Today's a rain day. Last night it was a big party as usual at the illegal casino/brothel but the cops seem to know about things and there were a couple of drive-throughs, some drive-bys on Rogers Avenue, and at the end, a cop car came in and flashed its lights (an undercover SUV) and the people didn't quite do their rats-leaving-the-sinking-ship routine but they did leave. Also I saw another undercover car come in and park right by the SUV and (the people almost all gone now) the driver - another cop - hang out with the cops from the SUV. So it's on their map.
All in all the idiots were not too loud, and I need to simply get good at sleeping through these midnight parties. After all, the guy in the RV up at the other end of the parking lot right next to Rogers has to sleep through all kinds of noise.
I finally did a weigh-in and I've lost a couple more pounds, which is good. I woke up with a headache I think because I've been allowing carbs to sneak back into my diet so that's got to change.
I'm to the point now where I don't really think about pain pills, am taking a Tylenol 500 when I wake up and other than that, am only taking them if I feel like I need to, which I pretty much don't now.
My upper body strength is shit right now and I was only able to do "cheater" push-ups a couple of days ago. How embarrassing! But I'll keep things up. I do feel like, if I had to, I could make my way in the world as a sign painter, which involves being able to move my left hand around freely to paint large letters.
This has interested me for a few reasons. Firstly, my being expected to become an artist resulted in my being more familiar with art materials and techniques than the average person by far. Secondly, if I ended up "street" homeless, I can't really busk for more than a couple of hours a day. Adding in a couple more hours making funny/decorative signs would be a big help. And lastly, it would really help my Hebrew if I got into making signs in this language.
In Israel, it seems the "shuk" or market, something like the Capital or Berryessa flea market, is a big deal. And people always need signs in a place like that. If I got handy at dashing off signs in English/Hebrew it would make me a fluent speaker in short order, and I'd always be fed.
It's very hard to get a real picture of how things are in Israel from the other side of the world, but people will throw just about anything up on YouTube and based on my being able to compare how YouTube depicts "the real Hawaii" compared to my own knowledge of it, I think it's pretty accurate if you know what to look for.
One way of describing my impression of the place is that it's like working-class Hawaii except with actual health care and public transit and with the native language actually revived and spoken, and a sense of people-hood.
Things Hawaii could have in an ideal world but instead it's a thoroughly colonized (by the US and Japan and China) tourist money-trap serviced by a largely imported (100+ years ago in the cases of Japanese and Chinese, or as recent as last week in the case of groups like Filipinos) working class. As for Hawaiians, they're the largest group of homeless in the place. That they're a bunch of thugs doesn't keep me from knowing they got a raw deal.
It's probably a stupid habit; it's certainly a depressing one most of the time, but I read r/homeless on Reddit every day and the one thing that impresses me is that the people posting on there seem to have one thing very strongly in common: they don't have any sort of skill that sets them apart from the herd. This seems very strange to me, coming from a background where you had to be very "akamai" or smart, to just survive.
Maybe this is the kind of blandness that comes from being a part of the majority. Like being Japanese or at least Asian, back in Hawaii. You didn't have to worry about your very existence being questioned or endangered. Your position in life was set out for you - you were going to operate the business your parents started or your high school buddy would set you up with a high-paying job at the shipyard. Or you'd work for the post office or some other government position, the kind of job where you'd never see a "haole".
Here on the mainland, white people are the majority of homeless, simply due to sheer numbers but also because of the norms of white culture - hyper-individualism. It's a new thing to be homeless, to them, and rather than growing up with it, they're newly introduced to the concept that they can't go into many stores, that they're followed and suspected of being shoplifters in many they are, and that their very existence is in question. No wonder so many of them voted for, if they can, their bloated Germanic god who told them he'd make America "great" (which means white) again.
I'm reminded of a time I was walking around by the Britannia Arms downtown, and there was one of those Black Hebrew Israelite types ranting on the sidewalk. There was a skinny white guy arguing with him, and he turned to me and said, "This guy hates you because you're white". I kind of shrugged and said where I'm from, that's just Tuesday afternoon and he doesn't have to like me.
Anyway back to skills or lack thereof. I guess it's kind of foreign to these Majority-Americans that they might want to have some kind of "ace up their sleeve" skill that they can make use of when no one will hire them. Today there's a discussion on r/homeless about how shelters don't want a person to work. Some, according to the discussion, even tell their residents not to work. This is because to the Homeless-Industrial Complex, homeless and desperate people are cash cows. Can't have them getting back on their feet, that's many thousands of dollars a year they lose. But if you have a sneaky skill they can't rub out, like you busk, or do odd jobs, or do crafts or signs or something, that's hard to keep a person from doing.
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