Rogan's Hero

 Ken came by last night and dropped off a bottle of laxative powder for me to use. Also some more gabapentin. 

After taking my morning pills and getting more sleep, getting up around 1PM and taking some ibuprofin and getting up and turning on the radio, I listened to most of an interesting interview with a couple of SF authors and then came "On The Media", a show I like. 

In the universe I live in, Joe Rogan had interviewed El Dumpo shortly before the election, and revealed with a blithering idiot he is. But in fact, and I had to hear it from "On The Media", Joe Rogan endorsed Mango Mussolini glowingly. 

So half of us believed the Dump is the danger he is, and the other half believe he's some kind of obese, racist, Christ who will, as the joke goes about playing Country-Western music backwards, "Ye'll git yer dawg back, ye'll git yer truck back, ye'll git yer wife back..." 

And the orange turd won the popular vote. White women, if only counted, would have tipped the election decisively to him. 

Voted for a man who said this will be the last election. 

RIP USA 1776-2024.

OK so, I have approximately 2 months before Kristallnacht. The "Day of violence" Shitler has promised. I'm not that worried being in an industrial area, and I have done nothing stupid like affix a mezuzah to the doorway here. Even if the rabbi had advised me to, my replay would be No, sorry, I can't afford to have this place firebombed. 

I'm still getting over this horrible back injury, this vale of pain. But I am, slowly, getting better. It's only been a week. 

I need to Xerox all the papers I have on my maternal side and give them to the lady at the temple who says she's a bit of a genealogist and let her find out what she can. For all I know I'm a descendant of the Gaon of Vilnius, or maybe just some Central Asian / Eastern European mutt on Mom's side. It does not matter, I intend to go through with this conversion if at all possible. 

I just need a passport I can fly somewhere on. And I need to be able to scratch out some sort of a living where I land. If we're going full Fascist I can expect my Social Security to be cut off so this is a dire situation. I may even lose citizenship when they get around to that. In other words, I'm not going to be in much better a situation than those who managed to flee Shitler's father figure's regime. But they managed, didn't they? 

And I have an arthritic back. I am so thankful I got to go in that wonderful CAT scanner and now know what's going on. 

Ken now knows I can't hump the heavy stuff any more and we talked about my new approach, that some of the big ugly equipment I've been taking apart and selling the parts. I pointed out a box of parts, circuit boards and stuff, and he said, "What were those from?" and I said, "That big HP analyzer that was there (pointing to a blank space in a row of instruments) and it night go for $200 on a very good day, but the parts will bring in $400 at least." He said at first he was kind of bothered by my taking things apart, but he's come around to my way of thinking. 

After all, he said at one time he's getting a bit old to hump the heavy stuff around any more, too. 

Now, with regard to my arthritic back. I hope to get back to where I was before, where I could work fine as long as  I didn't over stress it, and I had a good instinctual feel for that. I'd spell myself when lifting something heavy, etc. I hope I can use physical therapy to keep it trouble-free for a while. 

But when I was trying out playing violin, my left shoulder/upper back didn't like it and that was as much a factor as my stubby fingers for my deciding to quit it. Same goes for concert flute, my left shoulder/back were not happy. Even with the trumpet, I got a bit of complaints from that body part when out playing. 

I could switch to cornet and have that lovely Conn Connstellation waiting upstairs in the loft, just needing some new corks I think and new spit valve corks. That would bring my arms in closer and if I got a cornet with a Shepherd's Crook, it would be shorter still. And I always want to keep my shofar skills.

Clarinet is an option, but I seem to hate reeds. Sax is designed to be ergonomic but again, I seem to really dislike reeds and saxes are heavy. I just don't like reeds and all those pads to worry about. 

But there's one bright spot:  As Reform Jews, we sing a lot in services. Great songs. Plus a lot of the prayers are sung. So in spite of myself, I've been getting regular singing practice just about every week. I like it. I even sung along with the service that I missed, that I watched on YouTube. My singing apparatus seems to be separate from my back/shoulder apparatus. 

Eerily, our feedback on Ebay's last 4 digits have been echoing a previous dark time ... 1936 ... 1937 ... 1938 .. 1939 ... 1940. 

Depending on how carefully "they" comb through the data, I may be in real danger in 2 months, or I may be able to survive under "the regime" long enough to finish my conversion and make aliyah. 

On possible future is I leave for Israel just before Kristallnacht and skate along as an American tourist, then "the regime" clamps down and it becomes obvious that I qualify for refugee status. That's a very real scenario. 

Another is I flee to Hawaii and try to hide out, but I'd still be in the belly of the beast. Japanese living in Hawaii were indeed taken from there and put into concentration camps. And I can't count on either of my sisters living there to help me as one's friendship is conditional: that I become a Jesus freak, and the other one seems class-based in that I didn't go to Punahou. There is a Jewish community there but they might be busy enough looking out for themselves. 

Then again I might survive in Hawaii in the same way that Django Reinhardt survived WWII right in the belly of beast, playing his jazz tunes for Nazis while other Roma were shipped off. What else was he to do? He was able to save his family and perhaps many more, and there was nothing he could do to stop the trains to the camps. 

At least in Hawaii I speak the local patois natively, can say I went to school here and I worked here and I surfed here etc. 

So back to music. My singing apparatus is separate from my shoulder/back apparatus. But I need to have an occupation that does not involve stressing my shoulder/back apparatus. Sign-painting is, surprisingly, out. Painting letters of a size suitable for a sign involves reaching out quite a bit. That's out. Playing guitar is out, reaching out along the neck has given me complaints plus there are my stubby fingers. 

There's the "uke". They're light, are basically the top 4 strings of a guitar with a capo on the, I believe, 5th fret. The neck is short, and quite a while back I had a book of ukulele "jazz" chords and I had no problem hitting them all. There's a metric fuc'ton of materials and tutorials and support. 

To the process would be: 

(1) Work on singing, do voice exercises on YouTube and work on singing songs I'd like to busk with. Record myself (I've got a cheapo mic here)

(2) Get a uke. Practice singing + uke. Very simple songs. 

(3) Get out there. Play where amplification is not necessary. Keep it very low key. Like outside Caffe Trieste etc. 

(3) Get a good amplified setup. A small 2-channel amp, a "dead mouse" mic to pin on my front, some kind of pickup for the uke. 

If I skedaddle for Israel, I should have enough money to float on for a while, plus at least I can apply for Social Security and should get it at least for a while. And they sell ukes in ISR. 

I think back to my childhood. My earliest memories are of being with my dad, his teaching me little-kid songs which of course I sang in tune. Maybe that's why he seemed to get such a kick out of it. My teaching myself the alphabet by singing "The Alphabet Song". And my loving the music my father played when he was home, classical to Herb Alpert, Simon & Garfunkel, a bunch of those 1960s "folk" groups, American Pie, themes from spy movies, everything. 

I remember lying in bed, deciding to "play" the Hawaii 5-0 theme, and did it, with my little voice, that big bombastic piece done by a full orchestra. And when we got a little tape recorder, the kind with the little row of buttons on the front, loving what was on the tape that came with it, "Kites Are Fun" and an instrumental version of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" which I thought was about all the interesting fish in the world. (I'd come across a copy of McEligott's Pool" by Dr. Seuss at school). I was to become, from time to time, an avid constructor and flyer of kites just because of this. 

We did "funny stuff" we younger kids (not the oldest) and our father and the material was hilarious. We could have easily gotten it played on the radio. My mom took a dim view of this. She eventually erased or threw away the tapes. We were to return to doing this when we were in my teens, and my mom threw away the tapes and told us she had. 

How can someone who played the accordion and sang, with her sister, my Aunt Anita, in the Odeon theater, have done something that cool, and never tell us kids? Even discourage us from doing anything creative like that? I have a theory, as Mom had quit the act when she started to "develop" that she must have been molested or something, saw a darkness in "show biz" and wanted to insulate us from it. Hence her pushing me, the one who could sing in tune, so hard to be an artist. 

We sang all these funny, snide songs for fun, we'd get together and say, "Let's do funny stuff" and we'd go somewhere away from Mom and sing silly songs and imitate things on TV. It was our relief valve, our rebellion against Mom's overbearing-ness and our never being able to "behave". 

What I'm saying is, I may not have had the wholesome childhood of singing gospel music that Johnny Cash or Elvis had, but I certainly had music from the beginning. At times even as an adult, especially as an adult, music is all that kept me going.