real life even if it's just real life exaggerated to an impractical extent.
No one wants to hear about never leaving the house without at least one weapon, taking different routes in/out to avoid being predictable and thus liable to ambush, sussing out all pedestrians as well as cars a block ahead if possible, knowing which streets are more or less safe and so on. That's just routine stuff. They want to watch a movie about some impossible situation where, in movie-land, something's different.
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