Last night I not only listed 10 things but I also did over an hour practice on the shakuhachi and at least took out of the packet I was given at the shakuhachi club, the sheets I want to work out of which are the three or four songs and one of the three fingering charts. I put those in page protectors (the big wad of 'em I'd taken to the shakuhachi club I left with Rinban Sakamoto to use as needed, for whatever they're needed for).
I worked through the full set of exercises in the Koga book, both otsu and kan, playing each one 5X in otsu and 5X in kan. Doing those exercises used to tire me out, and it was rare for me to make it through the full page and yet here I did it without it feeling like being a big thing.
In the news some 72-year-old Vietnamese guy shot up a dance club in Southern California and was going to shoot up a 2nd one but a young guy saw what he was about to do and put a stop to that shit. But why in hell is a 72-year-old doing anything like that? That's the age you should be kicking back, enjoying good food with family, maybe working on your golf or your calligraphy, and enjoying life.
If the guy's 72, well, I'm 60 and born in 1962, so the guy'd have been born in 1950. The Vietnam war started really kicking off in 1965, when the guy would be 15. In 1968, when the war was hot and heavy, the guy would be 18, fighting age. By then the guy's whole life would be one in the midst of war. I guess when you grow up like that, it seems sensible to grab a gun and try to shoot your problems away. More fallout from the huge crime that war was.
In other news, apparently a lot of people have lost money from having their money in Bank Of America, due to some kind of failure involving Zelle, which is some kind of weird online payment thing. This is why I swear by paper checks. When I was a teen I was even skeptical of bank accounts in general. I thought you'd put your money in, and then a guy in a suit - I was very clear on his wearing a suit - would sneak in and take the money out. It actually turned out (my first account was a joint one with my mom) that it would be my mom taking the money out that I put in. (Later I had a joint account with my dad for a bit that I used to pay household bills and that went OK for a while.)
There's concern among buskers about people going more "cashless". Maybe this is another reason I did so well in front of a Whole Foods, because even people who don't use cash can always get cash back (you can get as little as $1 back at the till) so they'd see me, get a little cash back, and put it in my tip box? But I also had a lot of people tell me they thought my playing was great but didn't have any cash on 'em.
Japanese tourists are, or at least were, notorious for carrying large amounts of money and at least in theory they'll be a large part of my audience back in Hawaii. I won't even care if they tip me in yen, as I can always convert it to dollars. We buskers tend to be pretty flexible. And while I might lose some potential income by being cash-only, I'm prepared for my busking income to be pretty modest.
We in Northern California can't let those declasse' Southern Californians show us up, so within mere hours we had a mass shooting of our own. Both guys of Chinese descent, both shooting other Asians, and it's really close. The one guy killed 10, our guy 8. The other guy failed to kill in his second target location, while ours killed 4 in one place and 4 in another, that's style. The other guy was tracked down and shot himself in his van as the SWAT team closed in. Our guy turned himself in. I'm gonna give our guy the win - since he's still alive, he can write tons of manifestos, maybe take up painting in prison, and all the usual mass murderer things. Yay for us I guess?
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