Mudding Man

 Mother Nature decided the dirty hippies needed a mud bath, and watered the Burning Man "festival" well and thoroughly, with more rain to come.

I listed 10 things last night, and didn't practice much as the guys were washing their vehicles and just hanging out and I didn't want them to wonder what kind of loon would be practicing the flute at 6-7AM when I'm not really supposed to be here at all. 

I told myself I could sleep all I wanted and this woke up around 4 or 5. I decided to ride downtown, stop at Nijiya in Japantown for some gum, throw a bag of trash away in some random trash can, look for books, and maybe have a ride around just to see what's happening in a town as dead as this one on a Saturday night. 

Along with the gum I bought a can of "Boss" black coffee too, and sat at one of the tables outside to drink it and enjoy being somewhere that's not here. 

I checked the little libraries and found 4 books that are interesting, then meandered around by the college and Paseo de San Antonio. That area used to be so lively, and there would be at least three buskers but now it's dead as a doornail. 

I decided to, having been told there's a ukulele player at Whole Foods who comes around "late at night" which in this town means after 6PM, I'd ride over there because if this person is real, Saturday night would be the time to find them. 

I passed by San Pedro Square - tons of foot traffic but no buskers - and over to Whole Foods. The skinny conspiracy nut guy was just setting his table up. I said Hi and started to talk with him but he was going back and forth to his truck, so I went into Whole Foods. I could not find anything I wanted to buy other than a little bottle of taurine pills so I got those. 

I went back out and said to the guy that I'd looked up the Fulani flute he'd told me about, and that I could make one from plans online out of PVC and after I've played it a bit and made sure it plays right, give it to him. He doesn't play the flute, he said, and "used to be able to whistle but can't really do that now". 

I made the mistake of mentioning my going back to Hawaii as my reason to play the shakuhachi and flutes in general. "Do you know what happened in Maui??" he said, the very same thing everyone I make the mistake of mentioning going back to Hawaii to, says. 

As if I'd have no idea, never-ever read the news, or listen to the radio.... 

I said, "I know, do I ever know..." and he was off and running. Off and ranting more like. All about Jewish space lasers or some crap and I tried to explain that no, when the sugar cane plantations had shut down the land was allowed to go fallow and people were not paying attention to fire safety in general, and that, combined with a wind that's like the Santa Ana winds..... 

He'd not hear of it. Back to the Jewish space lasers.... I walked away. 

This guy will wear out his welcome soon enough. He's not been around because he's been banned, either something like for a year, or as long as a particular manager was in charge at Whole Foods. The guy's back and he'll get more and more obnoxious, eventually reaching his final form where he holds one of his banners up and literally tried to trap people coming from the parking lot, holding them prisoner until they cough up some money. 

It's enough to make me want to get a trumpet again, just because trumpets are loud. 

I rode out of there and by a different route to check one more little library, and was going to check one last one I've not been to for ages, the one behind Bad Boyz Bail Bonds, when it started to rain. When I started feeling drops I rode the shortest route back here and didn't get more than damp, got inside and that's my night. I got in at 7:30, which is like 10:30 in the before times. 

This all gave me plenty of time to think about my interaction with the old hippy guy. If I said I'd *not* heard about what happened in Maui, I'd have gotten the same frothing at the mouth tirade. No, my problem was admitting that Hawaii was home to me. It's not the first time I've made this mistake either. 

White mainland people who only go to Hawaii for vacation apparently believe they own the place, and get very, VERY gate-keep-y if the place is even mentioned. Saying I'm actually from there seems to send them into some kind of indignant rage. I had this happen not only with the old hippy guy but with a very nice guy who rides a cargo bike, who I used to talk to regularly when I was busking with my trumpet at Whole Foods. The underlying ugliness really came out, and he's a nice, normal guy otherwise. I was able to talk to him just fine, afterward. 

So my mistake was in mentioning at all that I had any connection to Hawaii. The proper response would be something like, "Oh, I've always wanted to go....!" maybe adding that I love the Blue Hawaii movie with Elvis and can feel the "mana" whenever I have pineapple on pizza. 

As for where I'm going to retire, I guess I'll have to invent a place that's cheaper than here. Colorado Springs, here I come? I lived there long enough to at least be able to talk about the place a bit, and it *is* cheaper to live there than here. 

What's funny is, when I was losing everything in the crash of 2007-2008, one thing I could have pulled off would have been to take all the cash I could off of my credit cards and go to the 'Springs to take the full bicycle repair course at the Barnett Bicycle Institute so I'd have gone back there for a while anyway, long enough to learn to repair bikes. 

But I know enough about the place to use it as protective coloration for the remaining time I'm here. 

I guess this post is really about aggressive gate-keeping which seems to be a white thing. Whether it's calling the cops on some kid for selling lemonade, or calling them on a family having a barbecue in the park or making up accusations against some peaceful birdwatcher and making sure the (white) cops kill him, gate-keeping seems to be essential to white culture. 

I've just never seen other groups do this. Other groups will gate-keep but they don't make it into a fight, in too many cases a fight unto death. If I go back to Hawaii and say I'm from neighborhood X, someone from there will just quietly ask if I know this or that family, etc. and let's say I fail the test, I'm utterly lying. They'll just laugh and turn away or tut and say "Typical" and turn away, etc. I'd not be shot or stabbed or beaten to death, just laughed at. 

This is what turned me off of going to Burning Man. I've been offered a free trip there a few times when I lived at the Gilroy place and as I've done the desert thing - dust, heat, dust devils the size of small tornadoes - I just shrugged and said No, I was really not interested. But another factor was the gate-keeping. You've either Been or Not-Been, and there's all kinds of stupid bullshit like you have to make a "dust angel" in the dust when you first arrive, and there are other hazing rituals too, and the whole thing is very white, very suburban, very middle-class, and extremely judge-y. 

It's also a festival for cars that just happens to have people because someone has to drive the cars. But make no mistake: It's about how expensive an RV, how fancy/expensive an "art car" you can have, it's drive-in-only unless you're wealthy enough to fly in and have a car waiting for you. Tickets are a few thousand dollars apiece now to keep the working class out. Essentially it's building a big suburbia out in the desert where no working-class or "coloreds" are likely to make their way in. 

And that's what makes it hilarious this year - pouring rain, with more in the forecast. And the mud out there is even worse than Kahuku mud. There are 70,000 or so entitled white shitheads bogged down in that crap as I write. Their Aryans Uber Alles consumption-fest is getting a round spanking or maybe it's best termed a much-needed bath, by Mother Nature. 

I think I have figured out, as well as can be humanly described, why our Ebay sales are so horrible right now. For some reason, although we had something like 25,000 - 30,000 things listed, we now have about 11,000. Notice I have these numbers rounded off to the nearest thousand, because no one, not ourselves, not Ebay, no one at all, knows. But Ebay used to show in the high 20-thousands and now it's around 11-thousand. 

Was Ebay simply drastically over-counting, before? This is not impossible. The fact is though that no one knows because it's not knowable. Customers continue to find the most obscure things, things we've had listed for over a decade, and are buying them so all so it's not older things dropping off of Ebay. All I can do is keep listing things and going along as usual. Ken seems to accept my theory that it's people spending less because their kids' school year is starting. He never seems to worry about much, having been born into the class that never misses a meal, owns the place they live in, is never-ever insecure in any way so as a member of that class, his worldview is that everything will always be all right.