Much Ado About Nothing

 Besides packing 28 things last night and doing some organizing, I got a good long long-tone practice in. 

There's much ado about nothing, by which I mean Israel defending itself. Israel is in an existential battle and the US, apparently weak and soft and forgetful of WWII, is asking them to be kinder to their would-be murderers. 

I even watched a documentary last night while practicing, named after the Arab town that was taken over, about how said Arab town, a very nice beachy area with great fishing, was taken over by Israel in 1948. Somehow this is supposed to raise a great hue and cry and there seems to be a mass grave under what's a parking lot now, but it's slipped in that the Arabs were armed to the teeth, with the Israelis finding tons of stockpiled weapons, and the Israelis caught by the Arabs nearby were tortured in ways I don't want to go into on this blog. 

The area is a kibbutz now or at least was one for years, and is very nice. If I were visiting Israel I'd be sure to visit. 

The thing is, one of our greatest presidents, Lincoln, was praised for being a great "Indian fighter" and another accused of genocide or some rot is on our $20 bill as I write. George Washington, our first, was a surveyor and somehow acquired tons of land. Well, it got it by claiming it from the original people who were there. They got fought, they got beat, and now they don't matter. I'm not saying this is fair, what I'm saying is this just plain is. 

Jews got reminded of this, hard, by WWII. It's called Realpolitik which is just what it sounds like it is. 

I packed two more things bringing the number up to 30, and left at the usual time. I'm glad I took the time to make yellow FedEx stickers because it was one of those that kept me from leaving a FedEx box at the post office. It doesn't help that both services have a big G (for ground and "ground advantage") on the labels in most cases. 

I didn't find much for packing materials, and circled around to Tom's place just to catch up on the latest. He's stopped talking about lawyers and says that although he doesn't think it's legal, he's going to let them inspect his place. James no longer lives there and he has one of his other hangers-on tidying up the place. 

We talked about various things and I was talking about how I'll be free to sell on Ebay on my own once I'm back in Hawaii since I'll be out from under the effective non-compete law I'm under now. We'd already talked about the situation with Tom's various bum friends (James is out, Rob "no longer comes around since he tried to fight me" and Roy The Pothead is the one doing the tidying) and who drives up but James. 

"He's here to repossess his dog", said Tom. James marched up after parking his hunkajunk truck and said he didn't want to interfere, and Tom said we were just "rehashing" Hawaii. Tom then told James his dog is banished to the side yard because he poops and pees everywhere. I'd said to Tom, before James came up, something like, "Well, now that you've adopted James, his blood feud is now your blood feud". So with James there, as a sort of sign-off preparatory to leaving, I said to Tom, "Keep in mind, when you adopt a pet, you adopt the pet's problems!". James would think it's about his dog, but it's about him. 

I checked the veggie dumpster and saw a bag of Romaine lettuce that looked good enough to make me come back here, unload, and go back with my "getter stick" to get it. So now I have a nice cucumber to have tomorrow that I'd bought for $3 in H Mart today, and Romaine lettuce for tonight. 

I wish, if I'm not busking myself, I at least had busking to write about. But busking seems to be extinct from this area and it seems to be being eradicated from American culture in general. References to it are simply being disappeared. 

For instance, I remember reading an account by a guy from the UK who'd come to the US with a high-level degree as an acoustician. He ended up busking, with a banjo, because he could actually get employed and the money was really good. There was also a book called "The Haunted Banjo" that has been utterly disappeared. You can find a book with that title, but it's for kids and it's not the same book. The original one had a plot something like, some evil force or organization was trying to eliminate any kind of spontaneous music, busking, any kind of informal grassroots music. That's what creeps me out - that the book hit someone a bit too close to home and has been - disappeared. Along with its author perhaps. 

At least while I was out today I went to one of my exercise places and worked on my chin-ups. I'm awful but I'm making progress. The last time I went from zero to being fairly good at them, I wasn't even 30 yet and was lighter. 

And when I got home, besides doing a "burn" of sensitive papers that build up (even the trimmings from Ebay shipping labels have info I keep secure) I washed my head/hair and shaved. Instead of Ken seeing me at my shaggiest (and smelling me at my smelliest haha) I'm going to be a lot more squared away. 

I think of great leader Chairman Mao saying "Instill good habits!" and it inspires me. I think, I may not feel like doing this thing but it's a good habit so I must do it. 

Over the sickness

 Until next year I guess .... by October-November next year I should be safely back home in some sort of safe, stable situation but even if I'm not, being sick for a day or two  won't kill me. Here, the weather is actively trying to kill you 5 months out of the year and yes, people do die of hypothermia once it gets down to the 40s. We lose quite a few each year. And it gets down into the 30s and even occasional 20s so it gets cold out there. 

I feel pretty much all better now, but planned to not go out today. I have a ton of things to pack, almost all small things, and they can all go out tomorrow. Halloween's an odd holiday as it's not a federal one so the post office will be open, and to me it's a holiday for kids; something you put on for kids although plenty of adults wear costumes and go to Halloween parties. 

I did a good long long-tones practice last night. I'm also doing breathing exercises while out on the bike, as I mentioned on the straightaways rather than at the lights where I have to pay attention to too much. I have to strengthen the whole breathing mechanism whether I'm playing shakuhachi or singing. One thing I've got to say for the shakuhachi, though, is that being essentially zero maintenance, zero assembly, etc., it's really easy to just pick it up and practice. Even if my voice isn't working well for some reason, I can still play it. 

It's very good to see President Biden so supportive of the striking auto workers. Their leader, Sean Fain, appears to be a great one, class-conscious and suitably militant. It appears we're repeating history and in the 1920s right now. The equivalent of the 1930s should be interesting as it should bring about the Socialist revolution we missed out on last time around, or will bring about a true FDR-equivalent who will keep capitalism as the system here, at least on paper, but do what needs doing which is to control and regulate it to a near-standstill. 

And likewise, Israel continues to bravely do what needs doing. They need to level Gaza, make it about as hospitable to human life as the Moon. Then once the "Palestinians" are sent back to Jordan or any of a score of other Arab (shithole) countries, Israel can get to work turning Gaza into a green, peaceful, area with pleasant seaside areas and a happy and prosperous, Jewish, population. 

An overarching comment on all of this is, while I have access to the internet and the many sites on it, the best source for news on things like this or even the latest mass shooting (a popular American pastime, for fans of that sport rather than football or baseball) is the radio. It's head and shoulders above anything on the internet. And by "radio" I mean of course NPR. 

It's just strange that, with 1000s of internet sites and one, very agile since it's as "grassroots" as they come, the radio and in particular one station, NPR, is still first with the news. I could probably approach the pinnacle it occupies if I kept parked on the BBC or Guardian web sites, but I doubt exceed it. And those sites are accessory to, respectively, a radio network and a newspaper. 

It's almost like almost all of the internet is to distract and propagandize, rather than inform. Even on NPR, on the famed "Science Friday", I have to wait until the wee hours of the morning to hear any actual science, as US culture is profoundly anti-science so who wants to hear about that? The best hour or two on NPR is when they play the BBC around midnight. 

I tried writing a couple of letters to Pat and another guy I know back in Hawaii because I don't think email is working for either one of them, but not only is my printer fucked up right now, leaving dark streaks on the paper, but with the one guy who's not Pat, I don't see any indication that his business has been valid for the last 10 years or so. I'll have to fix my printer or take the files to FedEx Kinko's to print out. The dark streaks don't affect Ebay labels much as they end up on parts of the paper I trim off. 

I also tried to find any ukulele activity I can realistically get to and there is none. The San Jose Ukulele Club meets in deepest darkest suburbia, that's miles to get to by bike and I have to cross two large freeway interchanges. The other groups are defunct because of covid, which seems to have killed them off permanently, and if they were active, again, are in places that are nearly impossible to get to by bike. 

I don't know how I'll be able to get it across to anyone back in Hawaii how impossible distances are here on the mainland or how things that are just routine as hell in Hawaii like buying an aloha shirt or finding a group to play music with, are impossible here. Plus I'll have to explain squirrels, crows, and seagulls, so I'll have some 'splainin' to do. 

Everything hurts

 I'd photo'd the 30 things I had ready to list last night, and then did my usual procrastination, futzing around on YouTube. I should have realized what was up when I asked myself, "Why do I have muscle aches when I've not exercised?" Pretty soon I realized  everything hurt. 

I got the first 10 things listed, fortunately the things with the most multiples so they represent a fair amount of money, and went right to bed. With this cold weather I'd dug my little heater out too but I didn't need it once I was in bed. 

I didn't sleep much at all because I was too ache-y and pain-y. Dinner had been 250ml of instant miso soup and that had been plenty. 

This is why I'm glad I got my shopping etc. done and had planned on being sick today, even while I did not think I would be so.  And I'm ahead enough on shipping that I don't have to go out tomorrow if I don't feel like it. 

I'll probably feel fine tomorrow though. What's really bad is, things on Ebay seem to be reverting to where they were before I had 1000's of backed-up offers to make. In other words, operating in the red. I'll have to try my best to keep it going along, on Scotch tape and bullshit or something. And also get hopping on getting my papers in order to perhaps leave before my planned time of mid-September 2024. 

5th one's the charm

 I got 30 things ready to list - which took some time - but in the end, before I knew it, it was 4AM and I decided to get to bed. 

I woke up in time to get going to Japantown. There's about a half-hour, maybe an hour if I'm early, window, once per week, to visit the ukulele store. I left a bit after 4 and figured if I was quick, I'd have a whole half-hour to look at their music books. Maybe even to pick up a flyer or two about any sort of groups getting together. But  I got there and it was closed this weekend for some reason. 

Next on my list was to go to Walmart for my autumn covid booster, so I rode down there hoping the pharmacy closes at 6 and not 5. I got there and it was actually relatively busy, with a few people getting vaccinations and such things. I got my shot and it was still free, so I guess Medi-Cal is still picking up the bill for these. 

I did some shopping around, buying things, because it's the Weekly Wal. I even ventured down to the other end of the store, where I found they have some of the nicer cheeses and things like they have at Whole Food but of course a fair amount cheaper. 

I paid for my stuff "Nice to get out of here for less than a $20 spot!" I enthused. 

I walked back to my bike and there was a guy with a bike by the curb, messing around with a tire and tube and pump and things. I was ready to offer the use of my pump but saw that he already had one. It wasn't working, though, and after watching him struggle for a while, I decided to help. He'd just bought the pump in Big-5 and it wasn't working. 

My pump worked, and while he messed around getting his tube and tire back together, pumped up, then on the bike and pumped some more, I tried his pump out - it worked. He said he'd been so frustrated at it not working he was about to freak out to the store employees in Big-5, and I said I hadn't seen where he was doing anything wrong. I showed him how I did it and then it worked for him. 

I had to conclude that I don't know what I did, but I'm glad I was able to get things working for him. By this time it was starting to get dark so he got out a brand new Cateye light set, the same set I use, that apparently Big-5 sells now and for a very good price. One of the batteries that came with it was corroded though and the guy insisted on trying to make it work. I kept saying it won't, and he'll need to go back in and get some batteries, but he insisted on trying to get the light to work with the bad battery, then decided to take the batteries out of another light he had, then was puzzled when the other light, a different brand, wouldn't work with the Cateye handlebar mount... At this point I said I was going to get going, had put my own lights on my bike, and rode off. 

I stopped at Nijiya for various things, mainly "snacky" sort of things as I'm generally a bit sick after a covid shot and am prepared to stay in tonight and tomorrow. 

One more winter

 I was up in time to pack 10 things, with one medium-sized one I can send by FedEx tomorrow from downtown. 

I didn't need the bike trailer which was good because it meant I could stop at 99 Ranch for things and then park the bike at H Mart, go over to Ross, then buy a few things at H Mart before leaving. 

The fleece I have is pretty decent but the way it fits ... it's not big enough in the shoulders  I guess, so I wanted to find something a bit roomier plus my sweatshirt seems to be kind of out of shape the way my old t-shirts were, and not very warm because the collar is all stretched out. 

So I was eager to get over to Ross, and spent quite a while looking around. Everyone else has, also, it seems. I was able to find a vest made of puffy material that might work out well around here in the shop because it might be warm enough while still allowing me to move around freely while I do stuff. And I don't care what it looks like since I'll just wear it in here. 

There's only one more winter to deal with and then I'm done. 

At 99 Ranch I'd bought some tea eggs along with the other things  I got, and sat outside at one of the tables by the tea shop to eat. I thought I'd heard, maybe, someone playing a guitar like, maybe some over-achieving Asian kid was making use of those guitar lessons he's had since age 6 and there will actually be live music at the tea shop. But when I was finished eating I walked past the shop and looked in and there was no sign of anyone, they just had a really good sound system and had played some random thing. 

This is something I never could have forecast 10 years ago. The effective elimination of busking and the kind of informal live music that used to be really common. There are concerts, of course, but they're far out of reach of most of the population, who can't afford to go to them or even to take the time off if they had the money for tickets. 

I think there are still some open mics but I can't mention any off the top of my head and there used to be tons of them and I used to know where and when a ton of them were.  Caffe Frascati used to have lots of live music and a weekly open mic, even Opera Night with local opera singers. It was even a place where you might be sitting outdoors, enjoying a bowl of soup from Pho' 69 next door, and people would show up with a guitar or a couple of ukes or anything and just noodle around. 

I can't assume San Jose is becoming uniquely soulless, it must be happening everywhere. 

Not here to make friends - work only

 I pay for it every time I do anything "personal" even if the thing's only an hour or two long ... I got in last night and found some things to list and did the usual things around here but didn't practice because I was too tired. I was literally up all night. How dare I actually do anything "personal" at all. I actually talked with people - what a sin.

I woke up at 4, time to have coffee etc., and pack 10 things, one of them big, and go out on my usual round. The chute at the post office was jammed of course, which is why although in theory you can drop packages there, using the chute, until 9 or 10, I'm always there before 7 because it only works in real life if there are workers there. 

On my way back I picked up shipping stuff which is good, and found tons of packets of "Loramed", an anti-congestion medicine Ken's wife uses, and is expensive to buy because hell, every medicine is expensive now. So that's today's freebee and a nice one. 

On my way back along Bayshore there was a zombie, a fast walker, cracking or snapping something that sounded like those things kids throw on the ground except it wasn't those; it was some kind of whip or something it had. And it was indeed a fast walker, so I sped 'way up to get past it and its angry gibberings and whatever the hell kind of weapon it had improvised. 

I rode along the area where the sidewalk is being rebuilt, which is a bit of a maze and, even worse, there were a couple of zombies tangled up in it too. One, on a bike, got free and went across Bayshore, then the 2nd one seemed not to notice me and was intent on joining and gibbering at, or fighting with, the first zombie. Maybe the first one had just got some brains and didn't want to share. I got untangled, myself, and got back here. 

I took some large pieces of junk out of the parking lot and put them into the salt place's dumpster which is out every other week these days I guess. Every place is slowing down, and some more businesses have just disappeared. 

Finally I put things away, had some cheese and olives and cucumber slices, and cleaned up the bathroom and office. Ken used to reliably come by at 10:30 but now he can come by any time from 9 to 11PM so I have to pretty much do nothing, just browse Reddit or something, waiting. 

At least I came up with something interesting on the bike ride. I *had* a plan to do breathing exercises while at stop lights, but the truth is that at a stop light there's too much to keep an eye on so I always forgot. But, doing breathing exercises on the long stretches of straight road, that works well. And there are plenty of those there I'm just riding along, not having to be super watchful for zombies, etc. It's a good plan and I did a fair amount of breathing exercises this way today. 

With the breathing exercises I am hoping to "backdoor" myself into developing my voice. For some reason singing is discouraged in our modern culture (but paradoxically, a good singer is appreciated) but I'm old enough to have gone through the kind of childhood where you sang. There were tons of songs you learned from your parents, more from school, then there were the off-color songs you'd learn from, say, your older brother, especially after he got back from Boy Scout camp... 

So I'm just foolish enough to think I could make a fair singer if I can develop my voice. And, as I'm finding, since this culture is about everyone working all the time and there being just barely sufficient time to maintain your physical existence, there's hardly any time to actually do the kind of practice it takes to get really good at something. 

So, one must draw on skills that were acquired during that "time is cheap" time of childhood. As an example, in the sport I did, the sport itself was almost just the icing on the cake. I'd practiced the things required as a matter of routine in my childhood. It was relatively easy to put them together in the form of the sport. 

Likewise, I think I have a lot of the basics for a good voice, minus just one thing - strength. Fortunately I can do one of the really fundamental things, breathing exercises, while riding my bike. I'll have to do those voice exercises on YouTube even if they do sound silly, and start in practicing some songs. 

Any old basic strumming on the uke will work, at least to start. There are tons of people who can strum a uke out there, but I've seen the effect a decent singer has on the public and it's magic. They tip really well too. I can even practice singing while out on my bike too. People hear stranger things in this town. 

Ken came by and I got my pay check, with an extra $50 on it "Because we've been doing better". I replied that I hope so, because I've run out of backlogged offers, and now it's back to what we can list. Ken and I hung out and talked about stuff as usual, and then I spent all night sorting out microscope parts. At least a lot of those are good sellers, or at least were in the past. 

I only practiced a little, mainly that bit at the end of Nori No Miyama that's been hard for me and I was able to nail it 3X in a row, then went to bed because I was tired. 

I woke up not sure what I had planned for the day, then realized with a start that it was my day to go to the bank. And I had 40 minutes to get ready and get out of here. I went to the bank and did my deposit, only a few dollars off and now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I have a service charge for my paper statements from the bank but that charge goes away as long as I have X amount in my account, I want to say 3 grand. 

I locked the bike up at Whole Foods where one of the annoying guys, a big, grey-haired Black guy who goes on and on about magic mushrooms, was occupying the center bike rack, the best way to, for a lot of people, take over the whole thing. He was going on and on about magic mushrooms. I joked around with him a bit and locked my bike up at the end rack. 

I bought some olives to get cash back, and walked over to Target. I actually walked all the way down to Petsmart just to see what's still in that strip mall, then doubled back and looked around in Cost Plus World Market where I got a Cadbury Flake just to see what they taste like (like every other kind of Cadbury chocolate) then went into Michael's to get some tan hemp cord and a little tube of watercolor paint to prettify my "enhanced" Shakuhachi Yuu with. 

Michael's has "Gildan" brand T-shirts which I've seen recommended as a cheap source of decent T-shirts but they didn't have my size in black and they were not all that cheap. I went to Marshall's next and didn't find anything there. 

Target at least had tape dispenser refills (I'd used a whole roll just messing around with those microscope parts) and index cards and I found a package of "unders" that, by wearing the white/light ones, I can see if they fit OK and are comfy, and if so I have the other colors to take with me to Hawaii, brand new. But no T-shirts. 

By this time it was dark and it had been cold all along. I have a new route to walk there and back from Whole Foods, it goes by SAP Center but goes right over to the bike path. It's a tiny bit longer but a lot more pleasant. 

I got a little package of salami slices and some more cash back, to make my total withdrawals just under $200, so I'm spending $200 and keeping $200 in the bank. I went upstairs for a near-beer from the bar (they had no singles downstairs) and was charged $4.50 for it. Busy night or something. I got a glass to pour it into and left a $1 tip but wow, I remember actual beer being only $2 Back In The Day(tm). 

It was too noisy upstairs to relax and eat and drink so I went downstairs and did that. Then I was off, headed over to the Amazon place where I actually got a ton of bubble mailers, a big Target bag to carry them in, and two pairs of brand new safety glasses someone had discarded. Good to wear on those days when the wind is really throwing stuff around. 

After that I rode home, stopping in Japantown to sit and relax and drink the coffee I'd brought with me. It's really peaceful there. 

I got back here, put things away, checked the closing times, and was off again. I rode up to H Mart, locked the bike and used their loo, and walked over to Ross where I found two black T-shirts with a little logo on them about Calvin Klein Jeans but not too bad, for $8 each. They were originally $24 and I can't imagine spending that for a T-shirt but that's how it is now, the ol' K-shaped recovery. I'm on the downward-slanted leg of the K. For someone on the upward-tilted leg, I'm sure $24 for an undershirt is a pittance. 

I got my macadamia nuts and a steak to cut up and freeze from Sprouts and hustled back over to H Mart. There I got a couple cans of coffee and some little cucumbers (price is back up again) and, hilariously, a nice piece of fish for 7 cents. Someone had put 0.001 for the weight and at 7.99 a pound, that seems to amount to 7 cents. I went to the one cashier who kind of knows me and she let it on through. 

I got back here for good, put things away, and went out and did some parking lot pick-up, and that's it. Part of my hurrying out and doing shopping I'd normally do on the weekend is that I just felt like it. And part of it is, I plan to get my covid booster on Saturday and if I'm going to be ill the next day, I'll have the weekend shopping all done. 

A crumb of information

Last night all I did was pack things - about 17 of them - and when I got up just have coffee etc. and get out of here and take the things to the post office and Fedex. 

I found a few packing things on the way back, pretty routine, then got back here and cleaned up and headed for downtown. First I stopped in at Nijiya for some sugar-free Lipovitan because I like having one as soon as I wake up, some peppers for cooking, a can of black coffee and a small tray of chicken karaage - I had the chicken and some of my own coffee that I'd brought sitting at a table out front. 

Then I rode over to Whole Foods to lock the bike up, use the loo, and I actually complained to the manager (because the web site says to do so) about a guy who was camped out in the bike racks and hassling people about collecting signatures and some shit about magic mushrooms. Of course to the guy I said, good-humoredly, that we'd looked for those when  I was a kid in Hawaii. 

Then I went to a meeting, which I thought might yield a crumb or two of information useful to me in getting my papers in order and other things. It went OK and indeed I got my crumb or two of information and they didn't even hit everyone up for a donation at the end of the meeting. I had a $10, a couple of $1's and some change and was going to give the $10. 

When the meeting was done I was surprised to find the $10 still there in my wallet ... Oh yeah they hadn't done the donation thing. Maybe they don't do that any more. 

As I'd checked my bike after walking back, there was a different (Black in both cases) guy, this one in a wheelchair and asking people for money. I'd gone to the bike to get my change bag out and was transferring the change to my pocket. First the guy had asked for $2 and when I said I didn't have $2 he said "A $5, a $20, a $100" and wasn't completely joking. Then he asked for the change. I said I needed the change for myself. 

Since I didn't want to spend the $10, I had about $4.30 for some eggs and got some that were $3.15. That's all I'd wanted to do. Just buy some eggs so I don't have to worry about it later in the week. I had about $.50 left over and was considering giving it to the guy, but when I went out he was gone. All these pesterers make me want to get a trumpet again .... 

The ride home was very calm, of course there were zombies out but not very many, and there was so little traffic at the Bayshore/10th intersection that I was able to ride through the red light to avoid a zombie that was almost completely hidden in the dark, shuffling toward me. I think it's my hearing that saves my ass a lot and this is why I've never been a fan of headphones. 

Today's freebee: A couple of daikon radishes out of this one dumpster that always has green beans and often other things, I skipped on the beans though. 

As part of cleaning up for the meeting, I'd put on one of the new "Puma" T-shirts I'd bought at Ross, and does it ever feel good. My Muji shirts seem to have become all stretched out of shape, so new shirts it is. When I leave for Hawaii I'm only planning to have 2-3 sets of underclothes, 2 each shorts and shirts, etc. Very pared-down. And preferably all new although I've learned how futile it is to try to buy an aloha shirt here on the mainland. I'll just have two shirts that are OK if not actual aloha shirts and take care of that once I'm back home. 

Practice last night had been my long tones routine on the shakuhachi. At least I'm doing 20 in a row now. I'd also looked at the San Jose Ukulele Club songbook which has a lot of songs with the chord diagrams which is pretty much how it's done at the ukulele playing sessions I've been to. The actual San Jose Ukulele Club meets in the "deepest darkest" suburbs of South San Jose, where public transportation and I supposed, non-pale people do not venture. But, long ago, I had found some at the Mountain View public library. I only looked over some of the songs but it looks like a good place to find stuff to practice, print out the one I want to practice and find someone on YouTube who's playing it to play along with. 

 

A sense of duty

 All in all for a supposedly non-busy day I was fairly busy yesterday, with returning stuff to Ross and buying other stuff there, hanging out with Ken and helping him a bit - the guy's just tiring to be around - and then putting the area I'd cleared in the loft back together and putting my bags of packing stuff back. 

Still, I managed to watch the 2nd half of "Chariots Of Fire" that I'd started on the night before (not as awful as I thought it might be and rather good actually) and Strategic Air Command with Jimmy Stewart which for propaganda was pretty good. 

Before bed I did a really good long-tone practice session, because if nothing else, practicing shakuhachi is strengthening my voice. I looked up the voice exercises I'd been doing long ago in the Before Times, and decided not do to them because they "sound weird" but that's a silly reason no to do them. I think it's Jacobs Vocal Academy on YouTube.

It had rained overnight so I thought it might be rainy today. Thus, I told myself I'll sleep all I like because I have one large, heavy, thing to ship that I'll have to move a lot of things just to get at, and I can pack just that thing and then a bunch of smaller things and make two trips on Tuesday to ship them all out. 

Practicing shakuhachi diligently every day/evening is a good plan as it's so healthy. After a year, and let's say the first 6 months back in Hawaii, I might end up almost musical on the thing. But I really want to try voice and uke also, as it might be more fun. Due to shakuhachi playing, I don't get out of breath so easily when singing. 

My fascination with busking comes from a number of sources. Firstly, when I was a non-seeing being until the age of 5, I *listened*. And besides all the sounds around our large household, there were Dad's records from classical to popular things like Herb Alpert, and Mom's singing us all those little-kid songs that people at least used to sing to their kids. She had a decent voice, and I don't know why she hid all that away. 

Secondly, after I was sighted Dad kept playing his records and seemed to have a real love for the music that was coming out in the 1960s and early 70s. Simon & Garfunkel, the Kingston Trio, Don McLean/American Pie, and even all the Sesame St. records were bought and played a ton as soon as they came out. I even remember a record of "Spy Movie Themes" Dad bought for my older brother that I loved to hear. Plus Dad was an early electronic music enthusiast so he got all the records of that genre as soon as they were hot off the press. 

Our moving out to the North Shore and Mom deciding we needed to be driven to a "good" school (Our Lady Of Sorrows" in Wahiawa introduced us to Motown, which Mom played on the car radio to stay awake. On the North Shore, you couldn't get FM so the AM station we listened to, KKUA, played rock, country, Cheech & Chong, Motown, everything. 

Music was a a refuge for us kids too. As things got worse and worse, and they'd started out bad with Mom being essentially a tyrant, we used to get together on our own and "do funny stuff" which was imitate things from TV, sing funny songs we'd learned, do "characters" and accents, and so on. We'd even done tapes of this when we were pretty young, the oldest about 12, and they were great - good enough to put on the radio. When we were in our teens and got ahold of a tape player somehow, we tried a Renaissance of this and the resulting tape was pretty good, we thought. One day it went missing and it turned out Mom had erased it "The worst waste of tape time I've ever heard!". Music and "funny stuff" was our refuge, our release valve, and we'd not kept it secret enough.

I should just cut to the chase here and say I was a music nut from earliest age and it's the reason why my "ultimate" birthday present which I got when I was 17 or 18 was a radio. Until then, for years, if I heard a song I liked, I put a lot of effort into "recording" it in my head so I could "replay" it accurately. I believe this is called ear training but for me it was what you did if you didn't have a radio or tape player. 

The first time I saw/heard a busker that was it; I was hooked on the idea. I've talked about this before, it was at Venice Beach and it was an old guy in a grey suit whom I think of as "The Moth" as he was in all grey and seemed old and content and mothlike. He sat there on the boardwalk and had a hat out and clicked a clarinet into his mouth, front two teeth worn down apparently from doing same, and played. The tone he had was amazing. Who knows what legendary jazz or session or Big Band player this was. I was astounded and stood there, mouth open, watching all this. The amazing tone poured out and people put money into the hat he had out. 

The next busker I remember was years later, when I was training in the sport. I used to walk up to a medium-sized neighborhood market for milk and things, and there was an accordionist who'd set up by the door, playing pleasant little tunes. There was money scattered on the blanket in front of him. I figured this guy had solved the problem of life. Here I was working on getting good enough at the sport to go to the Olympics so that if I went, I'd have a full scholarship to go to college at the one college that's one of the winter Olympics training centers also, and by going to college, be able to make a decent living. And here was this guy - play accordion - get money. He might make $50 a day, and that was decent money in the early 90s as it's decent money now, in the early 20s. 

After I was done with the sport and had verified that no matter how good you are at airbrush art, you can only make about $10 a week at it, I discovered Ebay and that's been a fairly good, if annoying, mainstay for me for decades now. 

But this is the final point about busking: To make $3 on Ebay, you have to go out and find something, clean it, photo it, describe it, store it, sell it, pack it, ship it, and all along the way you've got expenses. You have to have a place large enough to store the things. You have to pay Ebay fees and they make out well. You have to find and generally, buy, the thing. You have to be prepared to refund the customer if the thing gets broken in shipment or the thing turns out not to work when you thought it did, or the customer's just a pain.

Or you can go out and play an instrument (or, frankly, beg or just about anything) and there's your $3 often within the first 3 minutes. Suddenly you don't need a place big enough to store a lot of things, you don't need packing supplies or hours a day to go out and find the things, or trips to the post office or any of these many, many types of overhead. 

Just ... play instrument ... here is money. 

I was pushed so hard to be an artist that even I thought I should do that, hence the airbrush work and I was quite good if I say so myself. I thought even if I did caricatures/portraits that would be simple but even doing caricatures requires a ton of steps and a lot of materials. You have to essentially set up a bower like the bowerbird does, a display of your work, a place for you and your subject to sit, lights for when it gets dark, yadda yadda. It's possible to pare down quite a bit from the standard setup but it's still a ton of stuff compared to take instrument - go to place where people pass by or linger a bit  - play - money happens.

So even though I've got something like a black belt in Ebay selling and even though I know where to find tons of small things - seashells - that are worth a fair amount, selling on Ebay is not what I have planned for my retirement years. And Ebay selling is the only kind of selling of physical things I'd have open to me in dear old Hawaii. 

The reason for this is, if a "haole" or someone perceived to be such, sells any physical thing off of the sidewalk, they are going to jail. No ifs ands or buts. Draw a picture which changes hands - jail. Make and sell shell necklaces - jail. Make bamboo flutes and play one and a flute and money change hands -  jail. 

Pacific Islanders can sell their little coconut-leaf origami creations all night, and even sell little blinky LED things, but if a "haole" does it - jail. In fact the guy with parrots who'd let people take photos of themselves with a parrot or three perched on them, would go in and out of jail routinely. He had friends always nearby to take his birds when the police came to cart him off. And he wasn't selling the parrots, obviously, just having them sit on people's shoulders and letting them take the pictures. But, he was "haole".... 

But Hawaii is home to a couple of notable "haole" shakuhachi players, plus all the old guys who play guitar and uke, will tell you how they idolize and adore Chet Atkins, who was "haole" as hell. I'm very, very unlikely to go to jail for playing the shakuhachi, the only caveat being that people may not hear me to be annoyed by me - it's a fairly quiet instrument. I'm probably cop-proof with that one.

As for the uke, what would I get sent to jail for? Playing a ukulele in Waikiki? Seriously? "Yes, Your Honor, I was playing a ukulele, IN WAIKIKI". When they have noisy-ass break dancers and the pan flute plague to worry about? With the Chet Atkins admiring old guys saying, "Eh, dis buggah all right; he play da kines, ah?" 

So I am really hanging my hopes on music as a first-line survival skill, with selling things on Ebay as fallback position, keeping in mind it's a lot harder work for the money. 

What surprises me about the homeless people I've talked to is they don't seem to have any skills at all, or any interest in developing a skill. As I handed a pack of pens over to "Pee Pee Lady" in front of Whole Foods, if I were out there myself, I'd work on my lettering skills and make a lot of signs with sayings on them that people like, and have them out so people will want to buy them. Keep the costs of making them minimal and it's good money because they see you're "trying". 

I'm sure that's how buskers are seen these days, in this new social environment where buskers are being eliminated. That you can't possibly be out there unless you're at the end of your rope, but at least you're "trying". 

This gets back to how things were 100 years ago. If you were blind, for instance, there wasn't much available to you but playing music, and if you were poor, this meant doing it out on the street. Blind buskers were very much a thing. It was understood that a lot of these street buskers were very skilled, even geniuses, but lifting them up off of the street had to wait for the post-WWII economy. Until then it was understood that no matter how good you were, your career was going to be on the street and that was OK; it beat starving or being a shut-in who just exists. 

I think a big problem is that unless you're solidly middle-class, you don't get taught any skills. Art and music programs are gone from working-class schools now. Metal shop, woodshop, etc are gone too. I found myself at the top of the skills pyramid for street beggars as, in the middle-class part of my childhood I'd hustled Almond Roca door to door and been expected to know how to talk to people with a fair amount of confidence and poise. 

Of course "the homeless" I've had a chance to talk to have been the obviously so, as people who are homeless but have actual skills and a social network probably just spend some time in their car or couch-surfing and get back onto the grid fairly easily. So I've been talking to the real zeros. 

First rain of the season

 Last night I not only took some stuff part but listed 20 things on Ebay and at the end of all that I was tired and went right to bed. I figured I'd let Ken be my alarm clock but I woke up at 4 and Ken didn't show up until a bit after 5. 

I was drizzling outside, and I was just heading out the door when Ken came zooming in. He just wanted to finish re-arranging a bunch of stuff and I told him I was going out to exchange something at Ross. 

Which I was. I hadn't realized I still have a fleece pullover so I didn't need the rather ugly one I'd bought on the fear of not having one at all. I got $18 store credit for it and found a nice table cloth and two t-shirts and kicked in some of my own money also to pay for those. 

Using a towel for a photography background isn't very smart, but especially the one I got which is very delicate and already had little loops of thread popping up everywhere. I found a nice grey tablecloth that will work fine for my remaining time here. 

With the $5 I had left I went to H Mart and got some fish and some of the small cucumbers that are still on sale. 

Today's freebees: Two large onions that were just lying at the edge of the road. Nothing wrong with 'em, not sure how they got there, but there they were. 

When I got back Ken was doing his organizing, taking some more of his wife's stuff out and moving things so we can move around in the warehouse more easily. We got to talk a bit too, and I've got new things to list tomorrow. 

Two days' worth of errands in one.

 I practiced last night, lots of long tones. I got to sleep, hoping I'd wake up in time to get out of here before Ken comes by, and I actually had time to have coffee and nuts and clear out my bagged-up bubble wrap etc. area in the loft so Ken can get to the shelves he puts his personal stuff on. 

His plan was to come over with a trailer full of stuff from the storage unit and move things around so he can pay for one less unit, maybe going from three down to two. And put the extra stuff in here. 

I was headed out when Ken came roaring up in his truck with trailer, and I said I was off, had to meet a friend etc., and left. 

My first stop was in Japantown. To "Ukulele Source" more precisely. The idea here is that shakuhachi practice has so far not yielded much that's very musical for me, but it has strengthened my breathing and actually helped my singing quite a bit, the tiny amount I experiment with it. I've been considering busking by singing for quite a while now, especially as I like to think up funny songs. Since I am dead-set against anything that requires electricity, backing tracks and a mic are right out. But a uke and voice could work just fine. 

Since I didn't want to spend money at the evil Guitar Center, I wanted to get out of here in time to hit up Ukulele Source which closes at 5. I wanted a banjo uke because (a) they're cool, (b) they put out a fair amount of volume and (c) I'd actually taught myself the "George Formby" stroke years ago and am sure I can learn it again. If I'm to be out there singing, I'm really going to want something I can do to give my voice a rest between songs. Since I've never, ever, seen anyone use that technique in real life, it could be a real crowd pleaser.

Of course I talked and joked around with the nice old guy who's the owner of Ukulele Source. I said I hope that by buying this uke, I'll magically end up with extra time to practice it. The only way this might actually, magically, happen, is if I find playing the uke and singing to be more fun than practicing the shakuhachi which I do out of duty these days, and because it's more fun, I find myself doing it more. 

After once hearing about "the guy who plays ukulele who's here later in the evening" at Whole Foods from that one lady, and inquiring of others who all swear he does not exist, maybe I will become that guy.  After all, I'd swear there were people who confused me with Trumpet Rabbit Guy because he played trumpet and I played trumpet.

They had two banjo ukes there at Ukulele Source, a hideous plastic thing called a "Gem", and a Kala that actually looked like a solid instrument and had better be, as it cost more then twice as much. Both sounded about the same, both are rather heavy - the nice guy at Ukulele Source cautioned me that the Kala is heavy, but I weighed both in my hands and said the "Gem" is heavy also. 

So I paid for my new uke, put it in its case and on my back and off I rode. I stopped at Nijiya for a small bag of peanuts and cash back, then went down to Walmart and got my flu shot and bought some small routine things. 

Now, the thing with Ken is, when he comes over to work on things, I ended up "drafted", working for the day and I'm working more hours than I'm paid for as it is. So I thought up some more things to do.... I stopped at the Amazon place for bubble mailers, at the exercise equipment at St. James Park for, well, some exercises, then rode up Hedding to Oakland Road and on up to 99 Ranch for a thing and some more cash back, and got some tea eggs and ate those at one of the tables outside. 

Next I rode to H Mart and locked the bike, and walked over to Sprouts for macadamia nuts, then bounced back to H Mart for some beef and more of those little cucumbers which are something like 65c a lb right now.Cucumber slices are my version of potato chips.

Now I really was done, and had done all this with the uke in its case, on my back. (I did take it off, and my shirt, for the flu shot.) I rode back here wondering what kind of to-do Ken might have going, but I got back and he was gone. 

I eventually raised him on the phone because I wanted him to know it's going to rain tomorrow, in case he has anything in the trailer or at his house that's uncovered. He says everything's OK in that area, and he's coming by tomorrow again to do more re-arranging in here. I told him how I'd done a weekend's worth of errands today and how, if he's going to come back over, I might take the book I'm trying to read and go read it at the casino. 

I'm glad I got ahold of him because of planning like this, what to do with this huge space heater that's appeared in the office, what to do with a big clunky piece of test equipment and the plug-in that goes with it (sell the plug-in, take the bigger piece apart and sell the pieces) etc. 

 

Toot-toot and beep-beep

 I practiced some last night, long tones and attacked one problem more directly. Going from the 2nd highest to the highest note in one song, is a real problem so I worked on just that little transition and will work on it some more. 

I surprised myself by being up in time to take the things I'd packed last night and get them sent. I took the small thing with me and dropped it off downtown on my way to the bank, where my accounting and the bank's were in perfect agreement. 

I doubled back around and rode back to Japantown and did some shopping at Nijiya, and got back here at only a bit after 5. 

Traffic was nuts, frankly. It used to be that in the Bay Area your car horn could be broken and you'd never know. Now, I guess the car horn is like it is supposed to be for New Yorkers, just another part of the car like the clutch or the brake, to get regular use. Pretty funny really. 

I had time to not only load the big box with 14 things in it for one buyer, but to pack two smaller things and take it all along, up to the post office and FedEx for the big box. Then I picked up packing stuff, everything was nice and boring and routine. 

Today's freebee: A copy of "Behind The Kitchen Door" by Saru Jayaraman and a bunch of vending machine sized bags of chips, enough to fill a Walmart plastic bag.  I have to admit, I took out the bags of salt and vinegar potato chips and ate those (my mouth is rather abraded now). I took the bag out to the trash enclosure and hung it up and eventually a guy came by and checked it out and took them. 

Like we're back in Lindbergh times

 I futzed around taking some stuff apart, putting the stuff Ken had away, at least to places I'd not trip over it, and did my haircut. I even practiced (a little). 

I didn't go to bed until a bit past 10AM, so I told myself I'd not worry about the bank, as long as I was up in time to go to the shakuhachi club meeting. I got up at 5, so that was perfect. Then I got an email, Rinban Sakamoto's injured his shoulder and can barely move it, and Paul Endo, the choir director who's joined the club, is out of town. So no meeting this month. 

I hurriedly packed the 5 things I'd gotten out of the warehouse last night, and headed out a bit after 6. It was hot out there! It must not actually be like summer because I don't need to have a fan blowing on me at all times, but it felt summery. 

After dropping the packages off at the post office and FedEx, I had time to stop by the iTaiwan store that's where the falafel place used to be. Almost everything in there is (a) full of sugar and carbs or (b) some kind of weird tea with ingredients listed in their scientific names. I picked out a couple bottles of what I thought were black coffee just so I wasn't wasting their time and the two gals in there and I talked a bit. It was pretty nice but there's not much in there I need day to day. Besides, when I got the bottles home and read the label closely, they're some kind of black tea and coffee mix. 

I found some packing stuff on my way home and didn't stop by Tom's as he's got a collection of cars there so he's adamant about hosting a collection of bums and I don't want to be anywhere near bums. 

World War III continues its slow, gradual, wind-up I guess. The fifth column here in the US has managed to freeze all sorts of things like aid to Israel, to Ukraine, and even things like military officer promotions. I think we're in something like the times in the 1930s if Charles Lindbergh hadn't become discredited or withdrawn or whatever happened to him, and we'd entered WWII with a much stronger fifth column. 

Some good news I've heard on the radio is about Rachael Maddow's new book "Prequel" - there was an interview with here on NPR about it: https://books.google.com/books/about/Prequel.html?id=9IrCEAAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description

Maddow points out that Lindbergh looked like a shoo-in for President, "Father" Coughlin was hugely popular on the radio, militias, many directly funded by the Axis, were thriving, etc. And yet, none of the Axis' far-right future for the US came to pass. 

I opened two letters Ken had brought over last night. One was from the IRS saying I'm due a refund of $790 or so, which means it refers to the actual $850 or so I just got, or there's *another* one on the way. As long as I don't owe them money I'm happy, and if I do, I get it taken care of right away. 

The other one was from Blue Cross saying I won't have (medi-cal) insurance from them after January 1st so ... no health insurance? I guess this means it's time for lots of shots! Not only the flu and covid shots, but I should get shots for RSV, the 2-dose shingles shot, and I'd like to get a hepatitis B shot. So I'll have to do all of those before the end of the year. 

I did the final touch-ups on the stain on the standard Shakuhachi Yuu, now I just have to give it a couple of days to fully dry, then I can have a try at putting red paint on the interior. It doesn't look great but it does look a lot less like a hunk of plastic. 

Summer in October

 I did the usual things last night, got a lot of Ebay stuff done, packed things, etc. 

I also put a layer of finish/stain on the stock Yuu last night, and have it drying up in the loft on the stand I made. I'm starting to realize that the only way I'm going to get my projects done is to accept that they'll get done in a half-exhausted near-panic at 4AM. 

I got up, packed another 10 or 11 things, and headed out. All but one went to the post office. 

I took the one to FedEx then went to the chicken place and handed over my change for some chicken, and since that's about $6.50 and I had a bit over $7 in change I told the guy to keep it all, with the result that he put a biscuit and a lot of potato strips in the bag also. 

I ate the chicken outside and saved the biscuit and potato strips. The EMT place didn't have anything in fact I was surprised how empty their dumpster was. I guess they didn't teach any classes this week. 

I stopped over at Tom's. James, the troublemaking freeloader, was parked across the street in his truck and not coming over when he saw me there; he's keeping his distance. Tom was there and I handed him the biscuit and potato slices and he ate 'em while we talked. He's still pissed off about the trouble his taking James in got him into. 

I told him my thoughts, how if the guy who's got a vendetta against James plays golf with the right City employees, Tom might be in for a hard time. And, we only know James' side of things, Does he know if James is a sex offender or has some kind of horrible record etc.? This is why I never interacted with the local denizens when I lived there in that building, I told Tom. I related how I'd talked to a few when I was new, but was very neutral - friendly but not too much, nothing that would leave any impression. He said he'd read this same advice in some book on living "off the grid", that said something like "Never change anything so much as to be noticeable". 

I got back here and cleaned the office and bathroom right away, and Ken came by at his newer, earlier, time. He had a lot of stuff to unload and now I have some new stuff to play with (sell).  

I had to ask Ken to actually sign my pay check, then sign it again in the proper place. I think if there's anything else I'm going to sell to him, I'd better get it done before he goes senile, and I need to be prepared to greatly accelerate my plans to leave here. 

How you know the apocalypse is near

 I finished the load of laundry, listed 20 things on Ebay, and found all the things that had sold that I had to ship, then did a little practice. 

I'm beginning to realize a lot of the trouble I'm having with the shakuhachi (and shakuhachi trouble is nothing compared to trumpet trouble) is what I can only describe as bad habits from trumpet. Like pressing too hard against the utaguchi and "straining" not that you can strain that much on any kind of a flute. Kevin, with his saxophone background, strains like crazy and then wonders why he can barely get a peep. 

I can't think of a healthier instrument to play than the shakuhachi, and I swear here and now that even if I never busk again, even if I take up another instrument for some reason, I will always practice the shakuhachi because the effect of doing so is so good. And I am eternally grateful to Rinban Sakamoto for putting one into my hands. 

Last night I went to bed telling myself I'd sleep later, since I'd just pack FedEx things so I could leave here at 7PM instead of 6PM. And that's exactly how it went. I packed a bunch of large and medium things, left here at 7 with my rather big load, and dropped them off at FedEx. I found a bunch of bubble wrap at one place and one box - to replace the one just like it I'd used, I guess - from the "deformed fruit" place near Tom's. 

I'd wanted to stop at Tom's to say hi, but he had a couple of his pet bums there, James and some other guy. I guess Tom still has to internalize the idea that collecting bums is a very expensive hobby. Very. If the guy with a vendetta against James plays golf with the right people in the city government, Tom's in for a very rough ride indeed. 

I got back in here and washed out the shop vac I use around here, and had it sitting out front, drying, and I was just getting the pieces (top and bottom halves) to put them inside when I heard something like a "how's it going" and there was a fuckin zombie, right on top of me. This zombie was pretty normal looking, which is how some of 'em get you. I believe it was the old guy from the place near the end, who's in cahoots somehow with the welding place. Mr. Zombie walked past and I dunno, checked the door or some inane thing, then came back and by that time I was all buttoned up here. I know we've got another shop vac around here somewhere but I'd rather not have a perfectly good working vacuum cleaner stolen by some scumbag. 

One of the things I'd found - today's freebee? - was a McDonald's bag with some McDonald's chicken nuggets and hot dogs. Hot dogs? Yes, apparently McDonald's sells hot dogs now, which is strangely more apocalyptic than the other weird shit going on around here. I guess when you run out of hamburgers you have to have something you can sell. Anyway needless to say I picked this stuff up to leave out for the birds, not for myself. Things haven't gotten that bad yet. 

I was thinking the other day, that if I feel I have to carry the Glock when I go out that doesn't show it's time to leave, but it would show that it had been time to leave much earlier than that. 

This is a good thread on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/povertyfinance/comments/179wwiw/signs_you_grew_up_poor/ We kids ended up having things even worse than almost everyone there but I think of the kid whose friends had no idea how to function when the electricity went out and he knows how to wash, do laundry, cook, etc without it and I'm glad I have skills like that too. At one point starting a nice camp fire to cook on took me no more effort than turning on a stove, it seemed like, and I was maybe 13 years old. 

But there were a ton of negative things too. For instance never cooking for myself until I was around 40, because when I was a kid the only safe place to put food was in your stomach. So if you got a little money you spent it on something and ate it, quickly. Of course you shared if someone else was around but the point was, you might have $1 or so and had eaten nothing for the day, my go-to was a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips from this microscopic little store in Waikane, a fair but not bad, walk from our house and I'd eat that whole bag of chips. 

The idea of having things just sitting around the kitchen to cook meant whoever was biggest/strongest/quickest would get those things. I suspect my siblings did a lot of sneaky eating too. 

Also the idea that you have to spend any money you get, quick, before it evaporates. That was drilled into me unceasingly. First, as a kid, it was spent it on food and eat that food right away, or because I was supposed to become an artist, spending it on art supplies was excusable. 

Then, in college, to get financial aid to go at all you had to be poor, and stay poor. When I was a "professional amateur" athlete for a while it was like that too - you had to prove you were poor then they'd give you a fair amount of grant money but you had to spend that up that year. 

So my "savings" have always been my ability to get by on little; I know how little food a person can exist on. And having knowledge and skills. Turning saving money into a game is a pretty recent thing with me but it's a game I find pretty enjoyable. This is reinforced by my being a "prepper" who is sure the apocalypse is right around the corner, any day now. And tempered by my knowledge that as things get worse, money is going to matter less and less compared to skills and social connections and the ability to come up with things like food. 

Reading that Reddit thread, I think now that my parents were smart to move us to Hawaii. Firstly it was cheaper to live in Hawaii than on the mainland, always has been and always will be. And it's not just prices for things, but that you don't need summer-winter-autumn/fall clothes and lots of pairs of shoes. You don't need heat, and only mainlanders need A/C so you don't need that either. Sales tax, called "general excise tax" for some reason in Hawaii, is less than half what it is on the mainland and that's the tax that affects the little guy. 

It would have been far worse for us if we'd not moved to Hawaii. And the teasing, bullying, and peer pressure that's mentioned so often in that thread, was largely not present in Hawaii. Sure you get some flack for being white or part white, but that's pretty minor. No one makes fun of you having raggedy clothes when some of your classmates are literally right off the boat/plane from Samoa or Micronesia and carrying their books in a carrying bag they wove themselves from a coconut leaf. So I'm going to say it: The one smart thing my parents did was move us to Hawaii. 

I read these accounts on Reddit of the struggles people had growing up over shoes .... just shoes, I feel like I dodged a bullet. Add in clothes, and heat and all that ... wow. 

When she was in the mood for it, Mom tried. She got us these sneakers with three stripes on the sides, I remember that. They were OK sneakers; if you're used to putting in your miles barefoot you can strap on anything and you won't get blisters. I wore the things at one of my first jobs at a gas station and took them with me to Basic at Fort Dix with the result that when I finally had access to my "civvies" again I got them out and they stunk like gas. I threw them out. 

But that's not the funniest story. My mom got us these sort of jogging suits, with pants and a sort of zip-up jacket. The only problem was, if you wore one of those at Kahuku High School at the time, it meant you were saying, "I'm tough". So we only wore them a day or two and besides they were hot and sweaty. The kids from Guam for instance wore stuff like that because they were actually tough, and cold. Guam's hotter than Hawaii. 

So clothes were pretty minor. If you had a decent T-shirt, you were OK. And you were not "required" in Hawaii to have a radio, Walkmans were still off in the future, and really the only trapping you had or didn't have to indicate your social status was yourself; your appearance and mostly this came down to size. Which we didn't have - we were all undersized for our ages and skinny because duh, we were poor. In Hawaii, in the 1970s, you got down to the real basis of things.  You knew where you stood and so did everyone else.

I still can't get over my alienation from and even sheer repugnance I feel at the prospect of doing art, and I've certainly tried. I think becoming disgusted by it was the proper and noble thing, though, because let's say I'd done tons of it and built up a career at it. The whole family would have essentially jumped on my back, expecting me to support them. It'd be 1000X worse than just selling a painting or drawing and using the money to buy dinner so we'd eat a particular night. Moving away wouldn't have helped, they'd all have just moved too, and moved in.

I'd pulled a Bartleby. I'd said, definitively, "I prefer not to". 

Meanwhile, music was the forbidden fruit.

An expensive pet part 2

 I practiced last night, lots of long tones. The "enhanced" shakuhachi is playing better, and I could tell, in my fumbling way, that 99% of it is me. This is why the instrument takes years of practice. 

And I have my shakuhachi club meeting this Thursday night. 

I started a load of laundry and otherwise puttered around, and watched weird videos about a psychosomatic "disease" called Morgellon's. What a rabbit hole - the sufferers of this delusion have decided it's linked to Lyme disease somehow. 

I did the exercises last night that I'd normally have done when I got up so when  I finally did get up, a little after 3, all I had to think about was coffee and packing things. I packed a dozen things and headed out. 

They were all just small things so I just had to go to the post office. It was pretty busy as everyone who'd delayed paying their taxes had to pay them now. Again I was really glad I took care of them in April. 

I stopped by Tom's on my way back and he was up, and felt like talking. A City inspector had been around, due to a complaint that an old enemy, a local business owner just up the street, had against James. It's nothing to do with Tom, other than that Tom was foolish enough to take James in, and thus, has taken on James' problems. 

And so James is out, his junk car is across the street, and Tom has to get rid of all his food, his clothing, any couches, any and all signs of habitation by himself or anyone else. And faces a fine of $2500 a day. When this fine is to commence is uncertain; I think Tom gets some time to remedy things then they inspect again. Tom's taken all the food I've given him plus a ton of other stuff and it's in a storage unit now. James, who will get off scot-free, is back to camping at his old place up the street. 

We talked out a lot of this, how the street denizens around here see kindness as weakness, and it might not even be on the conscious level, so James might have said things like, "I really don't want to take advantage, and I'm so thankful...." "While they eat your feet!" said Tom. 

Tom said it turns out the mixed residential-commercial zoning there only applied for places that are 7 acres or larger, so it's not OK even for he himself to live in there. I wondered at how I'd lived in there for years with no problem, and I'd seem some of the same people living in their cars in the area for years with no problem. 

The problem is, James loves to pile up big piles of trash and just leave them, plus he intends to keep annoying the business owner who's been complaining about him. And now Tom has brought this all down on himself, while James gets off scot-free. 

Finally we were talked out and I took off and came back here. I was doing little chores like burning a batch of "sensitive" papers (tails of Ebay forms etc.) and I had the door of this shop open as I was just across the parking lot, lighting my crumpled papers in the charcoal starter thing I use. 

I noticed with some shock that a skinny, waiflike even, zombess was striding with some purpose right toward the open door. I likewise strode right over to the door and the zombess next huddled with her phone next to our roll-up door and seemed to talk to someone. Once I was in here I grabbed one of my wire spool bolts in case the zombess wanted to "talk" but it just walked on past pretending not to see me and tootled on around the corner. Even a small, physically slight, meth-addled zombess can be a nasty creature to fight, and who knows if the damned thing is a scout for a nest of zombies over on Crack Alley? Have I mentioned how much I hate the undead?

Once the "burn" was done and I'd rinsed my hair in preparation for a haircut, I could button up for the night, though. 

Deepest darkest Cupertino

 Today's "fun" was to go to Marukai Market to get coffee filters which they're the sole source of around here. 

I got a later start than I wanted to, but got going, stopped in at Nijiya for ginger, dropped off some books and stuff at the little free library there, then got going for a long ride. 

It took me a half-hour to get from Japantown to Stevens Creek and Saratoga, which isn't bad. It took another 10 minutes just to go from there to Mitsuwa Marketplace where I got a book on learning the katakana/hiragana, and got some raw fish and a "hamburger croquette" to eat. 

When I left there, it was dark. I got back on the road and another half hour later, wasn't sure if I was at Marukai Marketplace as there were a million stores in that pinnacle of human evolution, the strip mall alongside a stroad. But I knew the closest bus stop was the Portal one, so I turned in at Portal street and by doing a perimeter search, found myself at Marukai Market. Whew! 

I went in and got some coffee filters to last me a while, then went over to Daiso to look around, getting a scrub brush and a set of little paint brushes. 

Now it was a long ride back, and by now it was close to 9PM, which in this area is the equivalent of midnight. That time that nothing good happens afterward. As I got to Saratoga again, I heard a couple of zombies yelling at each other and figured I'd circle around to watch the zombie fight - bad idea, as the entrances to what look like legit driveways are guarded by chains, painted black, held up by posts, also painted black. I braked just in time, and decided the zombies can just fight without my watching. There are traps of this type all over the place. 

I got back to Whole Foods and since I had a nice case of heartburn going from the hamburger "croquette" and probably the coffee I kept taking slugs of, I stopped in and locked the bike and got my little 3-pack of Underberg and some kalamata olives. 

A lady was begging in front with a sign, and since I won't be here the 10 or so years it would take to learn her name, I'll call her Pee-Pee Lady as her "performance" has long been to stand with a nearly unreadable sign, fidgeting around as if she has to pee. This plays well with the middle-aged ladies. 

I had a package of new dry-erase pens which actually work well on cardboard, so I'd greeted her with something like "I knew there was a reason I came here!" and gave her the pens. She'd just made a new sign so it was slightly less unreadable than usual but give it a little time... 

We talked about various ways to hustle up money, and I said if I ever end up holding a sign I think I'd make a lot of signs with funny sayings on them and let people buy them from me. I'd use black and white chalk markers so I'd have the brown of the cardboard plus black and white. 

Pee-Pee Lady has an apartment and has had the same PO box for 27 years. She's probably got social security and disability and food stamps, and she said the one medicine she really needs is about $1.40 for a 90-day supply. But one reason people beg is not only the extra money but it's something to do. Plus, if you've been down and out or think you might be, you're very much inclined to make extra money when you can and hide it. Or she might be helping support grand kids. 

She knows Leroy and saw him recently, within the last week. So he's still alive, and whatever Godforsaken place inland he want to take care of his mom, he hasn't been swallowed up by the place, never to return. 

I rode back and passed through San Pedro Square - no buskers. Plenty of loud music from a few places but that never stopped a few in the past. At least they'd set up out on Santa Clara street. 

In fact on my way out I'd noticed where a coffee shop used to be 15 or 20 years ago and remembered that back when I used to go there, there was a night a week where people would some and sing or play an instrument, for a small audience but mainly for each other. There was a whole circuit where each night of the week you could go to a different coffee shop and do this. The coffee shop, and such subversive activities as that, are all gone now. 

The ride back was quiet, too quiet in places as, for instance, turning from 10th to Bayshore, it's only because of my rather keen hearing that I heard the shuffling of a zombie, that if the light took too long, would be right on top of me. Fortunately the light changed and I got out of there before the zombie could shuffle too close. Then, as I came into the complex here, I rode over where this Vietnamese place tosses out boxes and was about to check them out when I heard that little, hoarse, kind of whistle that kind of goes "sweet!" that people/zombies use to signal each other, and got right back on the bike and outta there. 

Rogers Avenue is just about solid zombie-infested RV's along the area by the cement plant and the food truck place. Needless to say there are all kinds of sketchy people with all kinds of transport from their own two shuffling feet maybe dragging a trash bag, to a bike without a front wheel that they're wheeling along (with two bike wheels hanging off of it somehow) to a bike plus shopping cart, decrepit old car or truck, or even some nice, high-end cars (these last being the drug dealers) Crack Alley's a busy place these days. 

Today's freebees: A copy of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and three issues of The New Yorker. 

An expensive pet

 I did my usual stuff last night, and ended up reading "The Cruise Of The Snark" by Jack London which is free online. I realized that I'd started reading it long ago, and quit when they got to the part about Haleakala. It's not that Haleakala isn't impressive, it's that, growing up in Hawaii, I'd had about enough of it. House Of The Sun, silversword grows there and no where else in the world, yadda yadda. 

I'd cheated myself back then, though, as the following chapters about London's various travels around Pacific islands that were already largely depopulated were fascinating and also sad. As I've observed about just the island of Oahu, there are vast areas where lots of people lived 200 years ago and no one lives now. (The standard figure not only in the Americas but right across the Pacific is a 90% - 95% dieoff.)

I got some practice in, and the "enhanced" shakuhachi does, indeed, seem to play a bit better than the "un-enhanced" one. 

I got some sleep and did I ever sleep. It's the weekend, after all. I got up around 5, and checked my email - Tom tells me "no more food, a City inspector came around because there was a complaint. The complaint is due to Tom's latest "pet" or hanger-on, James. 

James latched onto Tom because he, James, had been having a "war" with one of the business owners on the street, and as far as I can tell, for good reason. James is a slob, he's got at least a couple of junk vehicles at any one time, he's noisy, his dog is ill-disciplined, and James himself seems to be an experiment in how long a human being can go without bathing or engaging in any other modern self-maintenance. 

James can, legally, park his junk cars on Tom's property plus apparently Tom's bought hundreds of dollars worth of stuff from James that he'll never be able to resell, other than as scrap, at a loss. Tom's being a pretty good host to a parasite like James. 

So, the guy with the vendetta is merely doing the same thing I've done around here. Finding any legitimate complaint he can lodge, and in general making life uncomfortable for the undesirable. The real battle was with the illegal stone cutting operation next door, but I got 'em out. If James made personal threats against the vendetta guy, I can understand how merely retreating a door or two down the street to Tom's place would not be enough. The guy wants James gone. 

And Tom is paying for all of this, literally as well as figuratively. He's actually let James live in the office in the back of his place, which means now eviction rules come in if he wants to rid himself of the bum. 

I left here around 7. I rode past Tom's place and the wood pile, James' junk car and junky truck, are all gone. It makes me wonder how hard that inspector came down on Tom, and whether James threw some kind of temper tantrum and got his vehicles towed and himself a night in jail... 

I ended up riding with a Korean guy on a folding bike, which I complimented right off, and said I'm considering getting one when I move back home because it's so small to store. We ended up at light after light. He was going to H Mart but he did it an interesting way - he didn't turn at the big intersection but at the next one, and went in that way. I bet that's a lot safer. 

I rode on, past 99 Ranch and to the place where I'm gradually working up to being able to do a bunch of chin-ups. I did better than last time, and as I was doing my thing, a security guard car came closer and closer. I finished up at the guy got to me and I went over to explain what I was up to. The guard, a skinny Black guy, said it's no problem with him, and there's an Asian guy who works there who's the only one who uses the exercise equipment. "He's jacked!" he enthused. 

I went back around to 99 Ranch for some shopping. I found not only the wheat gluten "loaf" I've been buying, but a couple of other different kinds, seasoned with some kind of sauce but according to the label not too carb-y. 

Then I went to H Mart to lock the bike and walked over to Sprouts for things, then back to H Mart for other things. On the way back I stopped by Tom's and knocked on the door since he had his lights on. No answer; only some barking from James' dog. Tom's likely passed out from his "enjoying" the weekend, as he says he's "trying not to drink during the week". 

 

The leopards are eating well

 There's something on Reddit called "Leopards Ate My Face". It's best explained in the saying, "When I voted for the 'Leopards Eating Faces' Party, I didn't think leopards would eat *my* face!". 

So the "Palestinians", who voted for Hamas at a rate of something like 90%, are being asked to leave the land they've been squatting on, because Hamas wants to start at least a region-wide war. And now the "Palestinians" are crying and moaning about it. After conducting a sneak attack that would make ISIS proud. No sympathy here. 

I was up in time to pack 10 things and get going a bit earlier than my usual time which was good because for some reason I could not ship the one large one by FedEx so I had to ship it by UPS and thus, went to the UPS place first, then the post office, then FedEx on my way back to buy some paper. 

I didn't find much of anything for packing material but got today's freebee, some Romaine lettuce.

 

Axis Donnie

 Ken came over last night and I got my check, got some things to take apart which I did, and got some practice in - long tones, and I'm getting more used to the "enhanced" shakuhachi yuu. 

I woke up today and turned on the radio - the war in Israel is going along and of course Trump has had to put in his two cents: He called Hamas "smart", called a high-ranking Israeli official a "jerk", and Israel's government "stupid". 

So in case there's any lingering confusion as to whether Trump is a blueprint Nazi, this ought to clear it up. Christians are not a smart bunch of people, but Orange sHitler is really working overtime to alienate anyone who's not utterly fixated on worshipping the Fat Orange One personally, over even their supposed Top Guy, Jesus Christ Himself. 

I took off for the bank and deposited my pay check, and the numbers matched up to the penny. It's nice when that happens. I think the reason I was about $30 short last week was, the Hall flute place refunded me for the flute but not the books which I'd sent back so, which is in keeping with his 99.9% of music stores do things. I'd just sent the books back and said if they can't re-sell them to "gift" them to a charity or something. So my refund had been around $80 instead of around $120. 

I went to Whole Foods and got some meatloaf and Brussels sprouts which were a satisfying little meal and only cost me about $6. 

Then I headed over to Walmart for my "weekly Wal" and got a big package of TP and other stuff. On the way over I'd stopped at the Amazon place and really loaded up on bubble mailers so with the Walmart stuff I had a big Whole Foods bag stuffed with something hanging off of each handlebar. 

I rode through downtown and this is where things got interesting. All I did was get onto 3rd coming back from Walmart and stayed on it, and at one of the large intersections noted a skinny guy on a light grey bike go by which is no problem, I made way for him. We rode along for a while and since he seemed a faster type on a faster bike, I figured he'd go on ahead. Odd. 

I slowed down gradually since this is how you usually shake these guys; you go slower and they're in a hurry and get bored and take off at their natural speed. But he slowed down too and stayed right with me, just ahead. This was getting a bit weird. 

I skipped over a street, from 3rd to 4th, rode along it for a while, then after an intersection or two, there he was, at the same pace, just ahead of me. So he'd bothered to keep track of where I'd gone, raced ahead and "met" me, having a good idea of where I was going. This was getting a bit creepy. 

I took advantage of some traffic to dodge back down to 3rd and went over to Nijiya and did my grocery shopping there. Then I rode back the way I'd come and around to the Japantown light rail station where a train came right away. I had a fun time talking about motorcycles and engines and cars and stuff with a "cholo" sort of guy, and got off at Metro/Airport. 

I rode back in here without incident, other than that when I was pulling into the complex a car came zooming in from the main road and I wasn't sure it wasn't one of the erstwhile denizens of the parking lot here, so I zoomed into Galli Produce's loading area and stopped next to one of their big trucks to see what the car was going to do. I came in here cautiously, and the car turned out to belong to the old white guy who has the machine shop - not the Mormon machine shop, nor the Asian machine shop that leaked green goop into here, but the other machine shop - and their car does look a bit like the gold Mercedes driven by one of the scumsuckers some years ago. 

It wasn't an aggressive scumsucker, bent on revenge for my running him out of here, just typical old white guy "gas it and don't look where you're going too carefully" driving. It amounts to the same thing if they hit you, frankly. I'm just jumpy, but better jumpy than dead, I think. 

Whole Foods had a good assortment of what's taken the place of buskers these days. First there was the far-right-wing white guy who likes to argue with people, with his HELP MAUI and HELP THE HOMELESS signs (I'd be astoundeded if even a penny found its way to anyone on Maui). I did not say hello to him, nor did he say anything to me. He was busy hustling people anyway. There was an overweight Black guy with a sign, white beard, looking sad. Probably diabetic. He talked about with the first guy so at least they're on cordial terms. And over by the sign at the entrance to the parking lot was some really broken-down homeless guy with you guessed it, that essential homeless accessory, a nearly unreadable sign. 

Productive Wednesday

 I packed 21 things last night, most of them medium and big. It took me two trips to take them all to the post office and FedEx. 

On the way back the first trip, I got a lot of bubble bags and other good packing stuff. On the 2nd trip back I got a huge stack of those firm foam frameworks that go around large pieces of equipment. It was quite an impressive stack on the bike trailer but it worked. 

The weather's cooling but zombies are still everywhere. Hell as I was coming back with my big stack of stuff, a I heard a rustling and a zombie staggered out of the tall grass on the road median - fortunately a slow-walker, attracted by the greater noise than most bikes make, with the trailer and big load of wind-catching foam. It's not hard to out-ride a slow walker so I just sped up a bit - the undead will never stop creeping me out. 

I got back here and did a parking lot cleanup job, and filched some parts off of a furnace the HVAC place had left out. Ken called when I was working on that, saying he'd be here around 9. Maybe he's shifting his schedule earlier. 

The Middle-Eastern Front

 As a lot of people have been, I've been racking my brain trying to figure out who benefits from Hamas' idiotic attack on Israel? The old rule of "cui bono?" tells me it's almost certainly Russia. Putin is hoping that by opening a second front, it will help his war against the Allies on the Ukraine front. In the same way that Hitler wanted the Japanese to open a Pacific front in WWII with the idea it would make the Americans less able to fight in Europe. 

I will also say that, as some on Reddit are theorizing, it could well be that WWIII has started. When did WWII start? Americans will say it started on December 7th, 1941 but at that time England had been fighting alone (with some US aid) for a couple of years. Japan had already moved into China, and if you ask the Spanish and Ethiopians, the war was already well underway by that time. 

If I wanted to take a nice sight-seeing trip to Israel, now that's out. So far it'd be perfectly fine for me to take a nice vacation in Hawaii, and I can only hope this is still the case a year from now. There's a chance it may not be, and then my plans may have to get interesting. 

So it's Axis vs. Allies all over again. The Axis being Russia, its puppet/ally states like Belarus and North Korea, white factions in South Africa, and the large fifth column in the US. I don't include China in this because China is smart enough to only be "for" China, and the most liberal and sophisticated "Western" nation is still a bunch of savages by comparison. 

Practice last night: Since I have the stock Shakuhachi Yuu taken apart and on the stand I'd made, to thoroughly dry out after giving it a good scrub with alcohol last night, I practiced a bit on the "enhanced" one and to me it does not play as well. This means either it simply does not play as well, or maybe shakuhachi play better after they've got a bunch of hours on them. 

I was up in time to pack 20 things and get out of here. All the things went to the post office and I found some packing stuff on my route on the way back. The vending machine place had thrown out a lot of those small bags of various chips, so I bagged those up in a big bag and took them to Tom's. He was out so I hung it on the window bars on the front of his place and took off. 

Rain in October?

 I practiced a little, just went through my long tones routine, then hit the sack last night. 

I have my latest project all ready to assemble once I drill a couple of holes. It's to be a fixture for holding the two halves of a shakuhachi while paint, stain, etc. applied to the outside dries. 

I slept pretty well, and woke up around 4. Time for a few exercises, coffee, nuts, etc. It looks like it's going to rain out there. 

Today's a federal holiday, Columbus Day. He was an utter bastard so of course it's a national holiday. By far, as he kicked off the near complete genocide of people in most of North America and a good amount of the people in Central and South America, he gets a national holiday. We love the guy. 

I took off at 6 and went to Lowe's first for paper towels and some red paint, then over to H Mart to lock the bike up, walked over to Sprouts for some macadamia nuts, looked around in Home Goods and Ross but didn't buy anything, then back to H Mart for some veggies. 

I looked for packing stuff on my way back and found some bubble wrap, then as the last step before coming in here, checked the dumpster on the other side of Queen's Lane. There were boxes and boxes of something piled in front; something yellow. I got my flashlight out and investigated and it was boxes and boxes upon boxes of Colman's Mustard. Someone had been through the dumpster and piled most of it in front, and I didn't see anything else - just more mustard inside. 

I was just getting ready to leave when I heard a sort of a low yip. I looked and it was a zombie on a zombike. It circled around a bit and I got out of there. Mustard in that quantity would not be useful to anyone except maybe a restaurant that uses a lot of it, but it might be of high value to zombies. I can't suppose brains have much flavor on their own, and mustard might improve the taste considerably. 

I threaded my way back here by a fairly circuitous route and the zombie didn't follow, got in here and am buttoned up for the night. 

On the radio they're discussing how the homeless are now not only crapping up the cities but now invading the suburbs too. The thing with zombies is, when they first start to get zombified, they look, act, even smell, normal. The only way you can tell the zombie virus has started to take hold is the zombie-to-be has burned their bridges with family and friends, and are pretty much unemployable. 

The unemployability happens because of something that isn't measured regularly these days but to put it simply, they can no longer pass the Voight-Kampff test. Because they only see other people as things to be used, they're very bad at keeping appointments, promises, etc. They steal, they take drugs, they stop bathing, because they no longer have any sense of community or whether something is shameful. They're still smart enough to lie, connive, steal, but without that sense of empathy that differentiates a human from a zombie, they are only human-shaped and a huge pain in the ass - dangerous actually - wherever they pollute with their presence. 

There was a whole PBS episode about this, showing that schizophrenia isn't only the really obvious kind, with yelling and screaming and hearing voices, but that it starts with the "empathy" part of the brain no longer working. Take a human and show them a picture of a another human or a baby etc., and certain parts of their brain will light up. Test a zombie this way and the brain reacts the way a human's brain does when simply looking at a thing. That's the real-life Voight-Kampff test. 

Philip K Dick was right in "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" about empathic humans vs. non-empathic things. But it was not due to advanced robotics but due to a huge surplus population on the Earth, lots of new drugs, and the fact that if 100+ years ago, if you and Paddy O'Shea got in a fist fight and you got curb-stomped, you just flat-out died. Now, modern medicine saves you and you've got a traumatic brain injury and you stagger forward to a new career as a zombie. Doc Gurley at  https://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/doc-gurley-talks-about-bad-drugs-and-good-medicine/  talks about this - that the rate of head injury among the homeless is very high. 

It's amazing how much we're living in a Philip K. Dick world. Amazing technology but more and more people living like it's the 1930s. 

Another author author was Nevil Shute, with his novel "On The Beach". A couple of years back I came up with the theory that Shute, an engineer, probably figured out that global warming was going to kill us. Svante Arrhenius had worked that out 120 years ago, and if you're any kind of a scientist or engineer you know about him. Shute would have also noticed that the Earth has its own milder version of the "stripes" Jupiter has, that its atmosphere is sort of stratified or striated, and that deadly warming at the equator may take some time to reach the antipodes. 

But in the 1950s no one worried about global warming; they worried about nukes. So he made the story about nukes. But the last humans may well end up living their last in places like Australia, as described in the book. (I am only planning to move back where I grew up, near the equator, because everyone can't fit in New Zealand and Tasmania and I have no desire to be the last one standing.) 

I built my shakuhachi paint drying stand thing and it came out perfectly. I can stand both halves of a shakuhachi up on a nice sturdy base so the stain or other finishes I apply can dry. I can put it up in the loft where it's warm especially during the day. 

The red paint will go *inside* and I'll actually make a mock-up of sorts out of some PVC pipe I have around here to test out how to do it best. The paint is spray paint but I'm not sure if I'll be spraying it on, swabbing it on, or a bit of both. I'm hoping a coat of paint won't throw it out of tune or something, which is why I'm experimenting on the factory-standard Shakuhachi Yuu before I try any of my tricks on the fancy fine tuned one. 

Happy evening for a bum

 I practiced a *tiny* bit last night, mainly just messing around with that highest note that you normally play with 1-2 holes at the bottom closed, but it's possible to play it with all holes closed. I learned that from a video by Steven Taizen Casano, a shakuhachi player I may see a lot of in the future as he's based in Hawaii. 

It's harder to play that note than any other (other than the other, even higher ones, a really advanced player might play) so it's kind of a case of, "If I can play this, I can play anything". 

I went to sleep and actually slept pretty soundly, granted with some weird dreams that were kind of annoying. 

I woke up at something like 4:30 and had coffee and did exercises etc. I finally took off at almost 7, and rode right up to 99 Ranch. I tossed a bag of trash I'd taken with me, locked the bike, and asked a bum who was sitting against the wall there if he wanted anything from inside, like a Coke maybe? He said a soda would be great or, as bums always do, said a sandwich and ... and ... and ... I could tell he was warming up for a full-on beg-a-thon and I just said I'll fix him up. 

I got the things on my list and noticed their soda selection isn't good but those big tall cans of Budweiser were only about $2, and I found a bag of peanuts on sale for a little over a dollar. 

So I went back out to the bike and pulled the beer out and gave it to him, saying "Their soda selection isn't good" and said something like, "Wow! A beer! Thanks!" and I pulled out the peanuts, saying "And what goes with beer? Peanuts!" 

I hung out for a bit opening the little packets of noodles in the package of "White Curry Mee" noodles I'd bought, taking out the envelopes of seasoning and curry paste and leaving the noodles and the "powdered coconut-ish stuff" really just cheap coffee creamer. I asked the bum if he wanted the noodles to eat also and he did, so I said, "There you go, beer, peanuts, and a snack!" and rode off. 

I went into H Mart for some things, and had planned to go to Lowe's but since I was so late, figured I could get what I need without going there so I rode on home, only stopping at a dumpster with cabinetry scraps to pick out a nice piece of wood for what I want to build. 

I got back here and yep, have a couple of large/long electronics standoffs that will work fine for what I want to do. 

Since it's a 3-day weekend, I didn't do anything work-related other than the usual quick checks on Ebay activity, answering questions and accepting offers. Our numbers continue to be really good and Ken's not said anything about my going too low on prices. 

Ken doesn't come from the kind of poverty his wife or I did. He's really easy-going and his finances would be a wreck if it weren't for his wife. So as long as I keep the numbers good I don't think he really cares that much; it seems to have sunk in with him that this business will be done with in a couple of years - and only running well until I'm gone. I'm going to keep up the ruse that I'm staying here until the election in November though; it's a good way to keep pressure off of me and then woops! I'm outta here. 

The new Soviet economy strikes again

 I was too tired to practice last night so I didn't. 

I woke up in time to get ready, have coffee etc., and get out of here at 4. I rode over Crossroads Trading Co. thinking there's no way that shirt I'd seen yesterday would be gone. But it was. Somehow someone just had to have that shirt, although it was a Small which hardly any adults in this area can wear, and they'd bought it. 

Yeah it was $15 but it was a nice shirt, and I've experienced this a ton of times, that if you think you might want something, better grab it right away because it will be gone even if you go right back the next day. This goes for new things as much as used. I've had this happen too many times and really missed out.

I found another shirt there at Crossroads that would have been OK if it was an actual Small but it was what I mostly see these days, Mediums labeled Small. It makes sense given the size of the people... 

Next I rode up to Santana Row and went to my (apparently) favorite place there, Fjallraven. I had the bag I'd bought a while back, with all its tags and the receipt, in new condition. I was able to trade it for the one I'd seen yesterday that I wanted and even got about $16 back. The smaller bag turns out to be perfect for what I plan to use it for. 

I also looked for T-shirts in Big-5 but didn't find anything. It had been another hot day, in the 90s. I stopped at Whole Foods and had a large plate of food from the hot bar and a "Hoppy Refresher" which is a sort of hop/citrus flavored fizzy water made by Lagunitas. It's really good on a hot day like today, and unfortunately actual alcohol-free beers have a fair amount of carbs in them so they're out these days. 

On the ride home I found 5 New Yorker magazines and a copy of "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn which I've wanted to read for a while. 

I'd noted exactly zero buskers other than the lady who sings by the entrance to the mall across from Santana Row, frankly she's pretty good and sure works hard for her money. Whole Foods had no one, not even the annoying skinny white guy who likes to start arguments, and after eating and relaxing a bit and unlocking my bike to leave, I saw a regular beggar there, a lady who's "performance" is wiggling around like she has to pee, and holding a nearly unreadable sign. 

I guess today's freebees were the book and magazines. 

Today's horrible news is, the idiot Arabs have decided to try to start off a war in Israel. OK well and fine I guess, but they're doing it by kidnapping civilians, children, grandmothers, everyone *but* actual Israeli soldiers, who might fight back or something. Regular, peaceful, people are doing things like having a picnic or driving down the road in their own 'hood and getting shot to bits and the survivors taken into Gaza to be tortured to death, most probably. 

I believe the logic is that if Hamas, the Arab entity in Israel, kicks something off then the rest of the Arab countries will pitch in. Instead, what with all these children and families and grandmothers and little kids being killed and taken, only the most loony splinter groups in the more loony Arab countries are likely to think this is a good idea, and the reasonable Muslims, the majority, are as horrified as everyone else. 

This resonates with me because the other big story that's just popped is that someone has "scraped" data from 23andme and come up with a list of about 1 million people whose results have Ashkenazi Jewish in the top 3 in their ancestry. The cooler heads talking about this online are saying things like, "Well, it was inevitable" and "Wasn't this was 23andme was actually intended for in the first place?" 

In other words, what they're saying is that 23andme is a wonderful tool for a fascist regime to find out who's of any genetic profile, making it much easier to round 'em up and send 'em off to the death camps. So you have people saying things like, "This is why I never took part in 23andme" but the truth is, all they need is *enough* people to take part and they can figure out everyone else. In a race and ancestry obsessed place like the US (remember a tiny difference in ancestry determined if you were a person or property not long ago) it was a shoo-in for enough people to participate. 

When Cheeto Benito got elected, my reaction to the way things are going was to send right off for a kit. I figured my being Jewish was unquestionable, as how else would such a brown person as my mother have some from a line of even browner people, out of Lithuania? I knew Lithuania had had a huge Jewish population before WWII, and my mom even used a fair amount of Yiddishisms, no doubt picked up from a Jewish music teacher she's had when she was a kid and growing up in Los Angeles and probably as movie and entertainment obsessed as any 1930s/40s girl. 

My eagerness to spit in that little tube and send it off was that I'd get some solid proof to make good and sure I was proceeding logically, go through the 1-2 year conversion process at the local temple because if you're genetically Jewish but weren't raised observant and don't have a chain of actual documents from the old country, you have to "convert" and really ought to anyway so you're on the same sheet of music with everyone else. 

And the reason for this was, that I'd have this genetic information in-hand and be well along in the conversion thing by the time the slow wheels of government get around to singling me out as Jewish, and by that time I'd be packing my bags for Israel. Because I'd sure not be safe here. I assumed Donnie Dumpo would get a 2nd term because there's normally a great advantage in being the incumbent, and on his 2nd term he'd really step up the Nazification. 

At the time I figured Israel was a sort of beachy combination of Southern California and the Southwest desert, with an undercurrent of military preparedness out of necessity but in general an educated, liberal sort of place and a bit more difficult than life in the US but worth it. 

Since then, as I kept researching out of sheer curiosity, that there's a reason so many Israelis are desperate to move to the US. It's hot, like 120 degrees in the summer. The religious Right there has disproportionate power, and while I thought Netanyahu was going to get thrown out on his ass, he's done better and better and may be set to be president for life. The culture is one of haggling and slight-of-hand, of grifting, which is the opposite of the culture I grew up with in Hawaii where humility and honesty are golden virtues. 

When the DNA test came back and said I'm 0% Jewish, that was a hell of a surprise. I was hooked on the idea of retiring in Israel that I even thought, for a while, about converting anyway. But then I learned more about the hellish heat and the grifty, shifty, culture. 

Basically moving there means enlisting in a war of Us or Them. As I've mentioned elsewhere, if we in the US hadn't almost completely killed off our "Indians" we'd have the same problem here. The Manifest Destiny crowd did things the Old Testament/Torah way; when you move into a land, you wipe out anyone who's there - or they wipe you out. 

This is the situation in Israel. Looking at things from the Arabs' side, you have to wonder why all these European people who've been in Europe for 1000 years or so don't just stay in Europe or the USA. There's so much room in Europe, in the US and Canada and the Americas ... 

From the Jews' standpoint, they tried that and look what happened: the Holocaust. Look at what may be brewing in the US and Europe - another one. The far-right in the US constantly attacks Jewish schools and temples, and it's no better in Europe. I imagine the Jews collectively throwing up their hands and saying, "Fine! We're gonna fight wherever we are, let us go back to the land where our people were born as a people; the land that's in our Bible". 

I mean, speaking as a dumb American, I think we ought to have given them Utah or something, maybe thrown in Nevada too. But knowing our right wing, it would have involved just as much fighting as Israel's had to do since their founding. 

So the Jews decided, "Fuck it. we're going, and we're staying, and if you don't like it, get in line with the rest of 'em that hate us, and if you fuck around with us, you'll find out". 

I'm Left as hell and I think Israel's big mistake has been being too soft; too lenient. That's one of the things that creeped me out about the idea of living there, that the Arabs are their enemies and yet they employ them?? Allowing Arabs to come into your factory or farm to work, and one day blow the place up, is stupid on the order of some trusting old granny employing crackheads to clean her house. One day they're cleaning your house and the next they've killed you with a hammer and are cleaning out your house. 

So now Hamas has decided to fuck around. They are very much going to find out.