April 25, 2005

April 25, 2005 Monday Now this work thing is getting serious. Let me philosophize a bit. When I was young I always used to be shocked by how stupid people could get away with things if they had an allowance from their parents. I always had to work, for any interruption in my cash flow caused terrible and almost immediate consequences. On the other hand, the guy with a lousy $50 a week help from his family could take life easy and wait out the bargains. This is old material but you see, I am pondering making just such a change. Now, I don’t mean I’ll get stupid (I hope). Stupid means (here) a very English-like refusal to understand things from the other man’s viewpoint. If you know you will never go hungry, never be homeless and never be destitute, you just think differently, that’s all. For example, only a comfortable man thinks all men are created equal and is never forced to face the reality that they are not. That is what I mean by getting away with it – if you are rich even just enough to sidestep that issue, you get away with such ideas for a lifetime and claim therefore you are a good person. I’ve stood in cold and rainy yards at 5:00 in the morning with a hundred other shivering men outside work trailers that advertised twenty laboring jobs. In my life, I have delivered newspapers, driven taxi, piled lumber, worked in factories, taught dance lessons, painted houses, built snow fence, insulated, framed, cribbed, worked the pipeline, driven truck, stuffed flyers, shingled, prefab’d trailers and all because I could not afford the tiniest interruption in my income. (The reasons that it got that way are another story, but you can thank my parents for lying to me since I was six.) This time it is different. I just lasted since November without dipping into my own money in any significant way. Everyone (meaning mainly John and Hippie) (don’t make that joke) keep telling me to advertise more for work. They recognize I can get tremendous things done given enough time, but that a job bites deep into that time. Mind you, they both get more help in a year from home than I did in a lifetime. I would not have to make a fortune, just around $400 per week and then I could ‘wait out the bargains’. Certainly, I am considering that 90% of the progress I made fixing computers was after I started taking them apart by myself. At that rate, I will be a top-notch expert in a few months more and I have $3,000 to try out the idea, a situation I have never been in before. An alternative is to work for one of these places that do house calls. As long as it is day shift and I can take time off when needed I would consider myself almost self-employed. It is easy for me to rationalize any lower income if I have plentiful time off and am learning a trade. School goes until June 15, 2005. I will have my networking by then, although what good it will do is not apparent at this point. I’m having an extended morning coffee. Yesterday was also a great virtual practice – playing along with video tapes of Hippie’s arrangements. Hippie would end every song the same way if allowed to roam free. (I call it the chop-chop ending.) Knowing what type of guitar licks he likes for bass runs, I can use the tapes to customize longer and longer bass runs that get away from following his patterns too closely. This is the mark of a good bass player in my world. He always says something the first time out of habit, but once he listens, he realizes he is not a bass player. He has said things about this recently, which is a good sign. That, and after our little chat, he is listening to what I say at times – yes, I do know how to manage a band and I do if far better than your average lead guitar player.

Another sign I’m on semester break is my apartment. It is getting cleaned up a bit. I even stacked my milk-crate storage system up six high and tried putting up shelves in the kitchen north wall. (No dice, they don’t put studs in Florida houses, it seems.) I need six boards today to make things look fancier, and I think I may paint those milk-crates. These crates were one of the top inventions of the sixties, adding to the décor of millions and serving the needs of countless moving companies and flea markets. Imagine, a decent-sized sturdy plastic box with built in handles, and an industry too dumb to know a good thing when they saw it. What I plan is to pour paint into a 12 x 12 tray an inch deep, and dip each side of the crate into the paint. Later. I went out and spent a very overdue $40 on this place. It hit me that nothing else has really happened here since school started and my place looked like a repair shop. Which it kind of is. I bought all the doodads I’ve needed, such as a real computer power supply and a forty-foot extension cord. I got more plastic stands for advertising (fifty cents each, not $4 each like at Office Bunker). I decided not to paint my milk crate shelves. It took away from that early Calgary look. I spent five bucks on some wooden spacers, but don’t look too close of they’ll remind you of picket fence railings cut to two foot lengths. It is held together with zap straps, yet I’m telling you it would take Hurricane Annie to move that shelf. It is solid and it does not move unless that wall moves. Hippie didn’t call for our usual power walk. He always underestimates how much ground we cover, and the time also. By any standard, we should both be losing weight. Controlled diets, healthy food and very conservative portions coupled with long-distance walking. We are easily up to three miles a day in most cases. He thinks we should jog. I’m not so sure. Exercise is a factor in loosing weight but the bottom line is if you want to lose fifty pounds, you have to get your body to re-digest fifty pounds of itself and that is not a natural thing for the human body. It is going to put up a fight by convincing your brain it is starving when in fact, the food supply is right there. We have discussed trading fruit. He buys a lot of bananas, where I like apples. Actually, I like apple juice, but when I do buy apples they eventually go bad on me. When we reconnoiter the situation, it is plain I will have to step up my fruit consumption. He is already a vegetarian. To that end, I have carefully stocked up on supplements I’ll need to cover all the bases in case I don’t get a heavy fruit diet right the first time. It just makes sense to me. I drink a gallon of cranberry juice a week, but I have not eaten cranberries in twenty years. Similar goes for peaches, pears, grapefruit and so on. I’ve been drinking my fruit since 1980. The idea is to redevelop my taste for the actual fruit. Ditto for vegetables. I will not give up my decaf, that is not an option. I got another idea for my Florida feature. I toured an art supply store this morning on my way back from the lumber yard. They have these foam blocks for flower arranging, but they are the size and shape of bricks. Hmm, the old-fashioned Florida brick fight. Just a thought. I swung past ABC but the doors were still locked at 11:00 AM. What’s more is that everyone has seen Wayne’s World except me. This can be odd when I am the only person in a room that does not get a certain joke. So I spent a whole dollar and got the tape, along with another called Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I just finished watching the first one and be damned, they were talking real Cantonese. In a movie that must be at least fifteen years old. Even on video, that is the first time I have ever seen a white man speak Cantonese. Except for myself, of course. As Wayne said, “Babe-fest”. I thought the Chinese leading lady was a little too old for the part, I’d put her at close to thirty. She did not have that great of a body compared to Chinese gals I’ve known. The movie had terrific spoofs on Terminator and Rambo flicks. Again, there were some other spoofs I did not get, although I think the sex scene may have been from A Clockwork Orange. Tomorrow, I’ve arranged for a copy of Cakewalk, an audio recording program. This computer is now up to 30 GB and awaiting an 800 MHz Pentium, at which point it is upgraded to the max, although I may add more storage. I want to get all my audio onto CD as quickly as possible. A database of where everything is makes sense, but it is unfeasible to do that, both in time and money, although I am certain I waste about half that value looking for misplaced items. Next, that scanner, to cut down on the masses of paperwork I’ve saved just in the past five years. Good night