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.