The kind of shit that goes on around here.... so last night I was prepared to, since I was functioning on 4 hours of sleep, get to bed early (for me) like at midnight and since I was having trouble making it to midnight, had just made a nice cup of coffee and was going to read an interesting book I'd gotten from one of the little free libraries.
There was a knock on the door and since the guys next door were just leaving (cleaning business) and since the guy would only say, through the closed door, that he's "my neighbor" I thought it was one of them. Since I wouldn't go away I opened it.
I didn't recognize the guy but there's a fair amount of turnover next door, and even the owner, bless him, doesn't speak English well enough to hold any kind of a conversation. So this guy was asking if their music bothered me and I kept saying No, they're great neighbors and they always are done playing music by 10 or so, so it's no problem. (And it isn't. Best is when they actually have a live band come in. They like their music.)
With the talking back and forth, it eventually became evident that this was not about the guys next door but about the illegal night club. While the guy told me they just want to be a good neighbor, I told them they're awful neighbors, there's noise, people pissing all over the place, fights, etc. And I only call the cops when something *really* goes on like guys banging on my door, a fight, etc.
What's got me pissed off at them is, the guy - who's either a worker or the owners of Tacos Chencho and again, an actual good neighbor - is that "they saw on the video camera that I was talking to the cops and they don't want me talking to the cops".
I told the guy I'm a citizen (he said he is too, been living in the area 25 years) and for that matter, a 3rd or 4th generation Californian and I'll call the cops whenever I feel like it, that that's how thing work here. And since that building (that the illegal night club is in) is of a different owner than this one, why are they sending people over here to bother me? Here I was going to have a nice quiet evening, etc.
Then the guy said they were offering to pay me off. In other words, a bribe. I told him what they could do with that. The whole talk went on and on, and I finally said we've talked enough, Bye. And shut the door and went in. My coffee was actually still warm, so I sat and relaxed a bit with that. And then called the cops.
When they came around I told them about the whole incident, and they're thankful that I got the information on who the building belongs to and I said I'm only calling them when there's something really going on like guys going around pounding on doors, a fight, etc. I told them about their telling me not to call the cops, and their trying to bribe me. So more goes into the file...
When that was done I was far too angry to sleep or sit down with a book, so I went in back and dug out some things to take apart (mainframes with a bunch of modules in them) and took the mainframes apart plus also found some other stuff that we really don't need around here, and put the metal out for the scroungers to pick up.
Meanwhile, the night club set up but somehow they kept the clientele out of this building's side of the parking lot, and Lo and behold the cops came around an hour or two later and shut them down.
The reason for this is, with these illegal clubs, is sooner or later someone had a disagreement with someone else and someone gets shot. I told them about the little club set up in the backroom of this little hamburger place up the street. It was a Vietnamese gambling club and a guy killed another guy and it shut down and has been closed ever since. (And this was a place with a food and drink license!)
So they are interested in, and will check up on, places like this to prevent criminal activity.
By the time I was at a stopping point in tearing the things down, it was indeed about time to get to bed, anyway. Almost 6AM. I went to bed and slept until almost 6PM.
The kind of shit that goes on around here does not make my life easy. Yes, I'm getting paid decently ($400 a week, good for Silicon Valley) and am trying to save half of it. Yes I'm not paying rent. Yes I'm working for a friend with whom I'm closer to being a member of his family than a mere worker.
But my plan is to leave here in a year, with enough skill developed on the flute and at least some headway on the shakuhachi, that I can busk with the flute, and at least convince the few shakuhachi players/teachers back home in Hawaii that I'm serious.
Yes, Hawaii actually has a few shakuhachi plyers/teachers with ranks conferred on them by Japanese masters. That makes Hawaii the US state with the highest number of shakuhachi masters by far.
I went to hold off as long as possible, collecting Social Security, but I have to take into consideration things like my health, how much longer I can stand the electronics surplus/Ebay game, and the health of Ken, my employer, who since I just turned 63, makes him at 14 years older 76 or 77.
So the plan is to leave for home right when I'm turning 64. A wrinkle in this is that Medicaid in California isn't means-tested but it is in Hawaii but to secure even a room for rent I'll have to show I have plenty of money in the bank so leaving in a year means being a year without health insurance or chancing losing all my savings, or if I wait *another* year I'll have Medicare.
But waiting a year is bad enough. In two years, will the US be in another world war or somehow have travel shut down?
So it's a complicated equation.
When I say flute might be a matter of life and death, I kind of mean it. I read Reddit, well, too much, with regular subreddits being r/homeless, r/almosthomeless, r/vagabond, etc. I see tons of people with basically *no* skills. They're very unhappy people.
Maybe it's a middle-class thing as I actually grew up middle-class until things really started falling apart when I was 11 or 12. The big house, the books, Oh tons of books. I guess those are to be expected when your father was an English major at an Ivy. There were expectations that you were going to do things; like this sibling was going to be a writer and I was going to be an artist and so on.
(In James Galway's earlier, better, autobiography he mentions in his just-above-starvation Northern Ireland childhood, kids tended to home in on "their thing" that they did. His was flute; another kid he mentions had chosen boxing, and so on.)
I'm convinced it can be life-saving to be able to show that one has some skill, preferably one that those of the middle-class and upward hold in high regard, when one is, like 90% of the population here, in real danger of being out on the street and having little more than the clothes on one's back.
I got done writing this and then got a phone call. From Chase Bank they said. I don't bank with Chase, I said, and hung up. They called right back. According to the caller, whose voice had an annoying way of fading in and out, an account had been set up in my name at Chase, with $4300 in it, sent to it by a lady with the last name Valenzuela. The money had been sent by Zelle, oh yes, I have a Zelle account now too. According to him.
Finally this helpful(?) gentleman wanted me to, since I don't have a smart phone, download some program called Desk something and I said "Ohhh no! I'm not downloading anything!" and the phone went to those weird beeps and the line was dead.
The voice fading in and out thing is probably a pretty good indication that it's a scam call, probably from overseas. Somehow they had my phone number and claimed someone had to have my social security number to set up this supposed account. The guy had even asked if I went on public networks (no) and I said also that I burn any papers with those numbers on them.
Now, I can't prove it's anything more than a coincidence that I got this call. But the Colombians running the illegal nightclub had tried to bribe me. It's a hell of a coincidence. So I'm going to check with my bank as soon as I can on Monday, when I deposit my check. Really, all I need to do is check that my calculation of my balance matches their calculation of my balance. If it's down by $4300 then I know I've got a real problem and it's time to pull out the rest of the money and go un-banked or something. But I have a funny feeling things will be OK.
