Sunday, April 20, 2025

Easter Sunday

 It would be a great day to go out busking but I haven't been practicing the last week or three, and I have so many other things to do. For one thing my passport application, with the online form having a "burden of 30-90 minutes". I just realized I can crib a lot of info off of my old passport, and while I lost my Social Security card long ago, I might still have the tear-off stub that also has the number on it, plus my DD-214 form from the Army will have it because it's also my "service number". 

Friday went well, I packed things and shipped them and the usual. I got over to the service and it was a "Rock Shabbat" so that was fun. But here's the funny thing and the umpteenth reason why I'll take Judaism over Americanism every time. Before the service there was food and wine. The food was really good and the wine too, so I was pretty much full through the service, had great fun singing, etc. Then after the service? More food! 

It reminds of me Ken's telling me about his very traditional, very Polish Catholic mother. He'd get invited to some other kid's house for dinner and his mother would ask him, "Don't you want to eat something before you go?". 

At these Jewish meals, there's abundance. When there's lox, there's actually leftover lox. Leftover. Lox. How can there be leftover lox? But there is, every time. 

The way I grew up, in Americanism, no one invites anyone to dinner. Certainly not hungry skinny little kids who look they they could use a good meal. If you're a penny short at the store, you have to go back home and find a penny, etc. Everyone's just out for themselves. 

So yes, I ate some more. 

There's talk that, once my class is done and I'm less busy, I might audition to be in the band. There have got to be a lot of complications about that. For instance, when there's a Rock Shabbat, there's always this Black lady with a mandolin who plays in the band. But I never see her at services. Is she a temple member who only attends when she can play? Is she paid? I'll fine out, sooner or later. 

Philip played, and did the beginning of the jazz version of L'Cha Dodi. But, he screwed this mute into his horn before playing it and sounded .... kinda lame. It's not like his trumpet is too loud, not in that band. And not the way he plays into his music stand. 

It would be pretty cool to be in the band but it would also be an extra layer of busy-ness so I'm going to wait until my conversion is done. 

I got back here and ate a bit more and had wine and watched YouTube. At around 1AM I took 15 drops, so 1.5mg, of liquid melatonin I'd got at Whole Foods, with the result that I indeed felt sleepy and went right to sleep and as far as I could tell, the brothel a few doors over wasn't operating any more. 

So yesterday I got up and among other things I read Portnoy's Complaint. Amazing book. Sure there's tons of sex in it which is what kept me from reading it for so long. But like the heroin-taking in Burrough's "Junky" the sex was not the whole story. The book is partially complaints, against Jewish mothers and Gentiles alike, partially explanation, like if you wonder why the Jewish kids are always out-doing your own kids academically, here's why. And partially nostalgia and recognition of the great social institutions Roth grew up with, the adults playing baseball, their high school being beat at football and being proud of it, going to this uncle's or that uncle's store for things, being in a little world where you were safe. 

I'm beginning to understand why my mother bought any new Roth book that came out. I know we had them around the house, in one or another of the many book cases. Salinger too but I can blame that on my older sister in her elite prep school, where no doubt the older kids were reading Salinger because it was cool. And thus I read "Nine Stories" but that doesn't explain the Roth books or how they got into the house other than that my mother must have bought them. 

Roth's books are about the American Jewish experience, at least for the wave of Jews who escaped Eastern Europe to come here. Like my mother's grandparents did. Reading them would feel like someone else knew how you felt, and also be a handy guide to how to assimilate better.

What did my mother tell us? I think she may have told my next-younger sister, a year or so younger than me, because when she was going to Sunset Beach Christian School (her freckles and blue eyes got her a scholarship to there) she decided, or Mother told her, she's Jewish. She went around saying things like, "Oy, gevalt!" for a week or so. She also stopped, or was stopped from, going to Sunset Beach Christian School about that time. Yet many years later, this sister of mine said to me, "I always figured Mom was a Mexican". 

Me, I was told we're browner than the average "white" person because we're part Navajo Indian. That was about the coolest type of Indian to be in the 1930s and 1940s, so it makes a good cover story. It's not true though. There's no American Indian in the DNA test I took, and neither is there any recognizable Jewishness. Just English-Scots for Dad and Lithuanian for Mom. So I figure genetically, Mom's side is some weird mishmosh of the many groups that paraded across and warred and settled in Lithuania. In Israel they'd not give me a second look. 

So last night I had my dinner and started in on some wine, with the result that I went to bed around midnight instead of 1:30. I had 20 drops of the melatonin, so 2mg. I went to sleep fine, but the trouble is, with regard to not being bothered by the noise of the brothel's customers coming and going, I mis-timed it. I woke up at 5AM due to the "johns" making noise going to their cars and navigating the resultant traffic jam and honking their horns and shit. I had a very hard time going back to sleep. Fortunately, Friday and Saturday nights are the really busy ones, so for those I have to really time it right. 


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