ST

211th day sober. I managed to get some sleep last night, lots of weird dreams but genuine sleep. I still feel rotten, but should get some work done. 

I finished reading the book I'd picked up on Saturday, about an outbreak of ergot poisoning in 1951 in a town in France. 

I re-read "A Man Without A Country" enough to find and bookmark the place where he says the US is "now feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis once were".  I knew it was nearer the end than the beginning, so I started from the very end, where Vonnegut says the wisest man he knows is the artist Saul Steinberg and after finding the Nazi bit in the book, I looked into this Steinberg fellow. 

I was familiar with the name and with some of the art, but if Vonnegut says a guy is worth knowing, it's worth it to look into the guy. So I found his foundation web site (he's dead now, of course) and he had quite an interesting life. 

He grew up in Romania, where Jews were hated the way "Haoles" are where I grew up. I cut tons of school, due to the prejudice there, in the same way I used every trick I could come up with to cut school, for the very same reason. With family help (like I didn't have) he left for Italy to get his degree, in architecture, and on his diploma he was prominently noted that he was a Jew. In the same way, the US is obsessed with race, and when getting my booster vaccination on Saturday, I'd been required to choose a race from a page full of choices. I noted with glee the choice of "Not Hispanic" so I could be anything, just so long as I'm not Hispanic. 

People outside the USA don't seem to understand how race-obsessed things are here. You have to indicate your race on every official form and not a few un-official ones, and if you don't the forms won't be processed. 

And in his case, as with mine, it was assumed that art would be the ticket out. As it was, if Saul hadn't been good at art and getting art published in magazines in Italy and having relatives in the US, he and his whole family would have been shoveled into the death camps for sure. 

I don't think Steinberg had his family hovering over him, expecting his art to "hit it big" and then they could all live off of him, as I did. I was in a real Catch-22. First, it's very difficult for a "haole" to get anywhere in art in Hawaii. Secondly, if I'd made it "big" somehow, I'd have been sure to have said something about the social system there and would have lost everything or even been put in prison for Improper Speech By A "haole". 

It's really that bad over there. I was expected to learn to paint beautiful seascapes that would sell for beautiful money and thus escape my circumstances, yet Dennis Hardy, an Australian seascape artist, who gave me paints and brushes and lent me books, got his house burned down and went back to Australia in disgust. He's lucky he got to leave with his life. 

I thought electronics was a good, "neutral" choice with the very big perk that, as I believed along with a lot of others, that if I got my degree in it, I'd be able to leave for the mainland when the ink on my diploma was barely dry and work for some big tech company. Tech has turned out to be a terrible choice, for myself and those many others, as it's very low-paying and that's if you can get a job in it at all. (Incidentally, Steinberg once visited a cousin who was an electronics repairman in Arizona, and pondered that it could easily be him, if he hadn't had access to the education he did.) 

(For the curious reader, probably the best field to get into now is to get, at most, a "criminal science" or whatever it's called 2-year degree and to be a security guard. You'll make more than in tech, and you can do it past age 40.)