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.