Ken came over last night and I showed him how, on the little board with hooks I made, there's a key for the storage unit at the new place, *two* keys for the smaller unit at the old place, one for Ken to take if he needs to get in there (which he didn't take, of course) plus I've got the 3rd key in with my personal keys so there will always be one "master key". At least I managed to get a $20 bill out of him for the lock.
He'd brought over a bunch of stuff to sort and sell, and after he'd left I sorted it out and along with some stuff we had listed that I de-listed to throw out, put a box of stuff out for the scavengers.
I was up until something like 2AM because I was watching this, something like 14-part, minute-by-minute documentary about 9/11. I can only liken it to Adam Curtis' "TraumaZone" where it's just raw footage edited together, with no dialogue, no Narrator's Voice Of God, etc. It sounds boring and yet I'm watching all of it, which is at least 20 hours of material. Maybe 24 as it's supposed to be "that day".
This brought me up to the time the illegal night club would operate on this night if it did, and this night it did. About an hour later the cops came and cleared 'em out.
In the meantime, this one guy who ... I dunno if it works for the cleaning place that's on both sides of me now, or just hangs around. I get the impression he lives in his SUV, and does odd jobs for them. I believe he was doing some painting or similar low-skill work for the cleaning company in their new unit, to the left of me, and so had the Mexican music playing loud into the wee hours of the morning. I believe he's also an alcoholic, that reinforced by this leaving beer cans around and leaving a nice big pile of puke in the parking lot.
I've seen him drinking until 6 in the morning and suspect he's deep in it enough that he has to have *some* blood alcohol level to not be all twitchy and shaky, hence the beer to "maintain". I know this because I've been there, but jeez, at least I had the decorum to, if I had to throw up, do it in the bushes.
So it was a fun night and I stayed up until 4AM or so, but as I watched my 9/11 documentary at least I got the shakuhachi out and played my 150 Ro. Progress is slow, especially with how little I've been practicing, but I am making it.
And this brings me to Shaun "Tairyu" Head, erstwhile Shaun "Renzo" Head. He turns out to be an arch right-winger, playing a tribute to this age's Horst Wessell, the execrable Charlie Kirk. r/shakuhachi on Reddit, a Nazi site itself, alerted me to this. Now I feel kind of dirty for having participated in that question-and-answer with him, but for the most part all it did was support conclusions I was coming to myself about the smoothness of a shakuhachi bore, the usefulness of breathing exercises, etc.
But this brings me to another thing. Mr. Nazi appears to be a great player, online. But this is online. What if he's using AI to enhance his playing? I'd not put it past him. His wearing a cross during the Q&A was a HUGE red flag, it kind of screams that he'd throw his own mother into a wood chipper if it benefited him, because that's what that religion is all about.
Fortunately the creep-factor has been detected by many, and unless Nazi rallies and white-supremacist propaganda movies start featuring the shakuhachi, he hasn't got much of a future in the main shakuhachi community, and for that matter, the aforementioned rallies and movies will probably just use "AI shakuhachi" and anyone can do that.
I didn't get up until 3 in the afternoon because I'd been up so much of the night, and some time after 5 in the afternoon I decided I'd go to Walmart to get things, and see if there's a place serving Thanksgiving dinner, and have that. I got to Nijiya Market 15 minutes before closing and got a little thing of sushi and a bottle of green tea, and ate out front. It was really deserted there and it was kind of surprising to see the market open at all.
No problem, I rode down to the Amazon place to pick up bubble mailers and it was closed. I rode down to Walmart and it was also closed. Had probably closed at 6 and it was past 6 now.
I rode over to San Pedro Square and everything was closed except for a couple of kind of expensive Asian places and O'Flaherty's and they were super slow, a football game on loud and what few customers there, were paying attention to that. Meh.
I figured I had time to go to Whole Foods but it was closed. I rode back via Hedding and checked out Bay 101, which was open but not doing any Thanksgiving stuff and I don't trust the hygiene at M8trix so that left Denny's.
My next-to-last and maybe last, Thanksgiving dinner on the mainland was at Denny's and it was even worse than that sounds.
Before leaving the house, I'd listened on the radio to a bit about a guy who's one of the small number of Americans in Moscow, and how one Russian guy had figured out that for some reason, there's a market for turkeys on this one day near the end of November, so he raises them. The Russian guy said with confidence that it's because the Americans had an important military victory over the original people of their land, and the turkey was to celebrate it. He's correct, even if most of us won't admit it.
If I'm to have that last, actual last, Thanksgiving here on the mainland, I'm going to make a reservation somewhere good.
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