Since I'd stayed up all night the night before, and slept from about 5PM - 11PM, I went back to sleep at about 6PM and woke up around 1 I think, then went back to sleep until around 4. It was in this last bit of sleep that I had a dream that along with a lot of other strange things, involved Target going into the electronics surplus business. Imagine a Daiso but for circuit boards and the usual junk. It was very popular!
I woke up and my back hurt. I'm coming to realize that if I ride my bike just everywhere, I end up in the same sort of situation as someone who drives a car. I lose my fitness for walking. So I need to get more walking into my routine. Maybe shopping at the Target that's near Whole Foods more, and *not* cheating by parking my bike in Little (microscopic) Italy.
So I washed aspirin down with my morning coffee but at least I didn't have a headache.
I practiced a bit on the 6-hon shinobue, and put some time into sanding down the exterior and trying to get the ugly "seam" on the outside sanded down - with mixed results. This is why it needs bindings, to distract from that. I'm not that impressed with it, actually, as I think it sounds richer/louder just because it's bigger, and if I could buy a 6-hon Aulos I would, but they only seem to come in 6 and 7. I will, though, as soon as possible, have another order off to Mejiro for a 7-hon Aulos and a bag for this 6-hon flute. The 7-hon Aulos will only cost about $20 and a bag maybe $17 so I'll probably pad the order out with a book too.
Around 5:30 or 6 I left, first stopping at the veggie dumpster. There are 20 or 30, 25-lb bags of red onions left there right now. If they were yellow onions I'd be all over 'em but red onions ... farty as hell. I didn't take any to Tom's or anything. I left there and passed by Tom's and he wasn't there anyway. I went on to H Mart and spent a little under $20 on things, which means out of this last pay check $100 or a tiny bit more is going into my bank account. From about $800 to about $900.
Among other things I got a small can of coffee and a package of "home run balls", a cookie I'd not had since I was in Korea in the early 80s. Back then, they'd really nailed the concept, which was to make tiny cream puffs with the same texture and not-too-sweetness as full sized ones. These days, 40+ years later, Home Run Balls don't have the texture nailed any more, and in my opinion are too sweet.
I ate those and drank my can of coffee sitting out front, people-watching. I love H Mart; I'd never hang around a Safeway as there would be sketchy people and a possible bum fight in the 15 minutes or so it would take me to have a treat sitting out front.
Around back I got some "burro bananas" which are these short stubby ones that remind me of some of the non-commercial bananas you find in Hawaii, typically growing in your backyard or at a veggie stand in Chinatown.
Tom still wasn't back when I rode by again, so he's probably visiting our friend up in the mountains.
I came back here and dawdled around a bit to make sure a zombie on a bike that was riding around didn't see where I was going, and noticed a 2nd Harvest box. The zombie had gone and I picked up the box so I have 9 cans of food/jars of peanut butter to drop off at Tom's tomorrow.
Dinner was fried shrimp and fried burro bananas. An island fry-up. It was pretty good too.
Today was "brightened" by two mass killings, both by white supremacists, against non-whites. At least a third of this country thinks this is just dandy. Both perps were making a huge mistake and I don't mean the part about going to prison, probably for life.
No, the big mistake was in thinking they have a cause worth fighting for. I know, because I thought in this mistaken way long ago, and it was why I left Hawaii. I'd grown up seeing that the Japanese people largely associated with each other and did well, and the Filipino people, and the Samoan people, and so on, so I thought that if I got where it was mostly pale people, we'd all get together and have the same kind of society that I've seen among these other groups, where while everyone is expected to pull their weight, people don't tend to get forgotten or go hungry or homeless.
I should have seen a common sight soon after the bus got off the pali road and headed into the windward side of Oahu, that of a falling-down drunk lady, who had a habit of passing out on or near one of these highway concrete median barrier things. She was white. In fact the vast majority of homeless and/or weirdos were white.
You can't assume that a hyper-individualistic group to whom "family" means next to nothing, will mirror the society of a group with 1000s of years of tradition and Confucianism, just because there's no one else around.
So in both cases, one murdering with a vehicle and one with a gun, if either one of these mass killers were able to somehow bring about a whites-only America, they'd find it to be the dog-eat-dog, backstabbing place it is now, only more so. Meanwhile, these brown people they believe are The Enemy, are really rather nice people and if you get to know them and you join up with them either by befriending them or marrying into their family, you'll find they really do believe in family as a concept and look out for each other pretty well and you, too, if you're not an utter POS.
If either of those creeps really wanted to bring about a better USA, they'd push for things like Spanish required as a second language to learn in schools (we *are* part of the Americas after all, and English is a required 2nd language in tons of other countries) and for allowing more immigrants in, and a push for more sharing of the wealth by means of general strikes and other actions. You know, like are done in other places in the Americas, with good results when the CIA doesn't stick their noses in.
Things are certainly "hotting up" in this country and I'm just glad that I'm making progress in my plans.
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