So much for Tuesday

 240th day sober. I got Ebay things listed but it took a while because I had to find some things, sort and clean them, etc. 

I got some practice in, and I have to say that things are coming along. In the past, from time to time, I had come upon the technique of compressing my midsection but it was, in the past, a sort of diffuse sort of compression of the midsection in general. "Wedge breathing" is more focused. To be precise, Maynard Ferguson studied actual yoga and yogic breathing, and realized it's what's called the sacral chakra that's important. 

Bobby Shew learned this technique from Maynard, and came up with the name "Wedge breathing" which actually put me off for a long time because, due to the name, I thought it was some sort of gimmick like "wedging" your lips into the mouthpiece or something. There are a lot of gimmicks out there ... 

I'm glad I finally did my homework and learned the truth about this technique because I really think it's THE way, and the way Louis Armstrong and Herbert L. Clarke and all of those guys played, they just didn't have the words to describe it properly. Western culture doesn't have the idea of chakras anyway so it took Maynard's studying yoga to bring a precise definition into Western trumpet playing. 

I'm glad I'm making progress too, because trumpet playing is my one bulwark against homelessness and despair in the coming years. 

I notice that my playing is becoming more "expressive". The result of "more air" I suppose? But also, a musician's ability is limited to their internal concept of the music - if you can't hear it in your head you can't play it - and maybe my internal concept of music is growing. Because I am always working on music in my head. 

The nice thing about this last is, it seems when I'm out busking it's "not so much what I say but how I say it"; people often can't tell what song I'm playing but they like how I'm playing it. This is because peoples' own internal concepts of music vary greatly, but expressiveness is more general. 

I know it's expressiveness that makes so many people nuts over Miles Davis but I still just don't get the guy. I'll keep listening because I feel there's something I need to learn but I'd rather listen to The Velvet Underground. 

Anyway, I ended up between the listing and practicing, staying up until past 9AM and finally went to bed and slept very soundly and woke up at 6! So much for going to the post office.  

My schedule is that screwed up. Too much YouTube, I guess. Plus it's cold and I don't feel like doing much, and I need to give myself a haircut, and it's a weird week anyway. 

At least "too much YouTube" has enabled me to find two good resources. One is "HebrewPod101" and one is "Piece Of Hebrew" run by a nice young French-Jewish couple who speak good English and as far as I can tell, Hebrew, and who just moved to Israel. I need to keep on this shit because I can't move anywhere outside the US if I can't hack the language. 

And what of Hawaii, where I know where everything is, and speak the local patois natively? I just don't think I'm going to be happy back there, where I'd be stepping right back into a social system where I'm at or near the bottom. My two sisters who live there can get by OK because in both cases they've married into enough money and connections to be fairly safe, and still I found the day-to-day carefulness my older sister practiced rather ominous. 

Essayist Morris Berman advocates leaving the US. but with his money, of course Mexico City is delightful. And there's no way he doesn't have an "insurance plan" paid for and in place to whisk him out of there when the pogroms start. 

I really thought that if I got involved with the local Buddhist church which is the same as in Hawaii, I'd have a circle of people who "have my back" but I think that belief was delusional. Sure, if things get tough for those of Japanese descent here in the US, they'll be able to get out of here in a heartbeat. That won't help me a bit, though. And back in Hawaii I'm just another hated "haole". 

When I really get thinking about it, I never could feel any kinship with what Hawaii originally was - a group of remote islands inhabited by stone-age cannibals - or what it's become, which is a sort of white man's anti-intellectual playground where work and hard thinking can be left behind.