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.