Yesterday Pat, my "friend" on the Big Island, told me in an email that I've committed a lot of logical fallacies in, I dunno, I guess being anti-Israel where he's pro-Israel.
So I said since I don't know which ones I'm committing, I depend on him to tell me which ones and how. Go!
I haven't heard back.
I took a college course in logic and while it was a 100-level course, I probably know more about logic than 99% of the population now, whereas I doubt ol' Pat could tell the Pons Asinorum from his own ass.
Then there's Tom. I last hung out with him a few days ago and as he's taken to doing, he harangued me about wearing a bike helmet. He said he'll lecture me on it every time I come by. I said that's OK, I'll just stop coming by. Because it's obvious that his standpoint is, "I make more money than you and thus I know better than you and thus I will tell you what to do, because it makes me feel better about myself".
It's a variant of what high-on-his-own-supply Mark, who owns the Gilroy place, is on. Living there meant being a part of the Mark-Is-Cool Club. I really screwed the pooch, as they say, when I mentioned being in MENSA. It turns out Mark had tried a few times to get in and could not. He's not a dummy by any means, he just couldn't qualify.
Hell, the only reason I got into MENSA was, someone else ponied up the $10, a huge amount for me, to take the test, and I thought it was help me get a job somehow, which it did not. The test was fun, although I was terribly hungry at the time I took it, as I was terribly hungry a lot of the time then. I was 18 and the solution to my life's woes turned out to not be MENSA but the US Army.
So getting back to Mark, he seems to invite people to stay at his place who are hard up so he can have people around to feel superior to, then he likes to get the different people to be in conflict, kind of like a kid who puts different kinds of bugs in a jar to watch them fight.
I guess Tom's like this too, because he befriends the most amazing assortment of bums, then gets all butt-hurt when they con him. So my interactions with Tom will now be just observing from afar.
The only real good I'd gotten from knowing Tom was borrowing his water-shutoff tool, but if I need to shut off the water again I did work out a way to do it with two adjustable wrenches we have around here so that's not a problem.
Getting closer to home, Ken is acting strange. I don't know why a mere $1000 he owes to the landlord is the "hill he chooses to die on" but as far as I know, he still owes it. I got that one call from him saying he'd been up late testing, and would call again to let me know if he's coming by, but then nothing and that was last week.
His last check didn't bounce, amazingly, and I have the $360 check from the clarinet I can deposit tomorrow.
With Ken it's got to be (a) money trouble, (b) something at his day job that really requires a lot of his time and energy, or (c) something with his health. I don't want to call and bother him, but will wait until his usual time to show up, because if he's under a lot of stress he doesn't need me bugging him.
I figure I can afford a "package" of a flight and two weeks in a hotel and that will cost about half of the $5k I have on hand. In those two weeks I can start looking for a room to rent. Or at least find a storage unit to be a home base.
While I was able to sell the clarinet back to the music store, due to their policy regarding student instruments bought new, I'm not getting any calls or emails about the other instruments. I'm starting to realize I'd be better off getting back into busking and just donating the instruments, than trying to sell them in this Depression economy.
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