360th day sober. I practiced last night and it went OK .... while it rained pretty heavily outside. We got a good washing around here. I can see now that I was kind of jumping the gun, busking as early as in late March or early April. The season isn't really on until May 1 at least.
I took a look at Reddit and it seems some Nazi had gotten onto an Amtrak train somehow and was harassing a couple of gay guys taking a train trip with their two adopted children. As in, followed the kids into the restrooms where they were alone, threatened the parents etc. The guy refused to leave the train "You'll have to kill me first" (and it's too early to simply kill the guy and toss the body onto the side of the tracks) so the cops were called and he was dragged off.
I wish they'd show a photo of the guy. I might have to shoot right-wingers like that and I'd like to have some faces on file so I know who to hunt down. As an example, the guy who shot a lot of employees on the VTA a while back. I'm halfway convinced it was the guy who was driving the #323 bus who heaped me with abuse (it was so extreme it was kind of funny, actually) for simply asking some little question about the bus schedule or something. I actually wrote out a complaint about him at the VTA office. Since he had a long record as being a right-wing troublemaker, he was probably driving the bus as punishment for some of his behavior.
Now, if it were socially acceptable to hunt down and plug Nazis as it was in WWII, the guy'd likely have been mopped up well before he got a chance to do the damage he did. It's all pretty obvious. You know what a Nazi is; you know what a Nazi does, just as you know what a rabid animal is. You put it down. So it'd be a big help if the authorities would publish the train guy's face and name. This is why it's also important, if you witness a Nazi incident, to get video, audio, any sort of evidence to not only help in the case but to help track the Nazi down.
Needless to say, I'd leave this shithole country if I could, but moving to a war zone like Israel isn't the answer, and I'm too young to smuggle myself into France, pick grapes for 10 years and show I'm a good egg who's learned French including all the cuss words, and petition for citizenship. The best I can do is move back to Hawaii where I grew up and I don't even know if that will be possible in a few more years.
My only ace in the hole in Hawaii is, I'll have Social Security which will go about 2X as far there. It's not really possible to live on Social Security outside the US, because the plane flight back to whatever address I'm maintaining in the US once a month to collect my check in the mail would eat up the $900 or $1000 a month it would mean.
The biggie to get into Asia is to teach English but that's not possible without a college degree and due to my choosing an utter loser of a profession like high tech, that was not available to me. If I'd done something sensible like Creative Writing, getting the degree would have been easy, I'd have been able to make good side money writing papers for students, and getting the English teaching certificate would have been almost an afterthought.
But this is the modern age; anyone can teach anything on YouTube. You even get paid if you're super popular. Except that it's the modern age for perhaps the top 10% around here. Posting video on Youtube is effectively impossible for me. Hell even *viewing* YouTube is becoming untenable, with frame rates of 2-3 fps between the freeze-ups, the only saving grace for now being passable audio.
So, yes, I could be an English-teaching YouTuber if I were in an actual first-world country, but I'm not. So I'd have to become something I can't become, to be able to leave here for a place where I can become that.
This is why I'm so big on having paper, printed materials to learn trumpet from. It's why I'm such a stickler for printed books and don't own a single "e-book". This is why I don't use backing tracks or have "Venmo" when I busk. I have to keep telling people, when electricity is down to a few hours a day or a week, my decisions about what level of technology to use are going to be golden.
I keep remembering a story by "Selco" about life during the Yugoslavia breakup. There was a guy who played guitar, skinny and long hair etc. the very caricature of someone who plays guitar and does little else. And the local warlord, who'd kill people on a whim, kept him alive because there were no radios and no electricity and he was the only way to have music. I honestly see things going back to how Louis Armstrong describes in his childhood when there were no phonographs and of course no radios, and all music was live. People hired bands for all sorts of things and bands even hired other bands for their own parties.
I can actually easily imagine this for Hawaii, where music has always been such a big thing. I'm not really crazy about "Hawaiian" music as a genre, as it's old 1920s Tin Pan Alley stuff and not in a good way, but I certainly know a lot of it. For the working people, music was the one outlet they had. Churches were busy stealing their land and near-enslaving them, but they were allowed to sing. It's an echo of the old New Orleans where the slaves were whipped 6-1/2 days of the week but they were allowed to "let it out" on Congo Square.
I'm not sure where the trumpet can fit into this but I'm sure it can, somewhere. With the huge military presence there's sure to be some demand there, and a lot of bands like to have a trumpet to fatten up their sound. Plus, "Hawaiian" music being so 1920s influenced, 1920s stuff in general might go over well.
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