Time your covid shots for a weekend.

 354th say sober. Friday evening, late, I started getting chills and at about 2AM when I got up to use the bathroom my teeth would chatter. So, just like the last time. I didn't get *as* sick, but for the last day I'd read books or sleep, and a few times just close my eyes and next thing I knew it was 6 hours later. 

I still considered going out and performing today, but just after opening my eyes at noon, I closed them for a moment and it was almost 4. Plus I still hurt a little all over. This is why it's good to time your covid shots for a weekend so you can recover without interfering with the work week. 

The wind's whistling and howling out there, although as I remember it, Murphy Street in Sunnyvale doesn't get windy at all. So if I felt up to it, I could still get over there and play this evening. But I don't.

At least I got some reading done. No sense in watching videos as what, in the glorious year of 2022, in the glorious high-tech utopia of Silicon Valley, passes for "video" is not. A few frames per second, at times not even that, generally the sound track comes through OK although it may or may not be in sync with the video. In other words, ask a far-rightist what "Communist" video might look like, and you'd get this. But Communism gave us wonderful movie makers like Tarkovsky, while this is pure Capitalism video, through and through. Utter crap unless you are rich enough to be a Kool Kid with a solid-gold-cased iPhone and a $1000 a month connect plan. 

And uploading video, forget it! This is why I don't even think about recording or video'ing myself to put on line. A minute of video takes hours to upload from here and that's if everything goes just right. If I get good enough, said Kool Kids will take care of that. So far I think I've been video'd a bit, and one lady recorded me to use as a ring tone, although whether that's because I was musical or jarring it's hard to say. 

Old-time browsers used to have a thing called "Bookmarking" where you could save the URLs of sites you liked but that's gone. You have to be good at memorizing URLs and typing them in. You used to be able to print out emails, but that's also gone, for some reason. A lot of functionality that was in, say, Windows 95, is gone now.  In ten years, there may not be much of an internet to bitch about. 

After all, this is all in keeping with my observation of an approximate halving of wealth every decade. I can actually say I'm wealthier now than I was 20 years ago due to having no debt and money in the bank, but it's been due to downgrading my life ahead of time. It's certainly been true that in the year 2000, I had a car; in 2010 I had a motorcycle; in 2020 I had a bicycle, and in 2030 I'll be doing pretty well to have a decent pair of shoes. That's yet another reason to move back to Hawaii where shoes are not as necessary as they are here, and where you can make workable ones yourself. 

I had coffee and aspirin and got going at about 5. Other than a brief stop to drop off some trash, I headed right for the Amazon hub where I picked up some bubble mailers and my latest order, an SD card reader because my present one is crapping out - probably the tiny wires breaking inside the cable with the USB connector on the end. Sure, I could get out the soldering iron and another USB cable and fix it, but it's easier to just order another one. It was nice to just go in and pick one up - not so nice to have to step around the dried vomit by their front door.

Then I went over to Recycle Book Store and had an interesting book on US history (and why the US is so dysfunctional) that looks better than anything Morris Berman ever wrote, and also was going to buy a music book. Better check my money .... I thought I had $11 in my wallet but I guess I'd spent that at King Egg Roll on Friday. Oops. So I just had my little bag of "emergency quarters"  I'd brought in with me, and that was enough to buy one of the cheaper music books, a book of exercises by Herbert L. Clarke, because I felt silly not buying anything. 

I went over to Whole Foods and got a lot of groceries, highlights being that I got the last little package of cheese rinds and the 2nd to last of Kalamata olives and club soda. Then I remembered I'd planned to get something to eat, so I picked out some pulled pork and veggies, and just a little bit of chicken tikka masala to taste it. 

I went outside to eat, and the chicken tikka masala was good and I thought of a hack: Next time they have both things, I'll take the pork and put the tikka masala sauce on it. Then I packed up the bike and rode home. 

There were tons of zombies staggering, gibbering, flailing about and due to obeying traffic lights, once even got a bit too close for comfort. We're not to the point yet where it's like the Argentina "Ferfal" wrote about, where signals are only suggestions and you primarily look out for attackers, but we're getting there. Yesterday, there was a huge fire the burned a Home Depot store on Blossom Hill to the ground. The fire was started by two guys, who seem to be the same ones, the video shows, who burned down a Wal-Mart in Fremont, in both cases as a distraction so they could steal stuff.

It was also very windy and surprisingly cold, so not a very good even for busking and I didn't feel like I was missing out. The actual busking season here may only be 5 months long, May 1 to October 1, with a little space of time around Chrismas also being good, and the rest of the time, just hunker down and don't spend money. In other words, a shorter time-window for work than when I was hustling "awareness" ribbons Santa Cruz, when my work-year went from April 1 to November 1.

I do a lot of thinking when I'm out on the bike, and I thought, well, what if there were a real-world zombie virus? Not one that you could get by being bitten by a zombie, although God knows what other horrible germs you'd get from one of the filthy things. And the zombies wouldn't want to eat your brains like in the movies, but they might want to attack you because the voices in their head told 'em to, or because they want to rob you because they want drugs, very much. Also the virus wouldn't be able to be isolated in a lab, but there'd be a pretty clear-cut "zombie syndrome", familiar to anyone who observed homeless camps. 

So what if there were sweeps to round up these sufferers of "zombie syndrome" and put them into camps, where they'd have a safe, clean place to stay, decent food, TV and arts and crafts, and basically a pretty good life, just one that's not out on the street? Most of the sufferers of "zombie syndrome" would evade said sweeps, and spread out into the suburbs, taking their drugs and filth with them. So we'd not have sweeps, we'd just sort of tolerate them and try to avoid the worst of the filth and the violence, and hope they speed up with the process of drinking and drugging themselves to death. 

And that indeed is what's happening. Homeless camps are "swept" and those not functional enough to keep a bank account and keep important papers in a safe-deposit box lose those things, and of course the ones who are really batshit-insane fare even worse. Drugs are provided, by "off-market entrepreneurs" AKA drug dealers. They manage to drink plenty, and do far more than their fair share toward keeping the cigarette companies in business as they'll smoke those all day in addition to anything else that can conceivably be smoked (crack, meth, dirty diapers, cat hair ... ) 

Plus the really killer drugs, Fentanyl and some kind of really potent meth that's going around, are being made really easy to get. Plus I wonder if all the conspiracy theories about covid vaccinations are aimed at those with zombie syndrome because the less-educated, less-intelligent sector of the population believes in them. Get talking to some of these zombies, and I have, and they're all far-right-wing in their political beliefs. I mean 1950s style right-wing. Cigarettes are good for you, everything they don't understand is a Communist plot, the Vietnam war was good and noble, etc. 

The younger sufferers of zombie syndrome aren't even capable of that level of discussion. This is why, ultimately, places to put them, call them "mental hospitals" or even "asylums" need to be created. 

I got back here and noticed the zombie car had been dragged off somewhere which is good. I threw some stuff away in the dumpster and as they had a book case there that no one was going to want, I broke that up with a hammer and tossed the pieces in.