252nd day sober. I was up last night but decided I'm going to try to shift my practice from something I do just before bed, when I'm tired and really only thinking about how soon I can hit the sack, to during the day so I'm more alert and purposeful and let the Ebay bullshit own the time I'm marginally alert.
I was up around noon, having stayed up watching an "American Experience" documentary from the late 90s about the 1918 flu. It was pretty good but had some glaring flaws like saying that masks "are like trying to stop sand with chicken wire" when in reality they're to stop droplets, which is how a virus travels. And they depicted the flu as a 10-month ordeal, when it was over three years, the 2nd year being the worst. An analysis I saw somewhere showed that a repeat of that flu now, in proportion to the present much higher population, would lead to 2 million deaths in the US and we seem to be right on track for that.
As things get worse, I realize this blog itself is like one of those sand paintings that so much work is put into and then they're destroyed. The internet *will* wink out one day, and it just remains to be seen whether it's in a year or 30.
I'd talked with a guy at one place at the Reid-Hillview airport and he said the city has decided to let the airport exist until 2035, and we'd had a laugh as I said their biggest problem by then will probably be radioactive zombies. "A lot can happen by then," he said, and I agreed, "It sure can!".
There were certainly zombies staggering around yesterday. One street I had to go down had one staggering around out in the street and ranting something about "the white man" (it's a black zombie who "lives" in a van that often has such staying painted on it) and I had to head right for to avoid a car, then veered away from. On my way back, at one of the light rail stations downtown, the some firemen were trying to figure out how to deal with another zombie, also black as it turned out, that seemed to be having a full-on mental breakdown. There were tons of the regular types of zombies staggering around all over the place especially as the weather warmed up - the speed of chemical reactions approximately doubles for every 10C increase in temperature after all and this applies to the undead as well.
I was up around 11 or so, and took it easy today. Ken came by around 5, and he futzed around with one of the manual lift handtruck things, and I put things away and moved things around to clear more room to put said things. Ken also brought by some stuff to sell so there was that, too.
We also talked about stuff, and I talked about friends of mine, and we talked about airplanes, and of course some economics. I said - and I'd only thought about it right then - that not only had I been taught to never save money by my childhood, where if you got any money you had to spend it immediately before it was taken from you, but as a student, I could not make too much money or save any, or I'd not be allowed to continue as a student. Saving was not "cool" in the 1980s anyway - there was this sort of foolish exuberance, where it was believed that times were good and the money would just come.
As I say these days, "You have to save, save, save your money!" and that would have made a huge difference, staying the hell away from college and working any old job, just saving all possible. Inventing the side-hustle ahead of time would have been a good idea, too, but I think I am not taking into account how things were back then.
As a member of a hated minority, I had to really keep my head down. Becoming a college student was as much protective camouflage as anything else - there were slightly more of the hated "haoles" on campus, and who knows, maybe I was actually visiting from the mainland and thus could not be beaten up etc., without repercussions. College was also, I felt, my quickest ticket out of Hawaii and to the mainland. My pay, almost doubling from $5 to $9.50 an hour, enabled me to live OK and make the payments on my student loans. If I'd only known I needed to save money like I was still poor. Frankly I was too busy enjoying being able to go anywhere, into any store, hang out at the beach, etc. without the fear I'd lived under - the same fear I was disconcerted to find my oldest sister still lives under back in good old "Hawaya".
No comments:
Post a Comment