... that's decided it likes the taste of dollars bills. Thanks, u/LemonFreshenedBorax on Reddit! I can't let that one go, it's hilarious. Ken would be sunk if it weren't for his wife, Suzy, who granted is a Boomer too as I am, but who went through actual poverty, as I did, and is healthily paranoid.
I stayed up all night for the HVAC maintenance person who was supposed to show up 7:30-8:30 and all I saw was a plumbing truck with a hurrying-around guy who I think did some stuff next door, then left. I finally went to bed. I was awakened around 10? by a guy knocking on the door and got to the door in time, told the guy we don't really have any HVAC in this unit, he seemed satisfied and I went right back to sleep until 3, when there was another knock and I wasn't out of bed fast enough, I guess. I opened the door and called out "HELLO?" loudly but that was it. I heard some drilling etc. on the common wall with the unit next door and maybe that's it.
I've had the Neil Young song "After The Gold Rush" on my mind a lot lately, and it's not too hard to play on the shinobue. I'm thinking it would be a good one to busk with. If there's one thing I've learned out busking, it's that it's not *what* you say, it's *how* you say it, or in the busking context, a lot of the time people have no idea what the hell you're playing but if they like how you play it, you're golden.
I need to come up with an actual song list that I can have written out on an index card and have all practiced up and can busk with.
I'll also have my 7-hon shinobue next week, as it should be delivered to Ken's house on Friday and Ken will bring it over on Wednesday. Plus I'll have a cover for my 6-hon one. I also have a shakuhachi book that might be good in that order, which is costing me right about $75, leaving me with 90-odd accumulating in the bank this pay-week.
I was able to pack things and drop them off at FedEx just fine, and got back in here at 8, the equivalent of being out until 11 in the before times of course.
Now, it's fun to bag on Boomers and they do indeed suck, but I think there's a huge mistake being made in who's being called a Boomer. They're counting everyone born from about 1945 to 1965. That covers a large swathe of people with very different experiences. The older Boomers were old enough to serve in Vietnam, to go to Woodstock or at least be the age to go if they could, college was nearly free, draft cards were flammable, beads were groovy, etc.
But after 1960 or 61 or so, things were wildly different. This later cohort of Boomers has been called Generation Jones. This covers my siblings and myself with the exception of the oldest, born in 1957. She's the one who got private school, "poor" was having a small car rather than a large one, etc. The rest of us got really bad public schools and forget the car, just having shoes was enough to strive for. Life started being on "hard mode".
I'd also say that the characteristic selfishness attributed to the Boomers also started about 10 years earlier, with the Silent Generation. And I saw on Reddit today a good write-up on the effects of "Ethyl" gasoline, which became popular in the mid-1920s.
Here's a good write-up: https://environmentalhistory.org/about/ethyl-leaded-gasoline/
By the time my parents came along in the mid-1930s, something like 90% of gasoline was "Ethyl" and huffing gasoline was a way of life in the Los Angeles area. Cars were far dirtier back then anyway, but especially in the cities, you were probably huffing the equivalent of a gallon a gasoline a year just by the act of breathing.
And it's really with this "Silent" generation that the great American "Fuck You, I've Got Mine" ethos started. It explains why my grandparents' generation were actually rather nice people who helped other family members out etc.
Being born in the early 60s myself and especially if my parents had kept us in the Los Angeles area, I'd of course have huffed lots of gasoline, myself. But one thing my parents may have done right was to move us to Hawaii, and we were not downtown but instead in outlying, suburban areas. The good old Hawaiian trade winds no doubt kept the level of gasoline vapors in the air to a minimum.
My parents were around the Pasadena area and both of them were ... odd anyway. Dad was very flighty and could not stay with things, buckle down and work and carry things through. From what I've heard, Mom was kinda nuts. Even in my own memories of her, she could not keep friends, and was a hyper-perfectionist to the extent that it kept her from keeping house or garden at all and we kids had to learn to. They both had the money-management skills of the aforementioned basset hound.
Really there is something to this. This cohort of people, late Silents to early Boomers, don't suck because of propaganda, or cultural decay whatever that might be, or creeping socialism, or the alienating effects of capitalism, but because they were poisoned.
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