All the rain in the world

 I got 15 things ready to list last night but then told myself it's 2AM and I should be in bed. I ended up staying up all night again and the only good thing was I practiced a bit, not so much grinding away on long tones but messing around trying to be musical. One thing I've got to say for the shakuhachi is it's a lot more intuitive than the trumpet. 

For instance, the anime "Astroboy" has 3 series. The original black and white series, the middle series, and then a late series. I love 'em all, but the middle one has really neat music, one piece at the beginning of the show and another one at the end. I *did* work out both pieces on trumpet with some work, but I was able to work them out very quickly last night, just noodling around. 

I woke up at 4 in the afternoon, relaxed a bit and finally at 4:30 got up and checked the radar map. All the rain in the world(tm) was incoming, it seemed and shortly afterward it got very wet outside. This is why I'm glad I got everything that had sold, sent out yesterday. 

Reading my usual Reddit things, I came across a genius term: "Help theater". This is like the term "Security theater" only for help for homeless folks. They work the same way. Help theater is the appearance put forth by the homeless-industrial complex to give the more fortunate the impression that homeless people are being helped, but of course not actually helping them. 

Those who actually call the numbers, go to the places, etc, generally find themselves sent from place to place, exhausting themselves, going hungry, even putting themselves in danger of pursuit to help or shelter that turns out to only exist theoretically. 

I ran into something akin to this when I lived in Gilroy and the owner of the place I lived, being a good "small government" libertarian type, almost insisted I go on food stamps. I did, but there were constant interviews, "churning" in which I was put on, taken off, put back on, taken off, etc. Plus continual threats that at any time and at their whim, I might have to pay back every penny they'd given me, with interest. I finally decided they could fucking piss up a rope and at the time I cut up my EBT card there was $600-odd on it. 

I was getting about $200 a month from EBT, or borrowing it or something, and I had zero control over whether I'd get it. But I could go out panhandling 3-4 days a month and get the same money with some advantages: It was cash, there was no mechanism to coerce me to pay it back, I knew that for sure X amount of panhandling would result in Y amount of money, and it was voluntary on the part of people who gave me money - it was completely up to them to give or to tell me to fuck off, whereas food stamps come from taxes which are not very voluntary. 

Food stamps in my experience were not pure "help theater" in that I did get them but the strings attached were so onerous that they only made sense if one is simply unable to do anything else. I suspect it's the same for being homeless. The obviously homeless are something like 1/10 the total, because most are making things work somehow and taking great pains to not look homeless. 

I first got an inkling of how the system actually operates when, back in 2009, I'd gone to this one building in Palo Alto that was supposed to be some kind of big homeless center. There, I'd been told, I could obtain this much-rumored booklet that had numbers to all kinds of help organizations. So I'd gone there and at the window they told me it was after X time and I was to fuck off, in just about so many words. There were some very bad-off individuals hanging around outside and the one who made a real impression on me had his feet wrapped in rags in place of shoes (winters get cold here even in Palo Alto). 

It occurred to me that this place really was run for profit, and without that guy with his feet wrapped in rags, no profit. They *needed* for there to be people in horrifying poverty, out on display, for the good burghers of Palo Alto to keep the fat donations flowing. And they certainly did not give me the legendary booklet. 

I was to later obtain a copy of this booklet, only a year or two out of date, from a guy, a van-liver I think, at the Starbucks at one end of one of my regular panhandling strip malls. "You need this more than me", he'd said. As it was, I never called any of the numbers in the booklet and while I was gratified to see that it actually existed, by then I knew the score.