Out, damned horns

302nd day sober.  Last night I re-organized all my music stuff, and got the "horns" (trumpet, cornets, clarinet) ready to sell off. I just don't mentally like a lot of "stuff" and I was happiest when I had the least "stuff". 

I want my "stable" to be the Shakuhachi Yuu I have now, the "enhanced" Shakuhachi Yuu I plan to order any time now, and the silver flute. 

So that was my overnight, organizing stuff into groups, the trumpet gets the original mouthpiece plus the Blessing 3C, this bottle of oil and slide grease and the nice gig bag and stuff that goes with it, the Yamaha cornet gets this and that, the US-made cornet this and that, and so on. I even dragged out the ukulele I got just before Guitar Center went bankrupt or closed or whatever they did. 

Oh, and before all that, I put new spit valve corks in all the brass; factory Yamaha ones in the Yamahas and these cheesy ones I got on Amazon for the US-made cornet. That went quicker than I anticipated. 

The thing is, the Yamaha trumpet and cornet and the Yamaha clarinet are probably nice enough to consign at West Valley Music. They probably don't want another uke, and the US-made cornet is just plain grotty. 

I can get a little for the uke at Starving Musician, or just wait until I come across someone who could use one and give it to them. Same goes for the US-made cornet. 

I didn't practice last night but I finally got around to reading this post on Reddit in r/shakuhachi where a guy asks about warm-ups and .... one guy claims to be able to hold a note for 2 minutes. That sounded impossible so I did more reading and on another shakuhachi site there was a full-on "how long should you be able to hold a note" discussion and and apparently a skilled player can hold one of the higher notes for a minute, and the lowest for 45 seconds. It comes down to using a very small mouth aperture.

I packed/finished packing 15 things and took them to FedEx and the post office, picked up packing stuff on the way back, and visited Tom for a bit. He's getting tired of the antics of his pot-head assistant and I remembered Chris, a guy Ken hired to help with the move from the old building. So I'll try to get the two of them together. 

There's plenty of war news on the radio and I have to say, I was really wrong about the situation. I thought Ukraine's government was a puppet right-wing one the US installed, that most Ukrainians didn't want, and Russia coming in would be met with little resistance, much welcome, and Russia and Ukraine would team up to clean up things like the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. 

Instead, nobody wants the Russians in there including a good number of the Russians, Ukraine is fighting back enthusiastically, adjoining countries are taking in refugees, not only Ukraine but several other countries are very big on joining NATO now, and lots of non-Ukrainians are sending help and even volunteering. They're getting themselves kitted out at their own expense and going over there. Captured Russian conscripts are going online saying they thought it was a training exercise until the shooting started, and the ruble's devaluing fast. 

It's just another chapter in the bloody history of Eastern Europe, really, and all we can do is hope it fizzles out.

Flute books

 301st day sober. I practiced last night, over an hour, on the shakuhachi. I *am* improving too. I'm still drilling away on the exercises on page 23 of the Koga book, but playing each one several times in first and then 2nd octave, and holding as long as I can so each one is like doing a long tone exercise too. 

I had my bank account up to $10,500.00 there for a bit but now it's $2k down, plus I plan to order the "Enhanced" Shakuhachi Yuu from Monty Levinson pretty soon. Then I can use my plain one to experiment on. I want to try polishing the bore and finger holes where it's rough, and also experiment with making the outside look like bamboo. I'd rather experiment first on the $200 plain one than on the $800 "enhanced" model. 

I think getting a conventional Western flute was a really good idea. What if I never make it back to Hawaii? It's an instrument I can make a modest living with here on the mainland, and a lot easier on me than the trumpet. I'll surely enjoy myself more on it, as so much of the trumpet was just struggling to get any "range" at all. 

I was struggling with the 2nd octave. There are a few notes below it (keyed and I could bend a half tone below that) written C below the staff on trumpet, and I had that first octave, C to C in the staff, down pat. I was working on the C in the staff to C above the staff, AKA "High C". When I was out busking, G on top of the staff was do-able until I got tired, then E in the staff was my top note and at times that was a stretch. 

So I was dealing with, on a good day, an octave and a half. There's a lot you can play within that but there's also a lot you can't. Plus it was really starting to piss me off that when I got tired, anything above C in the staff started to sound like a small animal being tortured. I was not out there to "make noise" as Rabbit Trumpet Guy used to put it. I was out there to practice, make some money, and make actual music in a world where "music" is increasingly something people never see performed live. 

I woke up around 3, with a damn headache again. Black coffee and aspirin for "breakfast" again.

I got going a bit after 4, I think. Maybe closer to 5. I visited the little free libraries on my way downtown, dropping off tea, OTC medicines, a 2022 calendar, and even some "insect bite wipes" with lidocaine in them. I found one book to read, "The Farewell Party" by Milan Kundera. 

I went over to the book store and verified they're open until 8, which they said they are, and said it's good they're keeping up with Google Reviews because those are the ones people use now; they have the hours, a map, etc all right there. I went over to the music books and went through them, finding The Complete Flute Player by John Sands, volumes 3 and 4, Mel Bay's Flute Handbook, and The Art Of Flute Playing, one of the "Art Of..." series. So, 5 books and a $20 bill paid for them all. 

I doubled back to Whole Foods and got groceries and things, including a bottle of thiamine, the kind that makes one flush, on the off chance that might help with the headaches. The place was full of hockey fans so I didn't eat there. Instead I had a can of black coffee and a "shooter" of elderberry syrup, because my throat was scratchy and it's good for heading off "bugs". 

I stopped by the Amazon place for a few bubble mailers and then headed home. I had time to think and did some hard thinking about my headaches and various things. I need to lose weight, the extra fat around my middle is going to harm my flute playing. There's a reason those "competitive eaters" who win are skinny people - extra fat around one's middle means that much less room for food. Or air. 

I also wonder if the headaches I'm having are at least partially due to my having departed from my "keto" eating habits for the past year or two. One of the reasons for morning headaches is sleep apnea which losing weight gets rid of. Also, being non-keto, I'd have the urge to snack including right before bed. That could cause difficulties. 

So when I got back here I had some dry salami and Greek olives, and soda water. I like near-beer, but I noticed the stuff I drank last night had 20g of carbohydrate per bottle. Since I drank the 6-pack, that was 120g of carbs from it alone. Generally under keto rules, you want to limit yourself to 50g of carbs a day. Hence the Whole Foods club soda, which is nice and fizzy, and cheap.

I got on Amazon and got the Trevor Wye beginner book, part 1, and also book 1 of The Complete Flute Player, both new. I found book 2 of The Complete ... with "slight shelf wear" from England, again through Amazon. They're almost opposite approaches, Wye apparently being strong on basic technique, counting time, and learning unfamiliar etudes to force the student to read music instead of just playing from memory. The Complete books lean on popular, well-known songs and look like more fun than Mr. Wye would have a beginner indulging in, but they *do* look fun, and can help me develop busking material. 

War Flute

 300th day sober. I'd gotten 20 small things ready to list on Ebay but found myself starting to nod off at my desk so I put them away and did about 45 minutes' practice and then went to bed. 

I woke up at maybe 2:30 with a pretty bad headache going. I need to get to the bottom of this and it probably comes down to too much sugar/carbs, too much sodium, too much coffee, too much weight (need to lose a fair amount, I figure). I'd love to get an A1C test but when I was ready to buy a tester at CVS I checked to make sure it wasn't out of date and it was at least a year expired. 

I'm probably drinking far more coffee than I should, and one thing I should do is pay the outrageous store price for a set of measuring spoons and pick one of them to use, leveled off so it's always the same, per cup. 

After coffee and aspirin I felt a bit better and got on the bike, only stopping to drop off some trash, and went right over to Whole Foods. I locked the bike up there and got a canned latte and put $20 on my clipper card and walked over to Diridon Station. Sure enough, I'd just missed the train and the next one would come in 45 minutes. 

I read The Metro then put it back, walked around and looked at all the little displays in the station, then went back out to Track 4 to wait. A very hurried, noisy, gal came up all worried about missing the train and I told her she's got all the time in the world and that it will come here to Track 4 etc. She went off to the guy(s) she was with, making noise, and then I don't know where she went. 

I actually walked along the track thinking maybe she was down at the next end (I wanted to make sure she understood how to pay her fare) and didn't find her but ended up talking with a couple of guys who'd been to a sort of comic book art show downtown. One of the guys had bought a painting of The Incredible Hulk on the toilet. It was pretty well done, actually. The other guy had been a wrestler in college and was a teacher/coach now. We talked about a number of things but most notable was the elite/notorious athletes we'd met and places we'd been, as athletes. It was a jolly good time and made the time pass by fast - we kept talking on the train and were almost sorry to part when I got off at Mountain View. 

I walked over to West Valley Music and looked in the method books for the first Trevor Wye book but didn't find it (it would turn out they were out). I  asked if they had a Yamaha YFL-362H and the guy said they're out of them but we'll check .... they expected to have them in, in May. Maybe. They also had the 462H, though, so I asked what that one was. It was only a few hundred more than I'd expected to pay for a 362H so I got that one. 

What I paid a few hundred more for was a flute with a sterling silver body *and* head, not just the head. What I really paid for was "the bird in the hand" because the way things are going, who knows what May is going to be like. Who knows how much bigger this thing in Ukraine is going to be.

Plus, if I'm going to go out busking with the thing and want to try paying for it over this next busking season, it's going to be more than a few hundred dollars' difference to be ready to go when the weather warms up. 

The lady who owns the store was there, and she's a flute person. I could almost imagine her thinking to herself, "Ahhh finally another one comes over to our side!" Maybe that's why what I paid was about $400 less than the price on their web page, which in the past I'd been told was The Price with no dickering.

After buying my expensive little toy I tucked it under my arm and took a walk around Castro Street. First to use the bathroom and eat, both of which easily accomplished at the ramen place where they make their own noodles. I got the house special and while I waited I looked around at what's changed. No more TVs with Japanese shows on. No more little containers of kim chee to spice up one's ramen with. And prices seem to have come down a bit. It was also not very busy which is kind of surprising this being a Saturday night. 

After eating I walked down the street a bit and then around and back up. There were no street musicians. Castro Street is closed to cars except for cross traffic where there are blinking red stoplights. So it's a lot nicer to walk around. There were a few empty store fronts I didn't remember being empty before. I think the tea shop with the most amazing carving of Buddha in all different lives, from poor and starving to rich and fat etc., is gone. The book store has moved away from the corner and a plant store is in there now with the book store next door, in a smaller space. Red Rock Coffee was closed which was surprising because it wasn't even 7PM yet. 

There was a guy with a saxophone playing along to backing tracks, except the tracks even had vocals and he was playing maybe 5 notes. He didn't sound bad at all, but it was not exactly inspiring. His amplified sound didn't make it as far as Easy Foods though, so why wasn't there a street musician there? It's a good, reliable place to busk. And again, it was Saturday night. 

The wait for the train on the way back was only about 15 minutes coming back. All in all, train fares cost me $10 which is a bit more than the bus but well worth it. I was able to take a good look at the sections of the flute - they're polished like mirrors inside. There are little rubber holes in the keys that are open, so I can take them out as I feel like, as one flute lady on YouTube explained that even pro players will sometimes keep one or two in. 

In very little time I was getting off the train at Diridon and walked over to my bike at Whole Foods to make sure nothing was amiss. The petition guy was there and as always, we talked a little and I told him about my new flute. Then I went in to buy near-beer and a few groceries, and got a can of seltzer water for him. 

I went back out and gave him the seltzer water which he really appreciated and we talked some more. I told him about Tulsi Gabbard (which like all right-wingers, he supports - worse yet, he doesn't consider himself a right-winger but he is fact is) giving a speech at the CPAC convention along with Trump and a lot of Trump's cronies. He asked if I "associate" myself with Tulsi and I No, I certainly do not but then I'm not a right-winger. We talked about other things too and got along OK, and I'm getting good practice in talking with right-wingers like him while making them think *maybe* I'm a right-winger like them and thus OK. I suspect a lot of people got by day-to-day in Nazi Germany this way. 

In fact, I think talking ambiguously this way might be what got Tom showing what might be his true colors. He was talking about moving to the South somewhere, one of the Carolinas or something and I was joshing with him, about how he could join the local Klan and it might help him business-wise and all that, and he made no objections to this. I went on to say he could show them pictures of his blonde Icelandic wife and "Pure Aryan" son and they'd think that was great, and he agreed. 

I think what had opened things up with Tom was a month or two ago, when I said of course the Nazis were "green" in that they wanted less human population on the Earth and they were very big on health foods and nature and all that. (Their *way* of being green was flawed, in that if humans are restricted to being this extremely "pure" strain of "Aryans" you end up with humanity being very weak, genetically and even intellectually for all we know. It's a very bad idea.) 

I'm beginning to believe that if you take any white person, however "granola" they might seem, and scratch below the surface, you'll find a Nazi. Maybe they feel that if everyone not exactly like them were gotten rid of, their lives would be easier. AND they've at least traditionally been in a position to do exactly that. And now that their lives, along with everyone else's, are getting more difficult, they're attempting to resume where they left off in the 1930s. Going full Nazi again won't make their lives easier, but they *think* it will. 

So, anyway, I've got my flute.

Oh, Henry!

 299th day sober. I practiced for maybe 45 minutes last night, felt tired and called it a night. 

Tons of war talk on the radio and online of course. I woke up around 2, and was out of bed and having coffee and aspirin for my headache by 3. 

On the radio, as I was putting my bedding away, they happily explained how Nixon went to China, trying to "understand all he could" for a week, and under the guidance of Henry Kissinger. They gleefully went on to explain that Kissinger was the one who urged Nixon to buddy up to China, and that shortly thereafter he (Kissinger) retired from being an "elder statesman" and became a "business person" (not businessman but "business person" maybe to make it sound slightly less venal?) and urged the US to do things that benefited the Chinese Communist Party and .... Kissinger's business. 

I have to laugh about this, not being averse to the Chinese Communist Party at all. But, the US's stance being very anti-Communist and Kissinger doing things not to further the US's anti-Communist stance but his own profit instead, is comedy gold. And for them to come right out and talk about this, right out in the open, on NPR, is amazing. 

I have no illusions about NPR. I listen to NPR all the time and it's pretty much the soundtrack around here. But I know it's the American Pravda of the American Brezhnev Era. If they say Kissinger was essentially a 2-bit finagler, the cat is well and truly out of the bag. 

The problem with this, they said, is that it not only "strengthened" Kissinger's business, but also the Chinese Communist Party. You know, that thing the US was officially against strengthening. So now we have a powerful China. I hope they're laughing it up over there. In Ukraine the bomb shelters have been turned into brothels, and in the US the gangsters running the place have strengthened China to the detriment of the US to line their own pockets. 

And on Ukraine, they actually breathed a bit about maybe there are some Ukrainians who don't like the US-installed neo-Nazi leadership and maybe Putin has a point about de-Nazification. Then it was right back to the standard line. 

It's been in the low 30's overnight (sounds balmy in Celsius but 32 is freezing in Fahrenheit). When I headed out for downtown it was 60 but I knew it would get a lot colder when the sun was going down and I was right. I dropped off 9 packages at the post office first, then went to the bank and deposited my check and everything added up right. 

Next I went over to Dai Thanh for odds and ends, including some "Canadian style" fresh noodles, like, huh? They're the same type of noodles as come in a fresh ramen kit but probably have some flavor to them or something that makes them like the noodles you'd find in a Chinese or Vietnamese place in ... Canada? 

By the time I went over to the Amazon place to pick up my coffee filters and a few bubble mailers, it really felt like February. The wind was cold and things even looked kind of grey and wintry. There were a fair number of crazed zombies staggering around and yelling and so on, so I really didn't feel like hanging around downtown. 

I rode for home, visiting the little free libraries and leaving off a new 2022 calendar and a bag of OTC medicines in each. I picked up a couple of books. I stopped at Nijiya and got a bunch of stuff plus a "school lunch" bento so when I got back here I ate that. The guys next door had a cookout with beer and nice cooking smells so that was a happy thing to have going on. 

Among other things tonight I looked up things on YouTube about the Yamaha 362H flute I'm pretty certain on buying, and rounded up 20 things to list on Ebay. Eventually my stomach started growling and I cooked up some ramen, and while doing so, I had a thought: How many Japanese companies are making trumpets vs. making flutes? For trumpets there's only one: Yamaha. Jupiter doesn't count because they're Korean. For flutes, I'm learning there are flute companies all over the place but Japan has tons. There's got to be at least 20 of them. 

This pretty much answers my question of which instrument would be better accepted back home in Hawaii which is a pretty heavily Japanese place. And Asian in general. It explains the very flute-heavy music inside 99 Ranch. Buddha played a flute, after all. So if I can attain a decent level of skill I might find that most people I'm around like it more when I play for tips on flute or shakuhachi than on trumpet...

More war

 298th day sober. I listed a dozen things on Ebay last night and then practiced a bit, but felt tired pretty quickly so I only practiced about half and hour. 

I woke up at what's been the usual time, a bit after 4. I'd gotten something in my throat last night and it was irritating enough that I tried to cough, half-awake, and then woke up and had a good cough. This gave me a headache that was still there when I got up. 

On the radio there's more about the Ukraine war. The Russians have taken over Chernobyl and Kiev Airport, except maybe the Ukrainians have taken the airport back etc. Putin's doing a ham-handed job of things. If the Ukraine gov't is a puppet neo-Nazi regime installed by the US and supported only by a right-wing minority, then Putin should be able to go in and selectively prosecute them with the majority's support. Instead he's bombed civilians. Way to win hearts and minds there, Vlad.

This headache is reason enough on its own to quit trumpet. Shakuhachi may take a lot of air but as far as pressure goes, there's no need for it. Even practicing the 2nd octave it's not related to taking any pressure or at least what feels like none to a trumpet player. It comes down to a changing of the mouth cavity and tongue level and that's no-effort compared to trumpet.  

I've been thinking I should hang onto my trumpet because it's a proven money-maker but I've been averse to the idea of "training" on it and on the shakuhachi because they're pretty much opposites. But on YouTube I saw a gal play a song on a shakuhachi and then on a conventional silver flute, granted with a "Shakulute" mouthpiece Monty Levinson makes and I thought she sounded a bit better on the shakuhachi, but both playings sounded good and it seems she's a flutist and that's given me an idea. 

I'd busked with a flute years ago and I even made some decent money with it. I'd dropped it for not being as "cool" as the trumpet or as loud, plus there's a reason a lot of prominent flutists play with the flute angled downward. Emptying the moisture bugged me, although it's nowhere near the disgusting show emptying moisture from a brass instrument is. 

It would have a lot of advantages as something to be "cross trained" on instead of the trumpet: 

(1) Pressure is not essential to playing like it is for trumpet. 

(2) It takes a lot of "puff" making it a good cross-training instrument for the shakuhachi

(3) It's keyed in C which makes playing a ton of stuff fairly easy

(4) It's a lot easier to play Western/popular music 

(5) It's super easy to carry around. The case is really small. 

(6) Back in Hawaii, where the trumpet would be a noisy imposition, the flute would probably not be.

(7) It's easy to keep clean - no hidden "tubes of crud" like with the trumpet

(8) I've proven I can get up to speed and making money with it in fairly short order

(9) My hands are not actually too small for it

(10) It's something of a "family tradition" as my older sister played flute in high school. 

On this last, I have fond memories of my older sister practicing and of the mysterious "Flitz" cloth used to keep the flute shiny. Later, years after she'd left the house one of my younger sisters tried playing it and I remember with less fondness, her playing "One Day Over The Rainbow" and coming to one note, which she'd get wrong, sense something was wrong, take a breath or two, and start again ... over and over and over. 

I finally said something like "Let me try it, I'll show you..." but when I tried I almost fell over fainting. 

I don't know what happened to the thing after that. Later, when I was back in Hawaii in 2003, I told my older sister she must have been pretty good if she was playing at Punahou football games. She replied, "Not good, loud!". 

I think I may be onto something though. Just like a trumpet player might also play cornet and flugelhorn, someone who plays shakuhachi might also know their way around a conventional flute. 

I packed up an oscilloscope that had to go out, and if it were not for my headache, I'd have run up to FedEx myself. But I gambled that Ken would come by tonight and he did so I was able to foist the task off on him. He wrote me out 2 weeks' worth of pay and we had tea and talked for a while. His blood sugar monitor went off and he asked for something sugary and I was able to serve him the bottle of Mexican 7-Up I had ready for such situations, and that got him from 75 or so (he starts getting grey spots, he says, at 70) up to 120. Plus it tastes good, so I'll have to get another bottle of it to keep here. 

He said his daughter "paid" about $360k for her house in North Vegas, and it went up $50k in the last 6 months. Of course real estate will go up forever! And Las Vegas will never-ever run out of water. In any case her mortgage payment is $1200 and she's already rented out a room so it's all good. Until the next RE crash or the water runs out. (I sure didn't say this last.) 

I'll be the first to admit she was smart to both stay with the airline she was super smart to stay with the airline she's been working for, starting out as baggage handler, for I dunno maybe a couple of decades now. And smart to find out a 401(k) can be used to pay the "down" on a house. I just dunno if North Vegas is a good place to buy one. 

So Ken and I loaded the 'scope into his truck and we'd talked everything out and it was a nice visit. Once he was gone I packed about 8 things to take to the downtown post office and now I can finally visit the bank again. 

Ken had brought by 8 of these things that are some kind of internet wireless access things and they turned out to be worth actual money so at least I got those listed, slightly undercutting the other guy selling them too. At least ours don't have handwritten labels.... 

I got involved researching flutes, and have decided the one I'm interested in is the Yamaha 362. It comes down to wanting something new, it has to have open finger holes because then you can do cool stuff like half-holing to bend notes, and it has to be a Yamaha. There are a *lot* of other flute makers out there and I did a ton of reading. There are other brands, some of which are cheaper and some of which people love and others don't, and it kept coming back to Yamaha as the best choice. 

A Yamaha 362H costs most of $2000. I'm going to sit on this idea for a while because of this. The argument against it is I won't play the thing enough to get my money's worth out of it. Like the clarinet I don't play. 

I was sure I'd play that clarinet too. I had my mind stuck on "Jazz" instruments and had the idea I'd put in some time on the clarinet and then, naturally, get a sax. I thought the clarinet would involve a lot less spit and grottiness than a trumpet. A few times playing it and then cleaning the mouthpiece enlightened me on that - nope. I don't know where that junk comes from, but between that nasty reed and my mouth there was created some kind of ... sludge ... that made a trumpet seem positively hygienic. 

From my flute playing days I remember exactly none of that. I remember mainly it taking a fair amount of air and that bugged me but if I'm going to learn shakuhachi there's no getting around that. I'm simply going to have to learn how to breathe, if it takes me years. 

Back in my short foray into flute playing, I'd been "puffy" even when I went to playing a cornet I had, so my breath on flute can't have been very good at all. But I do remember that I honestly did alright, money-wise. I'm kind of amazed, looking back now because it has to have been around 2012 or 2013. 

I wasn't thinking about retiring back in Hawaii then. I wasn't thinking about much other than that particular day. Somehow I gravitated towards trumpet as the loudest instrument that's easy to carry, and figured Rabbit Trumpet Guy must be making a fortune somehow and I wanted to do the same. It took me the longest time to learn how pathetic he was, and about how unconcerned with being musical he was. 

Of course they're all gone now; all the buskers. Red the flute player probably isn't alive, and Rabbit Trumpet Guy is just plain gone. There are no other buskers now. The whole scene is gone. And "busking season" will start on May 1. That's the season: May 1 to October 1. I'd like to get back out there because it beats moping around here.

Life During Wartime

 297th day sober. Last night I'd finished off packing the packages which was mostly just trimming the labels and putting them on. Then I practiced for over an hour, I know, because I did it while watching a documentary that was an hour and 20 minutes or so. I'm finding that playing high notes isn't any harder than playing low ones, it just takes a "knack" which I can do a few times then I have to rest a little then do it again... all in all much easier than playing high notes on trumpet. 

Sure enough, I was up until past 9 in the morning and I woke up at about 4:30 in the afternoon but was not too worried as I had all the packages ready to load and go so I just had coffee and some roasted peanuts and vitamins and was out the door at the usual time. 

I did the drop-offs OK and went around behind H Mart where I snagged a 4-pack of lime Perrier water and some cookie things ... with tuna floss....? And two different flavors the other flavor having tuna floss and ... peas...? Not sure whether to keep or donate these, but it's hard to beat the price. 

I didn't find much for packing materials but the medical place paid off as it so often does. I got a bunch of aspirin and hydrocortisone cream for me, Aleve, ibuprofin and lens wipes for Ken and his family, some burn dressings and ammonia ampules to sell on Ebay, and a bunch of generic company break room type medicines with names like "Pain-Away" to donate. 

There's been someone in their car running the engine nearby but they didn't bother me. Probably too busy trying to stay warm. So no hassles from bums. 

Ken called and said it'd been a long drive back from Las Vegas (they'd stopped for a night somewhere halfway through and there had been a windstorm) and he was tired so he was not coming over tonight. We talked a bit about general things, and he said his daughter's already renting out one of the rooms in her new house, for $600. I went on a bit about how people are always saying Hawaii is so expensive, but prices all over are nuts these days. (In all fairness, it's probably worth the price to live with as nice and mellow a landlord as her, and the guy's occupation of bouncer fits well with Vegas.) Then it was, "See you tomorrow night!" at least he let me know. 

The people at the bank aren't going to see me until Friday, and they're going to wonder where I've been. At least the math will be easy to figure out: Just subtract whatever I've spent and add $950. I had my burger at 5 Guys tonight but tomorrow I'll just cook a curry or something. 

The radio's on continuous coverage by the BBC on the Ukraine situation where apparently the war's started.

Rain ...

 296th day sober. I really did take yesterday off, only listing a dozen things on Ebay which didn't take all that long. 

It actually rained last night and on the radio they're talking about hail up in SF. So I'm kind of glad I've stayed in. Maybe I'm a bit spooked after that run-in with (probably) Crazy Chrissie. 

I got plenty of practice in last night, going through the exercises but doing more in the Kan octave which is starting to sound better and is also strengthening the lower, Otsu octave. It sounds funny talking about playing a musical instrument being good for health, but I believe it's positively healthy to play the shakuhachi. Probably the only thing healthier would be if I went out and ran every day and ... that's not going to happen. 

I stayed in, having woken up at 5PM again, and "staged" 25 things. This means, go into the warehouse and hunt them down, find packaging for them, weigh and measure dimensions if needed and print the label, and if the thing's going in a box, pack the box to the extent that it only needs the label put in. So all I have to do is trim and apply the labels on these things before taking them to the post office/FedEx. 

That plus "fixed" (actually took case off and replaced a missing foot) an oscilloscope and got 10 things ready to list but ... those will have to wait. I also cooked up a nice beef and leek miso ramen, which came out well. All while listening to them talking about hail and freeze warnings on the radio.

Presidents' Day

 295th day sober. After my big shopping trip last night I had a chashu roll, some mackerel, and some "arabiki" sausage to cut up/portion out and put into the freezer so I eventually got that done. 

Late at night I tried some ramen from a 2-serving ramen "kit" that's got powdered broth and the noodles are dry, coming in two bundles. It was surprisingly good, although there's nothing like fresh noodles. Maybe because it's the season for hot soup, but there's a real "run" on ramen and I was only able to find some by looking in the frozen section at Nijiya. At least that showed me good old S&S Saimin is still in business. I might have to get some of that next time for old times' sake.

I practiced close to 2 hours, doing those exercises but with a twist. After doing them in otsu, the first octave, I did a few repetitions in kan, the 2nd octave. I *am* improving. I can't think of any way to do so without just being very hard-headed and practicing every day (or night) for as long as it takes. When I first tried the trumpet I sounded awful. I had a super fuzzy "student" tone. It literally took me years to sound fairly decent, and a few more years to sound somewhat mature, which was only during this last summer when I was out busking and making all that money. 

Even with all the spending I've done, I've only spent about $120 this "pay period" between when I would have gotten a check last week and when I anticipate getting one this week.  Cooking at home makes a big difference.

What an exciting weekend

 294th day sober.  Last night after getting back from Tom's I got out a large/heavy test instrument we can get more for parted-out than whole, and took it apart. It was a long, greasy, dirty job. Somehow lots of black gunk kept building up on my hands and it took a long time to get most of what I wanted to get out of it, out. 

Then I had a late night snack of sardines and crackers, and settled down and put in something like an hour and a half of practice while watching a documentary. I am getting stronger and what's needed now is to simply practice consistently and for as long as I can.

I finally went to bed around 8 or 9 AM. I woke up around 4:30, and had some coffee and a couple aspirins and got going a little after 5. I'd planned to go to Whole Foods but decided I can get what I need at Nijiya, which is a lot closer. 

I made the mistake of going down Commercial Street, which has a certain number of zombies but tonight it was really hopping with them. I rode between one zombie with a German shepherd and another one staggering slowly away from the first, hoping to avoid all of it - I rode closer to the one staggering away, figuring it would not notice I was there until I was past and I was correct. There were zombies muttering and fighting and staggering around all over, and I was glad I could come back along 10th. 

I got to Nijiya and locked the bike at the bike rack instead of just parking it in front. This turned out to be a good move as there was a tall skinny zombie sitting at one of the outdoor tables, that turned out to be bothering people for a dollar. He was really jones'ing for that dollar. I took a dollar out of my wallet and walked over and gave him a dollar, which earned me as a strange sort of thanks, the intended insult that I'm a Communist. "Lenin and Marx, baby!" was my response, and "Only a Communist will give you a dollar". 

I'd originally thought to hand out a dollar in the hope he'd see me at my bike and because of the dollar, leave my bike alone. But I think he was just a dollar short for a pack of cigarettes or some rot-gut or something, because he went away. His begging style was obnoxious so he wasn't going to get that dollar for a while. I'm glad that for a mere dollar I got rid of him. 

I got a ton of stuff, spending almost $70. My figuring being that I'll be busy shipping things all week so I'll provision up for the week now and then not have to worry about it. The joke's on me, though, as it seems tomorrow's a Federal holiday so I'd have tomorrow to shop, too. 

I stopped at TAK Market for some near-beer and salted peanuts, which make a fine substitute for the raw walnuts I've been having with coffee for breakfast. The price for the peanuts has really gone up though, from $2-$3 a bag to $4 a bag. C'est la guerre... 

 My aunt continues to correspond with me. She said I've certainly done a good job of keeping up with my family. (Really? With with two siblings incommunicado because I have no addresses for them, and one incommunicado because I insulted her 15 years ago?) My reason for corresponding with her is not only that little snippets of information about that side of my family are occasionally, accidentally, dropped, but also Dear Old Auntie is sitting on bags and bags of money, why, it must take a firehose of money just to keep her huge place going, and when she dies those bags of money have to go somewhere. 

Here come the warm jets

 293rd day sober. I practiced before going to bed last night (more like this morning around 9AM) and went through most of the exercises while watching a bunch of stuff about Japan and noticed that it's really easy to play "Here Come The Warm Jets" by Brian Eno in-key on a 1.8 shakuhachi. There's only one note that needs to be half-holed. That's a neat thing to find out. 

I was very productive because I took all the boxes that had lab glassware in them and put them in the office here. Then I dug out the pieces I needed for a big combination order and packed that, and packed another order that's just a couple glass pieces. Then I organized everything by type, for instance, instead of a given graduated cylinder being possibly in any one of 6 boxes, now it will be found in the one box where all the graduated cylinders are. 

Then I listed 18 pieces of mostly oddball/custom lab glass I'd gotten in, and had logical places for everything to go. It even freed up enough room to get 4 rather bulky chart recorders out of the office. So I was pretty happy with myself. This week I've shipped 40 things and listed 58. 

I woke up a bit after 4. Not great news, as I wanted to be out the door at 5. I fixed up coffee and aspirin and was out the door at about 10 after with the combination order to take to FedEx. 

I ran up there no problem, and since I'd not gone there last night, I went to the dumpster that appears to serve a computer place. This is the enclosure I'm working on cleaning up, so I pulled lots of cut-up cardboard out of the dumpster, then dug out a fair number of neat little boxes for shipping things in, and other packing stuff like foam. I put some old wood in and put the cardboard back in, and got a big bag out of the bike bag and was putting my boxes in it when I heard a "Hey!" from a car nearby. 

Maybe I should not have answered but I thought it might be a security person or an employee. I said I was "Cleaning up" which in fact I actually was doing. This ... person ... ended up driving up in a generic gold-painted sedan with the usual bum accents like the odd dent, I believe one body panel a different color, and junk piled inside. I think this person, a fat middle-aged female, may have been the illustrious "Crazy Chrissie" who I had a run-in with about 3 years ago.

She went on about how I "Can't" get stuff out of there and I said I'd bought stuff from the guy - meaning the lab equipment guy - and she continued to say I "Can't" and got on her phone to call who-knows-who. While talking I kept busy packing the boxes up and Ziptie-ing the bag and putting it on the bike trailer. By this time Fatso was out of her car and on the phone and I think this helped me. 

I sped off and I imagine now she had to take some time wedging herself back into her long-suffering car to give chase. I figured, since she ranted that I can't leave, that if I at least got out onto public property there'd not be much she could do. I sped across Brokaw and crossed Junction and 'round the corner to Tom's place. I knew he was there with his homeless buddy, Roy. 

I almost felt like saying, "Hide me" but instead I gave a quick run-down of what had just happened, and he said he and "Roy" were just heading out to eat, and we put my bike and trailer into Tom's shop and I got in Tom's truck with him and all we went to a Mexican place on Oakland Road. I had garlic shrimp and it was really good. I was going to offer to at least help with the tip as I had $8 cash in my wallet and ... my wallet wasn't there. I'd left it back at the shop. The meal cost Tom $100 with the tip. 

Tom and I went back to his place and we hung out for a bit. Lots of discussion of bums and the crazy things they do. As we talked, there were bums occasionally wandering, or riding their (stolen) bikes or so on, one crazy gal even walking down the middle of the street, ranting about something. Tom had drank a can of light beer on the drive to the Mexican restaurant, and had a bottle of beer there. He now said he "was gonna turn in" and looked very tired all of a sudden. 

This gave me the impression it was late and it *felt* late, like maybe it was around 11PM. But when I got back here it was only a bit after 8. That's the old "wartime 3-hour shift" for you. 8PM feels like 11 and for instance, Nijiya Market, open now until 7PM, is the equivalent to being open until 10PM in the before times. 

I wonder if Tom had had a sneaky nip when he went out to the porta-john to take a pee? Or if he suddenly looked tired because he was going into withdrawal? In any case it wasn't late, and I doubt Tom was going to turn in before he drank himself blotto on E&J brandy. It's Saturday night, after all. 

I got back here and when I'd left I'd noticed a child's pull wagon and a bunch of stuff left in the parking lot and it was still there, so after putting the bike and trailer away I went back out and piled the junk into the wagon. As I did so, a minivan pulled up and a female voice asked if I had "a spare cigarette".  I said I was sorry, I don't smoke. It really *is* a Bum-O-Rama out there on a Saturday night. I took the wagon full of stuff out to where lots of people would see it driving by on Bayshore and hopefully pick it up. 

Oh, and interestingly, my aunt actually wrote back to me after the last long email I'd sent her, the kind after which I usually don't get an answer. She wanted to know if I am "close" with any siblings. So I gave her a full run-down, there being four of them so it takes a bit of writing. Also I have no idea if she's in communication with any of them herself. 

But actually all of this has an additional stage. After the long screed she'd written back saying something like "I'm sure you'll have it all worked out!" and a damn picture of a unicorn. I swear to fucking God, a God-damned cartoon of a smiling unicorn. So I'd shot back something like, "Well, just imagine what you yourself would do at my age and in my situation, but without bags and bags of money". Frankly I really didn't expect an answer after that, but now she wants to know about my relations with my siblings. For what mysterious reason, I may never know.

Quick! To the cathouse!

 292nd day sober. I woke up around 4 so I decided I'm not going to the post office tonight. I got some practice in last night but ... not enough. But at least I'm being consistent. 

I had a big combination order to pack, among the things some lab glassware. The lab glass was so disorganized, I took all the boxes down and put them in the office and went through them, and there were something like 6 places a given graduated cylinder might be. So I re-organized everything into 4 large boxes and a few small ones. And got the combination order packed to take to FedEx tomorrow. 

There's more talk about Ukraine on the radio, and at one point it was actually kind of funny. When Ukraine was part of the USSR, they had plenty of bomb shelters. But now that Ukraine has decided to live under glorious capitalism, they still have the bomb shelters but the problem, as described by one Ukranian, is that they've been "privatized" so they're now almost all privately owned and used for things like take-out kitchens and even brothels. 

You can't even make this stuff up. I certainly agree with Putin that the collapse of the USSR is the greatest misfortune of the 20th century. Even Ken says that he misses the USSR because once it fell, life got a lot worse here in the US. There's no longer the threat of a better system.

Getting down to brass tacks.

 291st day sober. I got a bit of practice in last night, and am making progress. It's such a different method of breathing from trumpet.... I also listened to Miles Davis' "Sketches Of Spain" and .... I guess it was OK. I feel any competent classical player could play it, but would he *think* to play it. I need to listen to "Birth Of The Cool" next. 

If I write an email of any actual length to my aunt, she never replies. I have to assume she reads the things, but she only actually responds to short ones. I'd sent her a short one upon hearing Pasadena got some snow, and she replied. So I've just sent her a long one. I talked about my plan to get out of here in 2024, that I'll die in the street so at least I want to die in the street where I grew up and where all my memories are. 

She's only sitting in her huge house, on bags and bags of money, more than she'll ever be able to spend, and yet as I've said to Ken, she's rather cut her hand off than give me a sandwich if I were starving. And she feels perfectly right in being this way because this is how all the rich and most of everyone else are indoctrinated to believe in the US. 

I've been thinking about how people here say China's "Social Credit" system is so cruel, and yet we have our own "credit rating" system that's based on one's ability to take on debt. At least China's is based on how good a citizen you are. 

Also, I read last night the opinion by someone on Reddit that China is the only country that evolved an advanced civilization on their own, while the "West" simply stole, through imperialism, their civilization from others who'd actually developed it. It makes sense too, with the West's use of Arabic numerals, borrowing tons of things from Asia from the button to toilet paper, and even in the founding of the US, borrowing some ideas from the First Nations people here. It's all a borrowed hodgepodge lived by people who go through the motions without understanding it at heart. 

So you have American "Christianity" which isn't anything like Christianity as practiced in the rest of the world and is nothing like anything Jesus, assuming he was a real person, taught. It's really just a cover story that excuses one being as much a barbarian as one feels like. So you can go out and rob a bank, kill a bunch of people, run over an old lady pushing a baby carriage in your getaway car, and then as the cops are closing in, drop to your knees and pray to Jesus and bingo! You're forgiven! In the US we have people who have committed horrible crimes and who feel *they* were the ones wronged, to have been put in jail, etc. It's permission to be a psychopath. 

I pointed out to my aunt that when I came to the mainland in the mid-80s  I thought I'd get to associate with the relatives  I have here, but the way of life here is that everyone stays as far apart as possible. The goal here seems to be to make as much money as one can, and then in the end it's just the individual and whatever bag of money they've been able to build up. In contrast, in Hawaii, people's idea of a good time is to get as many friends and family together as they can and have a big cookout in the park. People are valued over money.

One of the worst insults/fightin' words in Hawaii - "Wut, IoweYou Money??" 

I took off with some small packages and after dropping those off at the post office did some shopping at 99 Ranch and snacked on a flat cake filled with lotus seed paste and a can of black coffee. On the way back I stopped by Tom's and we hung out for a while. He went up on the roof with his homeless pothead helper and fixed the leak or at least most of it, and sold a baseball scoreboard he had around the place for $50 to a guy. So he's making progress on the place. He's got a whole advance-on-pay schedule written out on two whiteboards and we had fun drawing pot leaves on the blank spaces. "Here..." Tom said, "Pot ... pot ... pot ...."

We talked about everything under the sun as usual, with my main theme being that I've realized I've only got 2 years to go before moving back to Hawaii so I need to get to work on getting my papers in order and all that. I want to hold out until I'm 62 and thus eligible for Social Security but honestly, I told him, if I thought I could make a go of things alright sooner, I'd be up for leaving sooner. That would make it a year.

We started to make plans to go to a local shabu-shabu place and I said I'd check their hours, but there's about to be a big surge in the corona virus because the mask mandates are going to be lifted, so I emailed Tom to say I want to hold off for a bit more. We're testing to see if email works between us, a whole 3/4 of a mile apart.

Another day, another doom

 290th day sober. I slept in until 3:30 or so which is no wonder. I packed a bunch of large things last night, the main one being a big heavy test instrument I had to dig in pretty far to even get out. 

Then I listed 15 Ebay things, three of them being about $100 worth, out of the three parts, I'd taken off a furnace being thrown out up the street. Parts of those are really easy to take off, since only a screwdriver is required. 

I got some practice in, and feel I am already improving, but this is many years' journey not a few days' or even weeks' or months'. A plus is, even if I eventually go back to trumpet, the shakuhachi is great breath training. This is why even if I stop being "serious" about it, I'll still get an "enhanced" Shakuhachi Yuu from Monty Levinson and as he touts, have the best of both worlds - a nearly indestructable instrument, that's also on a par with a decent bamboo one. 

I've also gotten back to keeping up with Guy McPherson on YouTube. The guy's an actual scientist, and his lectures are good for listening to while I do Ebay listings. Somewhere along there, in the comments or somewhere, someone commented that the present situation is like people fighting for control of the wheel of a bus that's already gone off a cliff. That's cheerful! 

I packed "just one more thing" OK, two, and got out of here the usual time. Dropped things off and after checking out "Noodle Talk" which looks nice but nicer than I needed right then, went to 5 Guys and got a burger. 

I picked up the usual - packing stuff  - on the way home  and as I rode into the complex there were some guys working on a car, around the corner of the building so probably not the high-priced hot rod place or the house cleaning place next to me because they work on their cars .. next to me. 

I got the bike and stuff stashed away and went back over and gave them my cheapo flashlight which I'm bound to lose some time anyway, because working on a car at night always requires one. Daytime too. Then I went back in and gathered up some things that might be handy (some plastic trays for parts, shop towels to clean up with) or welcome (a can of chunk pineapple I'd planned to donate anyway with a set of plastic utensils) and took that stuff over there too. The guy whose car it was, is a delivery driver and his rear brakes had started acting up. It was his friend working on it for him. 

I got back in here, put things away, put stuff I'd listed on Ebay away, got out a few things that had sold and packed them to take with me tomorrow to the downtown post office, and such things. I had everything all neat and orderly, and waited for Ken, but he didn't show up at the usual time. 

I called him and "I'm in Vegas right now!" He's helping his daughter with the house she just bought in N. Vegas. His daughter, instead of moi, was smart. She avoided college, perhaps sensing what a scam it is where I didn't. She went to work for an airline, as I understand it starting out as a baggage handler, about the worst job they offer, and working up to stewardess. She stayed with that one company for years, hanging on with a death grip - as a person is supposed to in a normal, non-tech, field. She hung onto her 401k, which as it turns out can be used to make the downpayment on a house. 

The wisdom of buying in North Vegas is the only questionable part. Why not buy somewhere in Sacramento, where at least you're on a great river delta? People have always survived best on river deltas. North Vegas has quite the reputation for being a hellhole, but it sounds like she's in a not-hellhole-yet part of it, in a gated community favored by old folks. 

That might get interesting. Not only with the water drying up, but old people tend to have useless children and grand-children who move in, so now you end up with a normal-looking neighborhood where everyone's on crack. I've seen it. 

There are a lot of things I'd do before I'd buy a house in North Vegas, but it's all theoretical in my case. It all comes down to social class and while Ken and his wife have managed to stay middle-class, so that their kids have middle-class genes and will have middle-class life outcomes, my parents became poor and those wonderful middle-class genes became working-class, proletarian genes and this happened after we were actually born. Since I haven't "married well" as two of my sisters back in Hawaii have done, and I didn't get fixed up with a military contractor job after a stint in the Navy (and had the wisdom to hang onto that job until his knuckles were white) like my older brother, I am excluded from the middle-class. 

So Ken's over there for the next week or so helping her "set up" this house, and being that they're middle class and therefore not allowed to fail unless they do, I'm sure they'll be alright unless they're eventually not. It won't be my problem in two more years. 

"But Alex, what sense does it make, in the face of global warming, to move to Hawaii which is much closer to the equator?" If the past few years have shown me anything, it's that wild gyrations in temperature are happening closer to the poles, and not around the middle of this beautiful, blue, and doomed planet. This is completely contrary to all doomer common sense, which says to flee the heat, go North (or South if you're in the Southern hemisphere I guess). 

No One Expected(tm) to see 100+ degree days in the Pacific Northwest, boiling the sea creatures. So far it's been Faster Than Expected(tm) and a "winter" like this one, with a week of rain and then nothing, was not anything anyone expected this soon. But being closer to the equator, I've not had to deal with catastrophic heat waves, floods taking out major highways, hurricanes, vast fires etc., the "new normal" for those in the Northwest and Northeast. And meanwhile back in Hawaii, a YouTuber I follow is taking his kids out fishing and hiking on beautiful trails, and it's nice and boring. 

I even had a theory about "On The Beach" which is a book and two movies, all of them excellent. The plot has nuclear fallout banding the Earth, and the only momentarily safe place being the Southern tip of the planet. The fallout is moving South, and starting to affect Australia. A lone US nuclear sub comes to visit, its captain putting himself in service of what's left of the last of the Australian Navy and in the end they all die. 

My theory was that it could equally be about global warming, the presently warmest middle of the planet warming the most first and becoming uninhabitable, and the heat gradually spreading to the poles. In the end they're all cooked. 

But what I'm seeing, in real life, is the equatorial region being the most stable and perhaps the most livable. That it may be the last does not mean it will be for long, because once the polar ice is gone it's game over. The "final heat" could come in a matter of months. Carbon-14 data already tells us that the recent great increase of methane in the atmosphere is not coming from fossil-fuel sources but from the present-day biosphere so we may have a rollicking positive feedback loop going already.

It's the methane

 289th day sober. After pre-staging a lot of packages I practiced, and finally went to bed. 

I woke up around 3:30. 

This article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00312-2

CO2 level is relatively linear and stable, and is the one cited, well, everywhere because while being over 415ppm is scary, it's not nearly as scary as the methane situation right now.

Practice, practice.

 288th day sober. I woke up around 2:30, and after coffee etc. had time to pack about 7 things and took those to the post office. 

I was going to go to H Mart but opted to go to Lowe's instead. Mainly because they're my one source for gallon bottles of Windex. I got one of those and some paper towels. Since it was a cold and blustery night and presumably the zombies would be taking it easy tonight after drinking and drugging the night away after the big football game yesterday. And indeed I only had to avoid a couple of zombies, a fat one wandering around by the railroad tracks and a skinny one on the road leading to Lowe's so that's really minor for this area. 

I also stopped by Tom's and the lights were all on but I could not get his attention - maybe he'd been drinking himself blotto after the football game too. It looks like he's been working on the place but it doesn't look any less messy, in fact more. Maybe he'll end up being like the "crazy neighbor" a few instances of which are on YouTube, the kind who's always "improving" their place yet it looks progressively worse. 

I'd practiced last night and gone through all the exercises on that page in the Koga book, and that's the kind of thing I need to do daily. I can also do the exercises an octave up, not perfectly but I *can* do it. As I keep reminding myself, if I put the same work into the shakuhachi as I have into the trumpet, I should really get somewhere.

The practice habit

 287th day sober. I listed 10 things last night and felt like going right to bed, but it felt weird to go to bed without practicing, so I worked on the exercises on page 23 in the Koga book and got 2/3rds of the way through them, playing each one several times. 

I noticed that if I put my lips closer to the edge of the mouthpiece, it's a bit more efficient and at times I got a glimpse of a nice tone. 

I'm going to admit something about this Shakuhachi Yuu Monty Levinson sent me: I think he "tuned" the holes on it a bit. I say this because the Shakuhachi Yuu I had before just had the holes drilled straight in. These appear to have been "tuned", perhaps hurriedly, as it's pretty obvious. 

I'm sure he did me a favor, but I want to go in with some sandpaper or something and clean them up a little, and also polish the bore a bit. And I want to work on making the outside look more like bamboo to make it better for busking. It'll be my "experimental" shakuhachi so when I'm ready to buy the "enhanced" one from Monty, I'll know how to make that one look better and also what various "tweaks" like polishing the bore, perhaps painting it with red paint, do. 

I also did a lot of reading on the shakuhachi and a lot of looking around in Monty's daunting web page. Yes, he gets thousands for his pro-level flutes, but they appear to be about the best to be had. For one thing, he's using 50-year-old bamboo. 

But the main thing is practice and all I can do. There's nothing more powerful than regular practice. 

I actually got up at a reasonable time and managed to get myself together early enough to go on my Big Shopping Trip. I brought some boxes of tea and those went to the little free libraries, in exchange getting a copy of "The Worse-Case Scenario Survival Handbook" which I've been curious about. 

The next stop was the Amazon place, where I dropped off the "Kukyo" shakuhachi, which I'd packaged up neatly in a box with their label etc. The guy said I could just put it in the chute, which I did. 

Now it was time for the long haul. Santa Clara to this little road by the CVS to Park to Shasta to Parkmoor, 2 blocks North then across the bridge to Moorpark, and a long straight ride to the Mitsuwa Marketplace. I noticed that although we're not even halfway through February, mustard and radishes are blooming and the foxtails are big and glossy, just ready to dry out and spread out. It's really been warm.  

I locked up the bike and went in and picked out something fizzy and cold to drink, that ending up being a Suntory "All Free" which I've mentioned tastes like beer might be imagined to taste by someone who's never had beer. But it was cold and fizzy. And a nice chirashi bowl. I saw outside to eat and drink, and it was indeed good. 

Then I went into Kinokuniya to check out their fountain pens. Back here, writing this, and having checked some prices, I can say they're taking the full list price and adding maybe 15% to that and those are their prices. I really didn't want to spend more than $10 or $12, and that probably on a Pilot Metropolitan, a highly recommended fountain pen that they only had fancier models of and which were in the $30 range. 

I ended up picking out a little package of two "Zig Cartoonist" dip pen nibs and what I thought was a cheap wooden handle, but the handle turned out to be $10 on its own. I wanted to spend $10 total. I found a cheap plastic handle over where they had their inks, and got that instead. At least I know my way around a dip pen. And I *did* get to try a demonstrator Lamy Safari, a recommended beginner pen in the $30-$40 range and was not impressed. 

It was a revelation to see that the great Osamu Tezuka drew his cartoons with a pen. I thought all those guys used brushes. But there he was, in this documentary I watched, dashing out panels using a dip pen. That's what got me going on this curiosity about metal-nib pens. Of course I've used a dip pen as a kid so I'm comfortable with them. 

A problem I'm having is, if I send anything like a letter to my older sister, it gets returned without being opened and read. So earlier today I thought of a genius idea: I could send postcards. Those don't have to be opened, and if the writing is nice and clear, she won't be able to help herself reading them. Then I thought, do I want to send postcards with views of San Jose? We *do* have some nice churches and stuff, but what would be really great would be to do my own artwork on the things. Pen with ink washes would be a good technique for this. To me it makes no sense to not be in communication with each other, and if a postcard once a week is what it will take then so be it.

Besides the shakuhachi and the music business, I want to do art stuff also. In two more years, I'll be retired. I'll have done my bit. I've done all the things one is supposed to do - gone to college so I fell for that scam, went to work for a tech company so I fell for that scam also, and I even fell for the scam of training for the Olympics and got fairly close. On this last I wish I'd fought harder politically. I'd seen better competitors than myself get fucked out of going to the Olympics, but my case may have gone differently. But the point is, I've done all the things and now I don't have to do any more. I don't have to fight tooth and nail with anyone for a job, and I don't have to worry about being in "the right field, that makes good money" - wow has that turned out to be a lie. 

I can completely goof off and do the two things it was thoroughly drilled into me could never make one a living, art and music. I won't have to make a living. Between Social Security and what I know about scrounging, hustling and grifting, I'll be fine. 

This is what the old samurai used to do. They'd retire to do art, music, calligraphy, etc. 

One fine little grift I have in mind is publishing books on Amazon. A lot of the books I've been buying on Amazon have been printed "on demand" and the physical quality of them has been really good. I believe it entails not just writing the thing and making whatever illustrations are going to go into it, but using some kind of publishing software to put the whole thing together, and paying $100 or so for an ISBN number so it's a "real" book. 

But back to my shopping trip ... I looked at the books on learning Japanese and they've got a lot of them. It looks like besides learning the language itself, it comes down to learning the hiragana and katakana characters, and of course kanji but I've seen in manga even in the 70s, the kanji having little hiragana/katakana characters next to them saying what they mean. The Genki book looks good, but there are a lot of other neat ones too, like workbooks. 

I went into the main market and did my thorough shopping as I'd planned. I found an interesting assortment of things to buy, coffee filters not among them. I asked the friendly guy at the register and he said to try Daiso, so after putting things in the bike bags I went there. They didn't have them either, but I found a few other things. 

By now it was dark. I rode home the way I came, until I got to Sam Tomas and decided I'd turn left on there and go up to Santa Clara/El Camino Real, because it can't be that far. It *was* that far. I'd forgotten that El Camino Real takes a real turn diverging from straight-across streets like Stevens Creek and Moorpark, and I had to ride really far to get to it, then had a lot longer ride on it than I anticipated. It was nice though, the night just slightly cool, no wind, very little traffic, and it felt almost nostalgic. 

Will everything not seem nostalgic soon? It's very few years ago that winter meant wearing gloves and a knit cap and a jacket when out riding, especially at night. And the winters used to be so much wetter. I remember one, in '05 or so, when there was maybe one day a week it *didn't* rain. We had maybe one rainy week this winter, and we didn't have summer storms at all last summer. We've blown right past the 415ppm level of CO2 that used to be something people worried about. 

I got back to Whole Foods and used the loo and bought a can of strong coffee and a near-beer and hung out with the petition gathering guy for a while. In some ways he's cool and has done some interesting things like serve in Africa with the Peace Corps but he also believes in all kinds of kooky theories. He's decided I'm a good enough egg to trust me to watch his stand while he went to his car to get something, and we managed to have a good time, talking. 

Today's freebies: I got back here and over on the other side of the complex, found a Sony speaker iPad playing thing that runs on rechargeable batteries and works just fine. It's got an FM radio function and also Bluetooth as well as working with the older iPads with the wide connector. Kinda neat and it's hard to beat the price. And the "Worst-Case Scenario" book.

Another sleep filled Saturday.

 286th day sober. I did some shakuhachi practice last night, just exercises in the Koga book, and decided I was really tired so I went to sleep. 

I woke up too late to take off for this big epic shopping trip to Mitsuwa Marketplace I've been planning for weeks now.  

I've really been planning to shop the hell out of that place, too. I've got it all planned: I'd get a nice bento first and eat that, although I could break with my personal custom and get a bowl of ramen, if the lines aren't too bad. Then I'd go to Kinokuniya and look at their fountain pens. I'm pretty sure I want a Pilot Metropolitan which is considered "the" beginner pen but I want to try some others before making a final decision. 

I also want to look at their books for learning Japanese. There's the Genki ("Healthy") series but there are others too. Long ago I'd started a $35 or so Japanese class at the Akiyama Center in Jtown, but it was more than I wanted to take on so I dropped it. At least I'm in a good area for such things, and I can even take a serious class that's held in one of the temple buildings as long as I don't mind paying about $800 for it. There are classes in kanji and shodo (brush lettering) too. But I want to ease into it. 

After all that, I plan to shop in the market proper, looking for everything from coffee filters to an ice cube tray to sugarless gum, plus probably some regular market stuff. 

And the winner is ...

 285th day sober. Last night along with listing Ebay stuff I did a lot of A/B testing between the Shakuhachi Yuu and the Kukyo and ... the Yuu wins. I'm going to return the Kukyo because hey, it's $250 or so I'll get back and can apply toward an "enhanced" Yuu. 

I sent Monty Levinson an email saying I got the Yuu OK and am "tooting away" and he sent me back an email with a bunch of links including how to get a free lesson from a couple of different teachers, and I replied that I'm able to get a note OK, and can play Otsu (the first octave) and Kan (the 2nd) but probably not Dai Kan (the third) yet. He sent me back a hint to try later when I'm a bit further on, so I'm keeping that email. 

Monty's web page is kind of hard to decipher and a bit intimidating, so I notice the Shakuhachi Yuu web site, which used to only sell a few things, now has a number of books for sale that they didn't before so I might get a book next. 

I didn't sleep well, maybe too much coffee, and got up at 3, packed things and got out of here at the usual time. I got my Koga book spiral-bound at the FedEx place and did some shopping at H mart, and got a bunch of bubble sleeves and I mean a LOT like two large bags full (good thing I carry large bags on my bike) behind the lab equipment place and was so glad to get those I picked up a bunch of cardboard and junk in the trash enclosure there and put it into the dumpster since I'd made so much room. Now that I know it's unlocked on Friday evenings, I can get packing stuff then and neaten it up a little more. 

Dinner or early dinner or something, was about half a pound of white tuna sashimi and some arare. Healthy? I dunno.

Gnats!

 284th day sober. I actually woke up in plenty of time to have my 2 oz. of walnuts and vitamins and chicory coffee, and get going a bit before 4. 

Traffic is nuts. But it's almost like the old days when I could cut through the lanes of congealed traffic with little danger because no one was moving very fast at all. 

First stops were the little free libraries where I dropped off boxes of "Red Label" black tea. I didn't find any books worth taking this time. 

Next was the downtown post office to drop off a bunch of small packages. Then the bank, where they were solving some problem for a guy. Poor them - someone came in to drop off food and it had to sit there getting cold while they took care of the guy.  I deposited my check and everything added up right and I wished everyone a good weekend. 

Next was Whole Foods just to pick up olives and cheese and walnuts and such things. I didn't feel like eating there this week. 

I went over to the Amazon hub for bubble mailers and the "Kukyo" shakuhachi I'd ordered. This is made by the same guy as the "Jim Johnson" shakuhachis, and the "Kukyo" just means a slightly different style of horn insert in the mouthpiece. This one feels a bit heavier than the "Jim Johnson" one I'd had, and has a couple of other differences: The bore has a slight curve, of course, but the way they made it, if the holes are facing exactly upward, the bell curves a bit to the side. Also, the wire bindings, instead of being black, are a reddish-brown color and actually seem to change color with the angle of the light shining on it. 

I rode for home, slowly, as the shakuhachi box is long and a bit tricky to carry. I stopped at Nijiya and the guy with blonde-ish hair (it's darkened) was out front and said Hi. Now, it's been really weirdly warm, and there have been a ton of these little gnats in the air. I'd had little gnats landing on me all through my trip. 

So he said something about the gnats, several of which were on my bright yellow jacket, and I thought at first said there were gnats in my hair. Not likely, as I'd have felt them and because my hair's super short right now, having just done a haircut. Then it became clear the gnats were in the *air* and I looked up and there was a swarm of them - and more landing on my jacket. Time to get inside! 

I probably only took a dozen or so inside with me, and probably only shed half of them in there. I got an assortment of things including some fried fish and a nice, expensive but tasty chashu roll. I paid their $5 price for a sleeve of garlic because my garlic here at the shop had gone bad, and all sorts of things. 

I got back in here and had the fried fish right away, and put things away etc. 

Now I have the Kukyo shakuhachi and the shakuhachi Yuu and can can really A/B test them. They seem to be pretty even.

Bye-bye 'scope

 283rd day sober. I slept in until 4 again. I'd given myself a haircut, as well as listing 20 Ebay things, last night so I probably didn't get to bed until close to 9. 

I woke up at 2:30 because a guy came over for an oscilloscope he'd bought. Of course he wanted to stay around and probably talk for hours but I cut that off right away. Handed him the scope, OK all's fine, thanks, bye and shut the door lol. 

Then I went back to bed until 4. 

I packed a couple of FedEx things and took my shakuhachi book to get it spiral bound but the guy who normally does that at FedEx wasn't there so I'll have to get it done another time. There's always that one guy/gal who is best at craft work like that, and I can wait. 

I got the kal bi plate from the Hawaiian place and checked a couple of places for packing stuff (not much) and got back here and ate. Then I vacuumed the office and cleaned the bathroom and got ready for Ken to come by and sure enough, I heard some noise outside and there he was - his noisy truck is in the shop so he was driving his wife's faithful Corolla. 

He brought the package with the Shakuhachi Yuu in it, and we got The Scope That's Going To Australia finally labeled and he got that into the car, and it was tea and talk for a while. Rockets, various ores of uranium, the possibility of monoatomic oxygen as a fuel source, really no subject was safe. It was a good old time, only interrupted by Ken's blood sugar sensor beeping. I forgot to show him the bottle of Mexican 7-Up I got in case he gets low sugar. 

Ken and I are sure pals though. He told me about a guy who came to the old shop years ago who'd been on a Russian ice breaker that had been a US ice breaker, and had been used to rescue a whale long ago, and how they'd talked at the shop there and then Ken had seen, not long after, the documentary about rescuing the whale. He said he wasn't sure if I was there at the shop at the time and I said I wasn't sure if I was either, as I was quite a bit of a souse back then and may have been 3 sheets to the wind and seemed fairly normal but too drunk to remember. 

Then we got into talking about Autenite, an ore of uranium, and suchlike things. And pretty soon it was time for him to go. 

After he went I got the Yuu unpacked and put it together and blew a little Ro and then put it on the music stand. How nice to get something from Monty Levinson! He's such a nice guy, and the package included a printed out sheet advertising a book by him that I think I might just have to get, it's only $25. In another week or two, though, as I've been spending a lot.  I sure didn't save half of this last paycheck. 

RIP Cafe Stritch

 282nd day sober. I woke up at 4. 

I had 20 things all photo'd and ready to list when I had to do a bunch of software updates and then the internet itself slowed down so much I decided to call it a night. 

I know the internet won't be around forever, and I know it's much more likely to degrade and keep degrading until no one wants to bother with it any more, rather than suddenly like in a Carrington event. So it's not like this slowing down is a surprise. 

According to the USPS, my Shakuhachi Yuu is coming to Ken's house today, which means he'll bring it tomorrow. According to Amazon, my Jim Johnson shakuhachi has been found and will get to the Amazon hub place tonight. Which means I can pick it up on Thursday. 

It was nice of Monty Levinson to offer to do the modifications to my Yuu that affect sound for a couple hundred bucks more, but I want a bone-stock one and then once I get somewhere, *then* get an "enhanced" one. Then I can test them against each other, as well as testing the Jim Johnson one against the two. 

If it sounds like I'm collecting shakuhachi, I guess I am. But so far it's a lot cheaper than collecting trumpets.  And a lot easier to transport back to Hawaii. 

On Reddit/r/sanjose I just read that Cafe Stritch is being bought by their bartender and is going to come back again as a jazz bar, yeah, right. Cafe Stritch was Cafe Eulipia for years but hardly anyone knew about them, and I and a lot of other people noticed it when it became Cafe Stritch. They even used to hang one of Roland Rasaan Kirk's stritches up on the wall when it was open, until I guess they realized how much the thing is worth. 

It was a great place. "The Burger" was outstanding, they had lots of good beers and drinks, if you didn't want much you could get a cup'O'fries and there was always plenty of mayonnaise to dip them in. They had established acts, an open mic night, visiting artists, etc. When the music got swinging, 20-somethings would start dancing in front of the stage, I think old 1940s dances they learned somewhere. And they absolutely loved it when a trumpet player showed up. There was an abundance of saxes. 

It was a really neat place to get into a conversation at the outdoor tables, and I even saw a chess player with one of those roll-up boards and non-toy pieces show up. I don't know why but chess is pretty much forbidden just about everywhere in this puritanical country. Sure there are chess clubs but they are few and very far between. Out in flyover country, bringing out a chess set is a sure way to get banned for life from a coffee shop. So is bringing a guitar. People used to play chess under the trees in Waikiki but that's long gone too. So sighting an actual chess player really means you're in an oasis. 

It's all gone now. Since restaurants and clubs are based on wringing out all the money possible, however possible, the replacement place will end up with loud canned music, strong drinks, and bartenders who will continue to serve patrons until they're utterly shitfaced. All they'll have to do is stay open past 10 in the evening and they'll be a success because it will be there or Denny's. 

I got stuff finished off that I'd "pre-packed" last night and rode out to do my drop-offs. It was warm, 65 or 67 degrees which was weird. Traffic's a lot heavier too. Everything went without a hitch, though. 

Freebies: A box of 12 boxes of 100 bags each of black tea, "Red Label" brand to donate at the little free libraries.

up in the afternoon

 281st day sober. Up in the afternoon. I got a bunch of small things packed and to the post office and one small box to FedEx. 

At the post office, a guy I'd seen when out busking came by and said Hi. He's a black guy who rides a big Harley, and he got a real kick out of some of my music. It was nice to see him. He's the only person who's recognized me from my couple months of busking other than some of the Whole Foods employees saying recently that they're wondering when I'll be back out there. 

I told the guy how my tips had gone way down when it got cold, and I figured it meant, just like when I lived in a rural area, that my real work year would be from April 1 to November 1. Except in this case it seems like it will end October 1. 

I didn't mention that I plan to give busking with the shakuhachi a go. 

Bachi-Do

 280th day sober. I woke up kind of in time to hop on the bike and go over to the Mitsuwa Marketplace and do the things I'd planned to do. I was going to really thoroughly shop the market and especially look at what they have for coffee filters, probably pick up some neat stuff like dried conger eel, and of course first thing off, have a bento. 

Then with the shopping done and things stashed away in the bike bags, I'd go to Kinokuniya and look at their fountain pens. I've decided I want to try using a fountain pen, and there's a "beginner" pen, the Pilot Metropolitan, that's recommended for, well, beginners and only about $10. I figured I'd doodle with a few and see which has a nice feel. Since finding out that traditionally, manga artists used dip or fountain pens, I've been interested. But at the rate things are going, I might as well get the pen from Amazon and the coffee filters also.  

But I could not get enthusiastic enough and went back to bed and slept until 5. Well, that was a productive use of the day. I should mention that after listing Ebay stuff I stayed up all night taking things apart. Mainly some stupid fluidics stuff, three charge amplifiers, and a big "treasure box" microwave device, with tons of goodies in it. 

So here I was up at 5 in the afternoon. I got an envelope and put in the little monthly tickets for January and February, and the $60 pledge for those two months. Times have got to be harder than usual for the temple, with no in-person services. It's just felt like I was being a fair-weather friend. And the more people they can say they have as members, the more matching funds they get so just being a member helps them. 

After that I went to Nijiya and they had one of my favorite things, chirashi bowl. So I got one of those, one of those weird Japanese near-beers (it tastes not like beer but like the idea of beer by someone who's never had beer) to wash it down with, and a couple of grocery things. 

I went over to the Issei building to eat, and it was nice since it wasn't that cold. My mind wandered to when things were normal and there were street festivals, and the shamisen people used to set up to let people try it. When I was done eating, I peeked in the window at the notice board to see if there was anything new, and found out the name, bachido, of the shamisen group. 

My next stop was to the Amazon place to pick up the Koga shakuhachi book I'd ordered, plus a few bubble mailers. 

Then I just rode around. I rode up 2nd street and Dai Thanh was still open so I went in and got coffee and peanuts and such things, then I rode up to Williams street which is sort of the "student ghetto" and saw some interesting things. One was a store called "CONVENIENCE STORE" that's in this weirdly-shaped building.  I really need to either upgrade my phone to one with a decent camera, or get a small camera I can devote to taking pictures of these weird houses and buildings I find. I get a real kick out of them. 

I rode around a bit and doubled back and rode up 1st. Cafe Stritch is so dead it's about fossilized. I stopped by the opera house to drink a can of Doutor coffee I'd bought, and had to move up the sidewalk when a group of people stopped to talk near me because they were wearing perfume and it made my coffee taste like perfume. There was a gal with a notebook or sketch pad, I could not tell, and her phone, working on something. 

It was pretty sad, really, riding around town constantly seeing where there used to be this and used to be that. I rode on home. I looked up bachido and it's a big, like worldwide, shamisen online group that holds lessons and camps and things, that was started by a guy from Santa Cruz who started playing shamisen at something like age 14. So I'm in a hot spot for shamisen playing, it seems. 

I do not want to play the shamisen, for one thing, how would I carry one on my bike? Not easily. But the shamisen, koto, and shakuhachi are often played together. So if there are shamisen players around, they'd probably appreciate a shakuhachi player being around too. 

By the way, Amazon says my shakuhachi might arrive by Thursday now.  Late tonight, past midnight actually, I got an email from Money Levinson, detailing what he does when he makes an "enhanced" Shakuhachi Yuu. It's a fair amount of work and I'm convinced well worth the money but I replied that I want to stick with the standard Yuu until I'm sure I'll get somewhere, then I'll get the Enhanced one. 

At the rate things are going, I'll have the Yuu in my hands before the Jim Johnson one comes from Amazon, if it comes. 

I think I will follow this equation: Buy the enhanced Yuu = Have made enough progress to go out busking at least once and made money + have an extra $750 above "base level" saved up in the bank.

Today's freebies: "The Woman Warrior" by Maxine Hong Kingston in softcover, "God Is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchins in hardcover, 3 "Bankers Box" type boxes, the big long ones, with lids.

Because of course it is

 279th day sober.

Today was going to be the day I go pick up the shakuhachi I ordered from Amazon but it's late because of course it is. "If it doesn't show up, check with us on Wednesday" they said. 

This was after getting up after having slept the day away, and going online to check Ebay etc. at 6. I was thinking, "Well, I've slept the day away but if the shakuhachi's there, I can go downtown and pick it up". 

I figured I'd take the rest of the night off except for listing things I'd photo'd last night, read the "Call The Midwife" book, and get to sleep early so I'd not sleep most of tomorrow away, and I'd take tomorrow to ride over to Mitsuwa Marketplace. 

I'd just finished doing some Ebay stuff like accepting an offer, when I heard Ken's truck pull up so the chaos that accompanies Ken ensued. I had to move things around quickly, hope Ken didn't fuck up the toilet using the restroom, and keep him from grabbing and pocketing the paperwork with $60 cash in there for the temple that I'd left on top of the printer. I grabbed it just in time and put it in a drawer. It's the rule around here that paperwork etc for him goes there, but I had it there to get it out of the way and didn't anticipate his coming. 

He came by because he needed one of the keys for one of the storage units, that he's bought some shelves for. We talked about the storage units and he's going to try to get out of the first-floor one, that's easy to get into, and move things into the other two that are on the 2nd floor, harder to get into but they're a nice square shape instead of long. 

That's all a nice plan, so I agreed with him that it's a nice way to go. Ken's work wants him to get some of his stuff out of there, too. He's got three different "labs" there and maybe it's become a bit much. 

I'm equally ticked off and worried about the Amazon shakuhachi not coming in on time, though. Fortunately I know how to make it all work out. I went on the Shakuhachi Yuu site and ordered a Shakuhachi Yuu just now. That ensures the first one will show up, and when I had a bamboo one before, I wanted to get another Yuu so I could compare the two. The bamboo one seemed to work better than a PVC shakuhachi and better than the Yuu I'd had, but since I no longer had the Yuu, I could not compare them. Maybe all the trumpet playing I'd done had simply made *me* better. Maybe the bamboo one I had, actually had problems keeping me from going very high into the 2nd octave, or was it me? The Yuu is sort of a "standard reference" to compare against. 

The only thing against the Yuu is that they're really ugly. I would feel ashamed to go out busking with one. But if I put in some time with some woodcarving tools and some paint I could make one look good enough for the busking audience. 

Interestingly, in the US the shakuhachi Yuu, sold by a company called Naljor, is actually having sales handled by Monty Levenson, who's probably one of, if not the, best shakuhachi makers here in the US. The guy emailed me right away, I got your order, it's being packed, etc Here's the tracking number. Color me impressed! Naljor/shakuhachiyuu.com sells an "Enhanced" Yuu that's been worked on by ... Monty Levenson. At about $750, I'm holding back for now. But if I can get somewhere with the plain Yuu and the bamboo one I'm getting, sometime, from Amazon, then I think I'll buy one. Especially if I can by then have figured out how to make a Yuu look nicer and more bamboo-like on the outside. 

To Bludgeon The USSR

 278th day sober. 

I got this stupid oscilloscope packed up as light and small as I dared, which still meant a big heavy package, to go to Australia and of course Ebay's shipping service can't handle it so I had to give Ken a lot of information so he can try a couple of shippers. When Ken didn't show up last night, or today, to pick it up I started worrying... 

I packed 8 things; a combination of finishing ones I'd "pre-packed" and packing some more, to make a good load for FedEx. I went and delivered those, picked up packing stuff on the way back, and then got to work on my phone. 

For some reason I saw my phone battery was down to one bar when I picked it up to take with me, and since I'm usually really good about keeping it charged I popped the back cover off and took the battery out, went around where the edge of the back cover had stuff like fine lint etc., on it and cleaned that up, and on the phone itself, then cleaned the contacts in the phone and on the battery and likewise the charger and charging port with contact cleaner. Then put it all back together and it charged up fine and I called Ken. Everything was fine, he just needs to email his shipper etc. Whew! 

While out on the bike (no zombies this time) I thought about what someone said on Reddit about how the American middle class was allowed to exist to "bludgeon the USSR" with. Now that the USSR is gone, the middle class is being allowed to wither. But in its heyday, the US had a real interest in allowing a lot of average Joes to live in individual houses with front and back yards and a car and all that. Here's what our systems gives our people, the US was saying. They don't have to live in commieblocks! 

Then I thought about how when I was a young adult starting out the game seemed to be all about making more money. Just make more money, and all of your problems will be solved. Capitalism really likes it when you strive all your life to make more money. You don't end up better off, yourself, but you sure end up doing your part and more for capitalism. 

I can see now that the real game is to work out how to not need money, and to save what money you have and manage it well. Back when Dr. Allison was paying me about $350 a month he said I "must be saving half of each pay check" which I was certainly not. But looking back, I easily could have been. I was in the Army Reserve then too, and that, I didn't realize, was a real cash cow. I got about $160 a month from it so that was almost a half-month's pay for my one weekend a month dressing in green and doing Army stuff. I could easily have saved up enough money to say F.U. to my awful job and found something better. The Army pay also included free college classes. 

Looking at it another way, the Army pay was just a bit more than my rent, so I could have used it to pay my rent and then been footloose and fancy free, doing any kind of cockamamie work I felt like. My early adult years would have been very different if I know that the real game is to save your money because striving to make more will almost always end in failure but saving what you *can* make is an almost guaranteed success. 

Capitalism, of course, hates it when you save-save-save your money. The hippies knew this, that the most they could do to fight capitalism would be to team up and live communally, eat rice and beans and lentils, mend their clothes instead of buying new, go back to simpler ways of doing things (who needs laundry soap, bath soap, shampoo, tooth paste(!) when you've got Doctor Bronner's?) 

The hippies were equal parts infuriating and fun, but at least in Hawaii there were some who walked the walk. There were people living in tree houses and in caves, and some friends of ours lived in some kind of weird little bomb shelter with lead shielding or something so a radio wouldn't work inside. A friend of my dad's built a ferro-cement boat and the family lived in it - and sometimes we lived in it when they were off on vacation - and that was their "FU" to the buy-a-suburban-house grind. 

The guy with the boat was Mr. Bethune. The boat he built was called the Sea Raven and besides building his own boat so he could raise his kids, Sean and Claudette, while only paying a slip fee. He was also good at saving money and "finding" things when it was convenient. According to my older sister he "found" a lot of money from my dad but I don't know enough to believe one way or the other. I wish I'd gotten to know the guy on an adult to adult level. His kids grew up and he ended up having a time-clock company in Honolulu and then he died. He didn't crash and burn like my parents, simply because he knew how to save money. 

But getting back to what capitalism loves and what makes capitalism tear its hair out, it's no accident that the SRO hotels and flophouses and rooming houses and residential hotels are gone now. It's not by some accidental falling-together of the pieces of the economy that these days, one must live rather well or be out on the street with no longer a grey area in-between. It's Marx 101. It's the reserve armies of labor and of the immiserated. You must work and consume like crazy and own at least one car and really bust your ass for capitalism or you must live in the street like a dog. 

A grey area in-between is dangerous to capitalism. Someone living happily in a little room that costs 5% or 10% of their income, with a shelf full of books and hobbies and friends, who gets around by bike  and has no use for credit cards is extremely dangerous to capitalism. He's showing an alternative is possible. So he must be stamped out. 

Jinro

 277th say sober(?). Last night among other things I picked up tons of tea bags, an unopened bottle of Chardonnay, a 3/4 full bottle of Jinro soju (40 proof) and some cans - still in the box - of diet Coke. 

When Ken came over I gave him the wine and the Coke, while the tea bags were put into large Ziploc bags to distribute to the little free libraries. The soju went into the fridge. 

I tried a cup. It made me feel weird and I got the classic red face, so I had some coffee and aspirin (for inflammation) and dealt with Ken when he came over. He got to watch me finishing up packing a large item which I foisted off on him - he's probably taking it to FedEx as I type here. 

I fixed up some salmon ramen and puttered around doing various things including taking apart a large thing I'd started on that had a million little circuit boards to take out, and left the metal scrap out for the scavengers. And I managed to finish off the bottle of soju, too. 

I woke up at 1, because Tom had come by and knocked on the door. He'd been walking by and just wanted to hang out but I said I was busy. It's a good thing I didn't let him in because the empty soju bottle was on my desk. 

I went back to bed for a bit then decided I really needed to get going so I washed hair, shaved, got stuff together, and was outta here at about 20 to 4. My first stop was the Buddhist temple, where I went to the office and asked for another monthly donation book because I'd lost mine. That was quick and easy, and I didn't even have to tell the lie I had cooked up about how my old one had been mixed up with some junk mail... 

Next I visited the little free libraries and dropped off the bags of various tea bags I'd gotten last night. All I found was a book about London Bridge that turns out to be one on building *models* of London Bridge. Still pretty neat. 

Next was the main task, the bank. The deposit went fine. I was surprised to find that even with buying another shakuhachi for about $250 it hadn't lowered the balance lower than that figure I'm so proud of. 

Banking done, I went over to the used book store. I was "loaded for bear" as I had all three of my Hebrew books I was going to sell 'em, as well as a few others including a few paperbacks that seemed of low value. I looked through their music books and found Jon Kypros' book for $10 and they didn't want the fancy expensive Hebrew books, they only wanted a few paperbacks for $4 trade. I had $3 trade credit already, and $2 in my pocket, and I'm glad I'd brought a bag of nickels and pennies because I had to dig into that and count out a bunch to make up the money.  But the main thing is I have one of "the" beginner books again. 

I went to Whole Foods next and parked the bike, went to Ace Hardware for some "Fels Naptha" soap that's supposed to be good for laundry, and had some food and a near-beer upstairs. There were some very noisy wined-up people sitting near me, with one Karen type gushing about how "they tested her and she has so many antibodies they won't let her get a booster". Trump-level science. There was much more Trump-level idiotic discourse, and they all looked pretty financially comfortable. People that dumb ought to be sweeping floors or something but they probably had pretty good jobs (or had married well). One guy left early to go teach judo. "With wine on your breath?!?" Antibody Girl asked. Gotta watch out for at least one judo instructor around here. But then, a glass or three of wine shouldn't affect one's judo skills. 

I stopped at Nijiya on the way back because I was out of instant dashi and I got a bunch of things. One of the things I got was "Du Breton Pork Belly Block" which is basically bacon without the smoking etc. The guy checking me out asked how it's used and I said I guess a number of ways, cooked like yakitori would probably be the best but it could be used in curries, ramen, etc. 

 The most notable thing downtown was ... traffic is back and there are zombies just everywhere. It's been getting into the high 30s overnight so it's not warm, but the damned things were out staggering around all over the place - around the corner from the bank, staggering/singing/hallucinating/raving down the sidewalk in front of the book store, all over the place around the park, etc. Although it wasn't a busy day for the businesses and there wasn't even any kind of busker, beggar, or hustler in front of Whole Foods, the undead were out and about this day. 

I've ordered the first Koga book (again) because I think that one goes more into how Kinko notation works than Kypros' book does. Plus more/different written music. I'll have *that* book early next week. It's funny, when I was studying out of Koga's book before, I was just grinding away on that page with the little exercises - it's no wonder I got bored! I did learn that first little song where you step up and then down with the cute little chirps, but if I'm going to do this right I need to work on more than just little exercises which I was doing for breath control, and more on actual material. 

I honestly need to get "shakuhachi on the brain". If I'm to get anywhere with the trumpet for that matter I need to get "trumpet on the brain" and spend a lot more time on it. Well, I've gone over why I don't want to find myself back home in Hawaii, at the places I love, as a trumpet player. Being a real "trumpet on the brain" person means having at least one trumpet and cornet (I actually have two cornets right now) plus a flugelhorn plus probably more than one trumpet - generally serious players have a piccolo trumpet and a C trumpet as well as a few B-flat trumpets. And mutes, a lot of cleaning stuff, etc. 

Having "shakuhachi on the brain" will certainly mean having more than one shakuhachi, but collecting the things is certainly cheaper than collecting brass instruments. And less bulky. One simple pull-through will clean 'em all. There are several books out there to buy but most of what needs to be learned is actually on YouTube. The main thing besides actual playing will be to learn to write down songs in the Japanese notation. 

The Japanese notation not only looks neat, but it's logical and also, for some reason it's treated as some kind of big secret to the beginner student. I haven't been able to find notation for typical beginner songs like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Mary Had A Little Lamb or any of the "minyo" which are beginner/children's songs. But if I get facile at writing it down, I can sound out songs myself and write them down.