A productive Wednesday

 138th day sober. The best thing I did yesterday was a haircut. I'd not actually washed my hair for days, because it's a lot easier on the clippers if the hair's oily, but this turned out to be a bad idea - best is to do what I used to do when I went to a barbershop. I used to wash my hair with hot water only, scrubbing well, which got the dirt and junk out while leaving a certain amount of oil in. The cut came out fine, except I ended up with a weird "fringe" across the front I had to trim with scissors and a place on top that didn't get completely trimmed, that I had to touch up with my little trimmers. 

2nd best was a load of laundry. If I'll just do a load a week, I'll get all caught up and will be able to go through the clothes I have and decide what to keep and what not to keep. 

I got Ebay things listed but decided I'm going to list bulk screws and nuts and stuff differently. I'd been listing them as bulk, "there are at least 400 in here although the bag is marked 500" etc., well, most people don't need more than 50-100 at a time, and the uncertainty about quantities make people nervous, I think. It's hard to sell a big bag of 500 nuts for $29.95 but, I think fairly easy to sell 5 bags of 100 each for $10 each for a total of $50. 

We're already pretty deep into "below standard" right now due to having had to do some refunds, mostly things being lost or delayed in the mail going overseas. And if I can't find some little displays Ebay thinks we have, I'll have to add two more "failed transactions" to that - that takes a while to dig out from. Failed transactions have to be less than 2% and we're at 2.34%. 

Ebay's changing in this way, more tracking and tracing and stats-keeping, so if it was ever fun in the first place, it's a lot less fun now. That plus the internet itself is getting worse and worse. YouTube is barely usable, although for now if one doesn't mind tons of ads and a hard limit of 420p and often 360 or 240, one can still watch things. And even comment at the rate of 1 character per second when it's really cooking. And it's a good way to check out reviews of movies I'll have to buy on DVD, preferably used. 

I got some practice in, and did lots of my octave exercises, lots of long tones on higher notes. That's working out well and I think I'm on the right track. 

And the reason why I'm not out busking right now is, late last night Ken called me and said he was caught up at work and would not come by. I said he ought to come by anyway, as I'll be up and he said he would. Then hours later he said honestly he'd not be by, as he'd had to take his wife to the airport too and I said Yeah that's just too much, See you tomorrow night. I'm a great believer in regular schedules but there is a limit. 

So I'd done my haircut and bath, done laundry and had the bathroom all spic and span, even had my shoes polished, was really on top of things and ... change of schedule. So Ken comes by tonight, I'll have the few things I have to mail packed and will take them with me on my way to the bank tomorrow, and busk tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday. 

I'm glad that however slowly, I am making progress on the trumpet. I keep getting discouraged and then just practicing anyway and working on whatever problem I'm having. I remember a year or two ago, the high parts in the Israeli national anthem or that thing Chuck Mangione is known for, being hard and often not being able to play them. Now I can do them. 

I've got three years to really work on this stuff then I'd better be able to go back home and win 'em over. I'm reminded of something I read in a book a while back, about how some political activist came up to the US from South America and after a while in the US, complained about the treatment of "brown people" in the US. His interviewer asked him, "But isn't this the case where you're from?" and he said, "You don't understand, where I'm from, I'm the white guy".  You can be "not quite white" on the mainland and in Hawaii still make the impression of being "white" by appearance even if you're kinda brown. 

So back home I'm just going to be, by first impression, just another white mainlander who's there to make noise on my trumpet just like all the white mainlanders who are there to make noise with their guitars. So I'd better be able to make some pretty good-sounding noise. 

Plus trumpet playing is the best survival skill I have right now. If I can get away with sleeping in a small office, I can make out just fine playing a circuit of a few different Whole Foods stores and never have to care about electronics stuff again. So if something happens to Ken I have a back-up. 

But if something happens to Ken, I think the best thing I can do is wind up my affairs here and get home to Hawaii as soon as I can. Because as long as I'm tied to Ken and his family I have my papers in order and have a reasonable chance of being able to fly home on an airplane, or take a cruise there and jump ship. 

There are so many things about home I miss. I never thought I'd miss them because I never thought there was a world where they were not things. But here we are. I miss: Nice beaches, pawn shops full of treasures, decent swap meets, good libraries, functional public transit, all kinds of greenery, medical care, a social network, everything you really need being in walking distance and everything else a bus or bike ride away, and a sense of rootedness in a place. 

Here, I can't join the musicians' union or the ACLU or pretty much anything, because I live in San Jose and my official address is in Fremont, in a different county. I joined the DSA for a while and that was kind of useless as I was unable to go to meetings close to me, due to being registered in a different county, and unable to go to the ones in "my" county due to distance. I'm unable to do a whole lot of shit because of things like this. 

I need to get my papers in order as soon as I can, but while the virus is stacking up bodies like cordwood it's not really possible to walk into the DMV and take care of it. And unless I plan to leave for home in the next week or so, I'll be on the no-fly list until I get my papers fully in order. 

Along with greatly accelerating every other trend, the virus has made distances much larger. I've mentioned telling a guy here in San Jose that I'd visited Mountain View, a mere 2-3 towns over, and he had no idea where that was. And that visit was before the mass shooting at the light rail facility so now even that long a journey is that much harder to do as it's no longer a walk to the light rail station and a ride there. Now it's a bike ride to Whole Foods, lock the bike up and then either take the bus or the train. Admittedly the train's pretty nice and it's almost as easy to ride that up to the distant land of Palo Alto. 

This whole situation is like being an ant, trying to determine the overall slope of a hill it's walking on. Will it go up? Will it go down? Will things normalize for at least a while, or in a year will I be kicking myself for not getting on a plane this weekend for a "vacation" back home halfway through which I hide out for a while and then appear, mysteriously, on the sidewalks of Honolulu and work on getting a local ID again? 

I don't even have any idea of how to take any money I've saved here on the mainland back with me. None of the banks are the same and smuggling large amounts of cash is not easy. I need to work out how to do that because if I can hold out for the next three years and the planes are still flying and the ships still sailing, I might have 10 or 20 grand saved up and it would be really useful to have that as opposed to having to start from scratch, from homelessness on up.