310th day sober. Besides taking those 4 large packages to FedEx yesterday, it was a day off so after my trip to the market and dinner etc. I just watched stuff on YouTube and did some practice on the flute.
I could not do the octave exercise and I kept trying and trying and it was really frustrating me. I finally chalked it up to a bad day and put the flute away, but after watching a bit more YouTube I got it out again and realized I'd been setting my mouth on the hole differently, further back or something. Once I went back to being very precise it was easy and I was able to do it fine. I put the flute together and worked on the first few notes in the Wye book. They sounded good - nice and "fat". This is due to the embouchure work I've been doing no doubt.
Something funny is going on with Ken. He's not paying the rent and he's stalled like crazy in getting insurance the new building owner requires. He's also said he ordered packing tape but it's not shown up and generally it's a big box or two that gets left in front and we've never had anything taken before.
The only thing I can think of is that his daughter bought a house in North Las Vegas - a place that will soon run out of water, I might add. I know they helped her financially. I doubt they'd help her to the extent that it deep-sixes this place but there's an example I've seen in my life...
It seems that, according to my older sister, we lost our Portlock Road home due to a conniving real estate agent. This is fairly believable because Hawaii is full of conniving real estate agents. This particular one convinced my dad that buying a 2nd car would be a good idea. So he bought this cute little car, a Datsun 240-Z. I have many fond memories of that car - Dad loved it, and it was fun getting 5 of us into it. But that car threw our finances off just enough to make us have to sell the Portlock house. The real estate agent had seen that if she could engineer this, she'd get the commission for selling our house. This is my older sister's theory anyway. But she knows everyone who matters on the island so I have to give it a fair amount of credibility.
There's no way Dad wanted to lose the Portlock place. Not the way we did. We had to leave it and stayed a number of places - I remember a place on the beach in La'ie where the local kids, some pale Caucasians from who-knows-where, ate salted licorice and had a pet monkey. The palatial "Schofield Sands" without staying in which no Hawaii childhood is complete. Pat's In Punalu'u in one of the cottages. A house one ridge over from our new place, being built where land was cheap in Pupukea.
I'll have to ask Ken what's going on when I see him in a couple of days. Since I seem to get copies of the emails sent to Ken by the landlord, maybe I'll have to print out the bills for the rent because Ken does much better with physical notes than with emails. I've even been in charge of collecting checks from Ken and doing the mailing before. I might suggest to Ken we go back to a system like that again.
I'll explain to Ken that we really don't want to be "problem tenants" and I don't think he wants to be. This business has been one he's kept going in one form or another for decades. It's just that I know how quickly things can melt down. Like gasoline being poured in a Styrofoam cup!
My Plan B is of course to get a storage unit in the place Ken and I have both used off and on since 2012, that's close to the trolley line. Get one of those neat US Army bivy bag "sleep systems" and sleep out in the Baylands and when not sleeping or doing basic maintenance on myself, play play play that music. But the closer I get to being "street" homeless, the more difficult it will be to get back home to Hawaii, since without working for and being friends with Ken's family, I'd lose my official address and the ability to look, at least on paper, middle-class.
If I can get sounding good on the flute it will make my future look a lot better. Without going out there playing with some proficiency I'll never find out if the flute or the trumpet goes over better with the public. So I really need to get out there this busking season. (Nice to think that in Hawaii there is no "busking season" as it's warm the year around.)
It seems so strange to me that I *was* out there busking with a flute something like 7 years ago. It was a Yamaha student model, 2000AD I believe. I paid nothing like the attention to embouchure I am now; it was just toot toot it works and off I go. I even had a Trevor Wye book because I recognize some of the illustrations in the copy I have now. I have no idea what I was playing for repertoire. Simple things, obviously. Probably the same few things I'd played on my home-made PVC side-blown flute, a shrill wonder I found I could play lots of things on with some judicious half-holing.
I may be onto a whole new chapter in my busking and in my life, really. I'd feel like a real idiot playing trumpet in Temple Valley back home or out on the lookout at the top of Diamond Head or out in front of 99 Ranch here, but flute would be fine. Even in Waikiki, where guitars and ukes and singing are all OK, they may have a ban in place on brass instruments and drums. A lot of places do. Constitutionally, busking is protected but places will have restrictions just to keep things sane.
As with everything in the US, there are also class implications. If you play guitar, unless you're really good and playing classical music, you're a bum. Band instruments are a level up, but if you play trumpet or sax you're almost certainly working class. Violin, as long as you're not playing "fiddle", piano as long as you're not playing something like "boogie woogie", and flute as long as you're not just some bum who happened to pick one up and learn 5 tunes by ear (like "Red" who used to be a fixture downtown) at least place you as being "fundamentally middle-class". Even "Red" probably did better than otherwise because it was the flute he played. The Starbucks allowed him to post up right near them for years, for example.
Being actually musical is a big "tell" also. Dear old "Red" could play "Amazing Grace" and mangle it out of all recognizability. One of the first times I saw him, he was playing "Candle In The Wind" I believe, and I was sure it was "Winds Of Change" by The Scorpions. This is a busker specialty; to mess up the rhythm turning even well-known tunes into mysteries. I believe if you are actually musical it means, to the public, that you must have gone through a music program growing up, and since this is a thing that's more and more restricted to the wealthy, it means you're "OK".
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