217th day sober. I practiced again last night and noticed a couple of things. First, for lower notes pretty much any position of the lips on the mouthpiece is fine. But higher notes take more finesse. I've been putting my lips in a position where, trying to get a high note, I'm blowing "against" the lip and it's no-go. Reposition, and suddenly that high note is easy. So I have to pay more attention to mouthpiece placement. Fortunately my teeth are fairly snaggly and it makes it easy to feel where I am.
I slept in today until almost 4. One thing I did last night was waste a lot of time reading this comic online, something about "vagabonds and waifs" or something. The art was really excellent and it started out with this guy whose parents moved to the US when he was little I guess, and he had some kind of tech or engineering skills, he marries a typical American "material girl" and then she divorces him. Oh, and he's got some kind of asthma or something. So it starts out with him surviving being homeless, and it works fairly OK for him because he dresses well, has a car, a storage unit, and places to shower. And he works out herbs and things to take the place of medicines he can't get.
But then it gets into weird stuff like gov't experiments making or discovering some kind of weird plant/animal/fungus thing that ends up curing him, the sad lifetime saga of a friend of his who's a werewolf (a nice one) and the ordeals of wolf-people like him, and a bunch of other crap. The author puts in a word about how the Earth is gonna cook and while conditions will be bad for animals it'll be fine for fungus, so there's a sort of hope. But I note that fungus needs, at least, photosynthesizers to live off of.
I feel like it was a big time-waster buy why do I feel this tale, and not "The Road To Wigan Pier" or "Down & Out In Paris And London" or even London's "People Of The Abyss" was a time-waster? I think it's because Orwell and London didn't waste tons of time describing what they're describing. Plus, characters besides the protagonist are "fleshed out" well.
I also read "Waiting", a book about being a waitress, and again it was interesting but took far too many words to tell the tale. It was a real reading weekend.
I do think the reasoning I put down yesterday is sound. The thing with doing art is, I'd need all kinds of materials, have a place to store them, and people would want to pay me by "on the record" methods instead of cash, hand-to-hand. I'm gonna be retired! Why would I want to start another career? I just want to make some nice tunes before I die and the Earth cooks.
Whether I go back to Hawaii as a hated "Haole", stay here, or am able to make it to Israel, the trumpet is best for me. I'm just playing music, who can fault that?
I was thinking while out riding the other day that the middle-class in Europe always made sure their kids learned not only the usual subjects but something creative like art and music. Like Einstein and his violin. When things turned upside-down in WWII, those who escaped were able to fall back on these skills. It's too bad in the US the arts seem to be confined to the middle-class and upward. You will not learn to play an instrument other than maybe the guitar, if your parents are working-class and only "play" the radio.
I hung around until 6 because I wanted to hear a bit on NPR about Kenny G. Of course they played that last in the "All Things Considered" hour. There's a documentary about him I want to see, not because I adore him but I do admire him. There are people who hate him saying "He's not playing jazz!" well, I don't think he ever claimed to play jazz. Did Herb Alpert get the same kind of heat for "not playing jazz?" In both cases they say they just played little tunes they thought up that sounded nice. Kenny G's been accused of "just playing musical wallpaper" - well, I believe there's a whole school of music that's exactly that, called "Ambient" music. The thing is he plays pleasant tunes, is apparently a practice monster, and seems like an all-around happy guy. There's a lot to admire in that.
After hearing that bit, I took off for Japantown. I was going to drop off my final donation to the temple but there was a skeezy looking zombie hanging around and on a bike - a Zombike? As with zombies' bikes in genera it was loaded down with all kinds of crap but it still means said zombie can chase a person better than on foot so I went on by.
I got some things in Nijiya and had also disposed of some trash, came back around to the temple and dropped my check off, and rode home. The cold weather's keeping the zombies off the street, mostly.
The temple crowd are certainly nice people. Rinban Sakamoto's a great guy, and Paul Endo who leads the choir, and all the wonderful people who make the social activities happen, but with covid running for however many years more, I'm not doing any of the activities. And if/when things go full Fascist in the US, is the temple going to help me escape here? No; I'm not Japanese or Okinawan. The temple has big corporate sponsors like Mitutoyo and that's great, but they'll be helping their own.
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