266th day sober. I got some practice in last night, well over an hour. I've noticed something which is that when I first start practicing I can play crazy high notes, and if I practice those first I can get in some real time playing up to the E above high C and good strong notes too. But if I start out with low stuff, I really struggle to get "up there". So I'm going to practice high notes first because the more time I get in playing high notes, the more familiar they will be. Besides it's fun playing stuff an octave up from where I usually play it. The lip-buzzing is helpful too while it's no substitute for playing on the horn.
Ken listed some things himself with his usual bad photography and semi-literate text so I cleaned up the ones that Ebay alerted me to (for some reason when he lists them they end up with a link in the description and Ebay doesn't like that) and when I got up today I thought I might check to see if he'd listed more than the three Ebay flagged and he had, so I went and cleaned those up too. I also had to raise the item weights so the shipping losses wouldn't eat up too much money.
I had a funny dream last night. I'd moved into a place that was big and roomy, sort of a living-room sized room so I had room for "stuff". Some friend came by and needed a place to stay so they parked this trailer or RV or something that was barely movable in front. Then there were two kittens, which needed to be "fixed" at the vet's and of course I was the only one who had money handy to do this so I was going to pay $100 each for them to be "fixed" and then I'd take care of them while they healed in my nice, big room. I realized I was essentially "buying" two cats now, since the transient person with their RV, if they left, would leave them with me as the RV was full of shit so there was no room and in fact they'd probably just bug off and leave the thing...
I semi-woke up and thought about the kind of place I lived in when I was back in Hawaii as a young adult. It was a room that was nice and simple with a desk, a dresser, a chair, a bed of course, and a closet. I guess there was a lamp on the dresser too. Lights-out was 10PM, no overnight guests, and once a week it was my turn to mop the hallway and kitchen and clean up in general. The Spartan-ness of this place made sure there would be no hoarding or hoarder friends showing up, and needless to say no cats.
I'm not sure if this dream had any great message, except that right now I have more stuff than could comfortably fit in a single room, and that my desired state of living is very, very basic. I could happily go back to that basic room with the possible addition of a music stand.
The idea would be to live somewhere around the university which is near Waikiki for busking, near the university and its libraries, near neat local non-touristy stuff in the surrounding area from Kaimuki on into "Town" which is of course Honolulu, and all of this reachable by bus or even walking. I'd do my practicing in one of the practice rooms at the university or if I join the local musicians' union, they probably have practice areas too. Or do what a guy who plays bagpipes of all things (he appears to be of 100% Japanese ancestry) and practice in one of the many parks. And those things... well, they're bagpipes.
So maybe the dream was telling me to be prepared to shed excess stuff and be ready to jump. One thing for sure is, if I'm going to busk for 2-hour sessions, I need to get used to practicing for at least that amount of time. I *do* need to get back to busking especially once the weather warms up again, and I also need to be ready to change over to busking as an occupation if something happens to my situation here.
I used to follow a blog called the "500 lb peep" blog, since she was a poster on r/lostgeneration on Reddit. But she's gone full-on Trumper and is busily doing all the Trumper things like paying attention to John Howard Kunstler who I learned years and years ago is a very angry person (I sort of picked it up from his blog but I made the mistake of corresponding with him) and reading that awful book by "the stupidest Kennedy" about how Anthony Fauci is the Devil himself or some such thing.
I'm fairly certain Hitler's book was successful in the turning-Fascist Germany of the early 1930s, and before that, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's dismaying to find that Morris Berman's blog is a thinly-disguised Trumper blog, that 'Peeps' is going full Trumper and will probably be calling for the burning of witches soon, and someone from long ago, John Michael Greer AKA "The Archdruid Greer" has been full-on Trumper from before the election.
About this last, Greer, I kind of saw it coming. He put up an essay about how our form of government in the US is actually National Socialist because we have, I dunno, an Army and a Navy yet we have Social Security or some shallow reasoning like that. And how delightful it would be if we went full-on, how the youth would wear green shirts and black pants and clean up the parks and help old people out and so on (the part about eliminating non-whites and putting in their time manning the extermination camps would be a given) and Greer took it down so as far as he's concerned it served its purpose and now he hides behind thickets of dense verbiage and woo-woo mysticism, just like some of the Nazis did in fact.
I've really been meaning to read Victor Klemperer's diaries of the Nazi rise to power. I've read that he found it dismaying how many otherwise normal-seeming people went full-on Hitlerite. The same thing is going on now. Normal-seeming people, people with hearts and minds and sympathies and who'd help the poor, the downtrodden, the unjustly served, at least if you ask *them* if they would, have decided the modern-day Hitler and his policies are really the way to go.
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