157th day sober. I listed Ebay things and mostly, dug a lot of things that had sold out of the warehouse, as usual some things being hard to find. I got to sleep by 7AM and, I feel, am slowly moving my schedule back to a more reasonable one. I did more "violin motion" exercises last night while watching YouTube videos.
I got up a bit past 3 but had gotten a full 8 hours of sleep so that's good. On the radio they were talking about sleep, and the guy they were interviewing said, if Nature could have us get by on, say, 3 hours, it would be that way. So we really need 8 hours. Or course this is NPR, which I listen to all day, not the AM stations where I don't know what they're talking about these days. Probably about how Biden's a lizard-oid and the best time to shoot the entire family next door because they might be Democrats. In between a million commercials.
I packed 16 things and had a few packed already so it was 19 things I took to the post office and FedEx. I went to the little Filipino market and got some peanuts and a can of "Tome'" sardines in olive oil and tomato juice to try. I talked with the guy a bit, telling how, due to the season changing or something, my trumpet income is way down so I'm taking the next couple of months off. But in that time, going to have another try at violin, a thing he thought was really great. "I love the sound of violin at this time of year" and he said he gets carolers going around with guitars all the time around Christmas.
On my way back I stopped by Tom's just to say hi and let him know I'm still alive, but although it looked like he was there (all the lights on and his truck was there, computer on etc.) I got no response when I rang the doorbell and knocked. So he was probably passed out in one of his alcoholic stupors.
I found something neat though - I saw, on Rogers avenue, some Dumpsters that looked worth checking out, you never know if someone's tossing out all kinds of neat packing stuff. Well, I didn't find that, but I found fruits and veggies. I got a cantaloupe and a bunch of plums and an avocado, all of these unripe, and a package of small shiitake mushrooms and a package of blue cheese. So I got back here and after putting things away, made a curry featuring the shiitake mushrooms and later will probably fix up a salad (I got a head of lettuce too and not that lousy iceberg stuff) with blue cheese dressing.
While I was out riding today I thought about the book "The Death Of Ivan Ilyich" and of the good person in the book who cares for Ivan without any thought of a reward, the butler Gerasim. Garasim's a country boy and among country people, you don't ask How or Why or What will I get in return, you just pitch in if someone's sick or injured. Meanwhile Ivan's family are conniving all around him and he looks back on his own life of conniving.
The difference is, in Gerasim's world, everyone's poor as shit and everything gets shared alike according to need. There's really not anything to connive over. I think this is the true meaning of the book, that humans don't deal with wealth well.
We didn't evolve with wealth, as it's understood now. In the hunter-gatherer days there was no such thing as a trust fund that could support you without your having to work, or your descendants, or their descendants, and so on. You went out, you hunted, you gathered. If you came upon a windfall you shared it. If you found a new way to do things you showed others how to do it - it's not like you can keep secrets in a hunter-gatherer band. It was true Communism, from each according to their abilities, to each according to their need. Being a dirt-poor Russian peasant was not much different, so of course Gerasim has these "noble" qualities.
The idea that wealth itself, wealth being a thing at all, being inimical to humanity is one I've had floating around in my head for a while. Back in the days when "Nature" shows like National Geographic were watched by everyone on TV because it was 7 in the evening Sunday night and that show was a big treat, we all saw that scene where the "researcher" gives out a lot of bananas to a troupe of chimpanzees. There are those scenes where chimps are grabbing all the bananas they can hold, dropping many of them, snatching them from each other etc, with much screeching and teeth-baring. That's just primate nature, is the message.
But since it's been seen that that is not at all primate nature, and that chimps and bonobos are actually very good at sharing. A massive windfall of out-of-season fruit during the dry, hungry, part of the year is going to spur some "edge" behavior as in the edge of the envelope of possible behaviors. Capitalism has to try to convince us that greed and individualism are proper and desirable.
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