272nd day sober. I slept in late, so I guess that was the closest thing to a day off I get around here.
I practiced last night and it went OK. I'm trying to work on long tones on the high notes and also working on some repertoire for when I'm ready to get out busking in a couple of months. My work year won't start until April 1.
The internet has become so slow ... I can do my Ebay work and that's what matters, but it's nowhere near what you'd expect for "silicon valley". If I wanted to upload videos etc I suppose I could use the internet at my bank which might be faster. They have a little conference room they let people use. But then I'd have to lug my laptop down there and it would be a big hassle.
It's just not gonna happen.
And here I've spent hours pondering and moping over things, and not accomplished much of anything other than reading "Decline And Fall" by Waugh, which is a pretty good story and to think it was his first book.
A huge thing for me to mope over right now is, Do I try to get out of this hellhole by studying and doing a ton of stuff to convert to Judaism and skedaddle to Israel, assuming this is possible in a couple-few years and assuming it isn't actually shittier there. Or do I simply run back home to Hawaii, Oahu to be exact because while by everyone's account the other islands are nicer, I only care about Oahu.
If I'm going back to Oahu, I only need to get my driver's license upgraded to Real ID and decide when I'm going to go. Ideally I'd wait until I'm 62 and so would be able to get Social Security so I'd have that source of money as a backup. But arriving with some savings, I might be able to support myself fine by picking shells, busking, maybe keeping an Etsy account going with odds and ends I find. The longer I hold out, the slightly larger the social security payments get, and once I hit 70, they don't care how much I earn besides, I get the full payment plus whatever I'm making.
When I tried to move back in 2003 it was too soon and I was trying to make too drastic a transition. I'd planned to get a room to rent for $300 a month or so, as they cost then, yet somehow I was still faced with having to sell on Ebay. But I had to drop off of Ebay and off of the grid in general for some years to get out of the financial fix I was in. Or get back to doing what I knew how to do which was trade in electronic surplus. That's how I ended up coming up here to the Bay Area and the surplus trade was good, until 2008.
I've been through a ton of things since then and I can honestly say I could go back there with just about nothing and make it fine. I know a ton of hustles for making money. I've long grown out of missing having a car. I can walk for miles and if I've got any kind of a bike I can really get around.
I also may have to give up trumpet because I keep getting these headaches and headaches are not normal for me. I'm going to quit coffee and give it a week with nothing but good old green tea. It might be that I'm just drinking too much coffee.
But there are some other factors. Playing trumpet is pretty physical. It's not like playing guitar where it takes very little muscle power to pick or strum and the chords take a little hand strength and that's it. Trumpet takes a ton of things from below one's belly button on up. It's like working carrying baggage at the airport or something where as one ages, one will *not* progress at it but regress.
That plus the Hawaii ethos not really being about "noise" and the fact that the tropical atmosphere wants to corrode everything and makes all brass instruments stink, are things that if I'm to return to Hawaii, make me have some serious second thoughts.
In any case I can't return to Hawaii just doing nothing. It's like someone who works hard to escape their small town to go somewhere big like NYC. Then they're ready to go back to Smallville to retire, and no one wants to say about their decades in NYC, "Well, I was a parking lot attendant".
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