it’s Thursday. It’s been a busy, busy week. Today the band is running through a few tunes. I haven’t even had time to process the ones from last week, that’s how busy I have been. What have I been doing? I don’t know, time just flies by like a river. The news cycle is booooring as usual. When you figure out it’s just manufactured rage bait, why would you bother with any of it?
The picture above is of the surface of the sun taken by The most powerful solar telescope on Earth, the NSF’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope located in Hawaii. “In the highest-resolution images of the Sun ever captured, Inouye has exposed a hidden landscape of eddying whirlpools swirling around the Sun’s magnetic boundaries.” The story comes from sciencealert.com and it’s the most interesting thing I can find to talk about today.
Now I don’t know how this is going to advance civilization, but everything new we find out about our existence has got to be a good addition to our collective knowledge, right?
I distinctly remember walking home from school as a small child one afternoon and looking up in the sky directly at the sun. Nobody told me that I shouldn’t do it, and fortunately I didn’t look at it so much that it damaged my eyes, but I do remember seeing a golden yellow ball. Kids get away with things like that sometimes. It’s only after the event that you feel like you dodged a bullet somehow.
The sun in Hawaii has a very gentle effect in my skin. I don’t know if it’s because of the tropical climate but I always get a nice tan without the sunburn if I’m there for any length of time. I’d like to go back there soon. The worst part about it is the 11 hour flight from JFK. I don’t like sitting in plane for more than three or at the most, five hours anymore. A trip to Australia is totally out of the question. It’s 32 fucking hours door to door. Even if I broke it up into three stages it’s still a ten hour haul at least from one part to another.
In the 80’s, 90’s and even early 2000’s I had no trouble doing it in one hit, although Qantas had such antiquated service that it became tiresome at times. “Welcome to the movie marathon” was something I heard upon boarding one day. No thanks. Sometimes you would get an empty seat or two which made it possible to lay down and get some proper sleep, but that rarely happens anymore.
The flights are packed, and full of people I don’t want to spend any time with cramped in a tin can at 30,000 feet. The food sucks, the entertainment sucks and the lack of space sucks even more. The airlines simply don’t care. If you want room it’ll cost you. I’m not that enamored with overseas travel that I want to spend that much money.
I do like Hawaii however, so I’d probably fly to LA or SF and cut the journey in half. The quickest flight from San Francisco to Honolulu is 5 hrs and 20 mins, which is just at the edge of my tolerance. If I go via San Fran I can check out my old neighborhood in the Mission. Maybe even have dinner at the “Volcano” restaurant. It was so good. You could walk around the corner from the house and there it was. Update: It’s not there anymore. It’s (yet another) cake shop.
This is the corner of 25th and Alabama in the Mission District. That’s my place. Top floor on the right. Today I’ll post one of the many songs I recorded in that very room.
Good Day
Recorded in SF Mission District early 2000’s based on actual events that happened here. This is the corner where the dude had the ghetto blaster playing “Perfect World”, just as I walked by. (you had to be there)