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.
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