Thanks, I hate it

 I listed the 25 things last night, managed to stay up all night then realized I needed sleep and went to bed. I woke up around 6PM and read more of the "Disappearing Spoon" book for a couple hours. 

It had, I believe, rained all day thus I gave myself permission to sleep through it. 

Finally up-up, I turned on the radio to listen to what's going on and thanks to NPR I know all about "Zyn" nicotine patches... These are, apparently, all the rage among high schoolers, sold by helpful cigarette companies... 

"Tobacco's for ninth and tenth graders!" said one kid, quoted by his mom. 

There are little pouches of synthetically-made powdered nicotine so there's no tobacco involved, and the US being the US, it's perfectly fine to advertise, and sell, these things to school kids. On the positive side, anyone my age will remember smoking in high school and there were next to no barriers to obtaining cigarettes if you were a 70s kid. The only thing was, if we wanted to smoke we were to get our own - no bumming Mom's ciggies. She had enough moochers among the adults. 

I decided smoking was not for me, having only the very odd puff over the years. One time in Santa Cruz a grape Swisher Sweet I was tipped, just out of curiosity - it tasted like smoking a cigar while swigging grape Kool-Ade. Another time I smoked a clove in front of the Blue Lagoon with some friendly guys and I still have fond memories of hanging out smokin' cloves together but I'm glad I never got addicted to nicotine. 

These Zyn pouches seem to be clean, either flavorless or minty I'm not sure, and I'm seriously considering buying a tin so when someone asks me if I've got a cigarette, I can hand 'em out. But I've already had good luck handing out book matches which are cheaper and have gone over well. 

But why is it suddenly OK for school kids to get addicted to nicotine, a substance notoriously difficult to get un-addicted to? 

There are supposedly good mental effects of nicotine, and schizophrenics famously self-dose, with it helping them keep steadier. However, my theory on this is that if you're reaching for a smoke instead of a snack, you're at least keeping your blood sugar down and thus keeping at bay the "brain fog" that attends a starch and sugar based diet. 

On this last, due to having given away my chocolate and having a keto-compliant dinner, Lo and behold, when I got up I had no headache at all. 

Being back in Hawaii will be interesting. There's rice and macaroni salad and noodles everywhere. I will also have to go through a period of doing next to no cooking for myself. I'll have to have the discipline to, for instance, buy two spam musubi and eat only the spam and nori. Or ordering my ramen with extra chashu and eating all but the noodles. 

So I'm having my coffee and reading the usual cheerful stuff on places like r/homeless. One thing I see, constantly, is that at least the people posting there have no "mobile" skill or trade. 

As an example, let's say you learn to detail cars. Not just work as a detailer in a carwash although that's one way to get started, but you've learned about the various cleaning products, techniques, done a lot of cars maybe cheaply or even friends' cars for free or for some beer or something, to get lots of experience. You like the work, like the physicality of it as well as the technique, and like not only having a somewhat enjoyable way to exchange labor for money, but like the social interactions with your customers. 

This example, car detailing, is something where you could hop off a train in a strange town and go right to work whether it's at a carwash or truck stop, or even setting up under a tree. It's a "mobile" skill. 

Busking is like this. Also bartending, tattoo'ing, barbering, a whole lot of things. When I was much younger, I thought doing airbrushed T-shirts was this sort of skill but I soon found out I could make $10 a week doing this, none of it profit. I could make OK money doing it, if I had $100k to put into equipment, van, etc. first. Conclusion: it's not a mobile skill. 

There are really quite a lot of skills that are like this when you get thinking about it. Busking is one, of course. 

So here I'm reading about someone on r/homeless saying they might go back to stripping - but they really don't have the body for stripping any more. But it's all they have. 

I'm beginning to conclude that on r/homeless what I'm reading about are the "beached sailors" people who've been kicked out of parents' houses (common) or couldn't keep up with payments on their house or got tons of medical bills (a bit less common but still common) or ruined their lives with drugs or alcohol (also quite common) and so on. They have no mobile skills. The ones who *do* have a good mobile skill aren't moping around posting on r/homeless, they're out coping with life. 

My coming to the Bay Area is actually a version of the "land in a strange town" thing. I was able to come here with really only a few thousand on tap, and rent then buy a car, get an apartment, and start my ebay business up - so I had an ebay account (although this is not hard to start up) OK credit, and a good reputation with the company that owned the apartment complex I rented in since I'd lived in another of their properties in Newport Beach. 

Without those things, but with the Ebay account or knowledge of Ebay, I'd have gotten started up just fine anyway. Ebay skill is actually a "mobile" skill. It's worked well enough for me for 27 years now and the only thing I'd do differently is avoid debt like the plague. 

What got me into busking was an interest going back to when I saw my first busker and realizing, in my $1000 a month apartment (mid-2000s) apartment in Sunnyvale with my Prius parked out front, that I had to sell $6k a month just to keep even, and had tons of bills and overhead to worry about, my banjo-playing pal Aric Leavitt really only had to worry about the odd broken string. 

I figured, just before the economy crashed and emphasized things for me, that I could busk and make $50 a day, live in a $500 rented room, get around by bike, and save plenty after food and everything else, out of the resulting $1500 a month income. And all I'd have to worry about is a broken string or something. 

Since getting around by bike is a lot more enjoyable than getting around by car, and I'd no longer have huge bills hanging over my head, I figured it would be a great way to live. Then of course the economy crashed. 

But interestingly, the math still works out the same. Social Security will amount to about $30 a day, and I don't assume busking will bring in more than $20 a day in Hawaii, and that's the same $1500 a month I'd calculated almost 20 years ago. I don't plan to have a car, and in 3 more years I'll be able to ride the bus for half price. Also take college classes for just the activity fee. 

I guess I'll be doing more and more "mental rehearsal" of How It Will Be(tm) once I'm back in Hawaii. When I left in 1986, I was juggling college classes and work, but the college classes at least got me away from the standard 40-hour workweek and I got a bit of a glimpse of how nice life could be. When I was back there in 2003, I had a lot less fun than I should have because I was trying to figure out how to make a living there, with the amount of debt I had untenable and being really burned-out on Ebay selling.