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.
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