162nd day sober. Or as I consider it, free of the "mainland disease". I took something like an actual day off today.
The party next door was done by midnight, the kids off to bed, and the parking lot left scattered with little packets of candy, green seedless grapes, and a large lump of shaved ice in the cast of a large bucket, which the crows nibbled at and drank from at dawn. I ought to come up with some way of providing them fresh water in the morning.
The crows probably took care of most of the things like grapes. And some of the guys came by today and cleaned the rest of it up. I woke up at 4, and stayed in bed and read the last of "White Noise" and a weird book called "Lucky Strike" by a Kim Stanley Robinson. It involves how the bombardier on the Hiroshima bombing run might have decided to fuck up on purpose, dropping the bomb in the mountains instead of in the city.
The interview section after the story, and after the analysis/discussion of the story, is the best. Apparently the guy's written a ton of books, it's just that I've never heard of him. They're sort of... not what I'd call "airport books" because those can be any potboiler, but they're the sort of book you read and not much of it really stays with you. The guy's a boomer and so am I, but the Wikipedia entry on "Generation Jones" tells all. The guy had a draft number. I think that's a quickie marker between a boomer like him and a boomer like myself. The earlier cohort really did get everything on a silver platter. My older sis, for instance, who'd have had a draft number if she were a guy. And us younger boomers for whom "woodstock" is some thing "the hippies" did, and who consult Wikipedia on things. If you're of the older cohort you get to write a lot of potboiler books and coast along pretty easily.
Those of us in the younger cohort know the field of writing is dead. Everyone writes for free now. If I could, I'd go back to Jack London technology and write for 10c a word but I can't. No one's paying that huge amount now. To be sure of survival, I have to step back much further, to drawing portraits, a well-developed art 1000s of years ago, or play music on the street, preferably with an instrument at least 100s of years old in its present form.
As I write, on r/collapse on Reddit, they're discussing the airlines cutting down on flights due to having less pilots. A ton retired and of course some have died. I just hope the planes are still flying in 2024 or will Matson start having passenger service? Or can I take a cruise and jump ship at good old Honolulu Harbor?
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